Crime, violence, and insecurity are among the most important social topics in contemporary Costa Rica. These three issues play a central role in the media, politics, and everyday life, and the impression has emerged that security has changed for the worse and that society is now threatened...

The Costa Rican talk of crime is fundamentally based on the assumption that crime rates have increased significantly in recent years and that there is today a vast and alarming amount of crime. On the basis of this assumption, fear of crime, the call for the “iron fist,” and drastic law...

Postwar societies are high-risk contexts for youth violence. Nevertheless, not all postwar societies are equally violent. This article explores how these variations can be explained by focusing on the interaction between youths and adult society in a comparison of Guatemala and Cambodia....

Crime, violence, and insecurity are perceived as society’s biggest problems in contemporary Costa Rica. This degree of priority is especially remarkable because the country has always been considered the peaceful exception in the violent Central American region. In this paper I analyze four...

In Central America, legislation aiming to reduce violence and crime has become an important topic in the security debate. Focusing on Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, this paper analyzes laws and other legal texts regarding the trade in and consumption of drugs on the one hand, and...

It has become common to state that youth gangs and organized crime have seized Central America. For theories on contemporary Central American violence, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Nicaragua present important test cases, demonstrating the need to differentiate the diagnosis. First, national...

Central America has the reputation of being a violent region with high crime rates, youth gangs, drug traffic, and ubiquitous insecurity. Politicians, the media, and social scientists in and outside the region often claim that the societies are in complete agreement with their judgment of the...

The concept of “structural stability” has been gaining prominence in development policy circles. In the EU’s and the OECD Development Assistance Committee’s (OECD DAC) understanding, it describes the ability of societies to handle intra-societal conflict without resorting to violence....

En todos los países de Centroamérica se está llevando a cabo una lucha de definición, interpretación y clasificación entorno al campo temático de la violencia, la delincuencia y la (in)seguridad. Y aunque esta lucha tenga consecuencias políticas y sociales sumamente relevantes, no ha...

It has become common to state that criminal violence has superseded political violence in Central America. This paper presents the first results of a research project which analyses the social construction of violent realities in Costa Rica, El Salvador and Nicaragua. The authors describe the...