Through the use of case studies intended to illuminate the many security challenges facing Latin America – including drug trafficking, organised crime, terrorism and more – the authors seek to conceptualise the idea of state fragility. The authors suggest that, without serious reform efforts aimed, for example, at rooting out corruption, progress cannot be made.

Survival: Global Politics and Strategy

In a larger regional context of historically unprecedented levels of electoral democracy and more than a decade of sustained economic growth, this volume of original contributions serves as a cautionary tale of the multiple challenges still facing many countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. With impressive sets of data-based country-level research, contributors analyze distressingly high levels of criminal violence, drug trafficking, and corruption in a context of ongoing impunity fostered by weak institutions and leaders. In addition, analyses of recent U.S. policy make a compelling case that approaches have either failed to address the problems these beleaguered democracies are facing or have actually made them worse. A must-read for scholars and policy makers alike.

David Scott Palmer, Boston University

The contributors to this volume provide insightful analyses of the factors that destabilize states and threaten democracy in the nations of the Americas. The book’s framing device—state fragility—is a subtle yet useful analytic for conceptualizing the conditions of governance and facilitating comparison across and between states. The case studies collected here will be an invaluable resource to scholars from a range of disciplines concerned with the histories, the present realities, and the possible futures of states and civil societies in the region.

Daniel M. Goldstein, professor emeritus, Rutgers University