Reduction of Homicides and Armed Violence: a Look at Latin America

Timetable of the call for papers:

September 15th 2016: Submission deadline for abstracts (300 words) and a short biographical note (100 words).

October 15th 2016: Authors are notified of the results of the selection.

December 2016: Submission deadline for complete articles (see: instructions for authors).

All written correspondence should be sent to the CIDOB publications email address: publicaciones@cidob.org.

Monograph coordinators: Ignacio Cano and Emiliano Rojido , Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro

Homicides are an epidemic phenomenon in Latin America, a region which, in recent years, has continuously recorded high rates of lethal violence. In some countries, the number of victims of homicides – related to organised crime and interpersonal conflicts – is higher than the number of deaths caused by the civil wars of past decades. Homicide rates have risen in this region at the same time as political tensions have become more moderate and economic growth and social inclusion have improved. The problem of lethal violence is thus endemic and it cannot be expected that conflict resolution or simple economic development will automatically bring it to an end.

On the other hand, the United Nations’ choice to promote peaceful and inclusive societies as number 16 of the Sustainable Development Goals will tend to raise the importance of public security as an aspect of international comparison and as a priority on the political agenda. Hence the homicide rate – given its widespread use, potential for comparison and relative reliability – will also acquire greater importance as one of the central indicators on this issue.

A number of countries have decades of experience with policies of preventing violence and crime in general, as well as promoting public and citizen security; nevertheless, specific policies to prevent and reduce homicides are more recent and their expansion is still incipient. In the broader policies of violence prevention, homicide rates usually figure only as a performance indicator or as a criterion for selecting beneficiary areas or groups, but no logic that directly links the nature of the intervention with the reduction of homicides necessarily exists. Nevertheless, it is forseeable – and the emergence of some programmes of homicide reduction seems to bear witness to this – that the prevention of this kind of lethal violence will take on a growing centrality in the future, at least in certain regions of the planet.

With issue 116, the Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals seeks to contribute to the study of this subject. Thus, we are calling for the submission of work on attempts to reduce armed violence in contemporary Latin America from an international relations perspective. Among others, contributions will be welcomed that offer original empirical or theoretical work on:

a) the impact of the strategies to control armed violence on international relations in the various countries in the region;

b) analysis of strategies of violence reduction in situations not comparable to armed conflicts, either international or domestic, but which nevertheless cause a high number of fatalities and high social costs;  

c) evaluation of programmes of prevention or reduction of homicides, of any nature, implemented by public authorities or civil society in any Latin American country;

d) theoretical reflections on how policies to reduce armed violence converge or diverge from other public policies in the field of public security or from social policies in general;

e) analysis of the political dynamics in which the strategies of reduction of armed violence are framed, including comparative studies between various countries in the region.

Proposals will be accepted in Spanish (preferably), English and Portuguese.

The editorial board of the magazine - coordinated for this issue by Ignacio Cano and Emiliano Rojido - will be responsible for the final selection of the articles to be published in the second issue of 2017 (September 2017).

Created in 1982, Revista CIDOB d’Afers Internacionals is a scientific publication on international relations that publishes original work. Each issue is a monograph, coordinated by an expert, which provides in-depth analysis of an aspect of the international state of affairs from a multi- and trans-disciplinary perspective. The articles pass through an external double-blind peer review process and are indexed and summarised in the main academic social sciences databases, such as Scopus and Thomson Reuters. The publication is aimed at the academic community and the interested public in general. It is published in print and digital versions.