This book offers novel insights about the ability of a democracy to accommodate violence. In El
Salvador the end of war has brought about a violent peace one in which various forms of
violence have become incorporated into Salvadorans' imaginaries and enactments of democracy.
Based on ethnographic research The Violence of Democracy argues that war legacies and the
country's neoliberalization have enabled an intricate entanglement of violence and political
life in postwar El Salvador. This volume explores various manifestations of this entanglement:
the clandestine connections between violent entrepreneurs and political actors the blurring of
the licit and illicit through the consolidation of economies of violence and the reenactment
of latent wartime conflicts and political cleavages during postwar electoral seasons. The
author also discusses the potential for grassroots memory work and a political party shift to
foster hopeful visions of the future and ultimately to transform the country's violent
democracy.
