Building on their joint participation at the 2018 annual congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), the LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre, the Institute of Latin American Studies of the GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, the Centre on Conflict, Development, and Peacebuilding (CCDP) at the Graduate Institute Geneva and the Núcleo de Estudos da Violência at the University of São Paulo have together created a European collaborative research partnership on violence, security, and peace: the Europe-Latin America VSP Network.
The collaboration generates research-based knowledge and understanding of the crisis of violence and security in Latin America, informing policy debates on Latin America’s pathways to peace, and produces lessons relevant to other situations of violence, war, and post-war.
The network brings together three themes that are interconnected but require distinct academic treatment in order to deepen our understanding of each and explore their interlinkage. To build up momemtum behind this process, members of the network will host an itinerant VSP Network Seminar on each of the themes, engaging with key scholars internal and external to the network and identifying potential areas for research collaboration.
The network has ran a series of workshops, the first in Colombia in October 2018, followed by a second in Geneva in 2019, and recently in São Paulo. The Centre will host the first London workshop June 2019. The network will also introduced a working-paper series on relevant, intersecting issues with contributions from leading scholars.
A special issue of the Journal of Peacebuilding entitled ‘Learning from Latin America’ and based on papers presented at the LASA panel will be prepared for publication in 2019. This special issue, edited by Carlos Mario Perea and Jenny Pearce, will conceptualise the debates around which this new network revolves.