Building on their joint participation at the 2018 annual congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), the LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre (LACC), the Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS) 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 (NEV-USP) have together created a collaborative research partnership on violence, security, and peace: The Violence, Security and Peace (VSP) Network.
The collaboration generates research-based knowledge and understanding of the crisis of violence and security in Latin America, informs 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 momentum 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 ran a series of workshops, the first in Colombia in October 2018, followed by Barcelona, São Paulo, and London in 2019. The next workshop will take place in Geneva in March 2020 (date tbc). It has also introduced a working-paper series on relevant, intersecting issues with contributions from leading scholars (see below).
A special issue of the Journal of Peacebuilding titled, "Post-war and Non-war Violences: Learning about Peace and Peacebuilding from Latin America", based on papers presented at the LASA congress in 2018, was published in 2019. Edited by Carlos Mario Perea and Jenny Pearce (LACC Research Staff), it conceptualises the debates around which the new network revolves.
In September 2019, the Researcher Links Workshop, “Governance, Crime, and International Security: Testing Innovations in Policy, Practice, and Research”, introduced early careers researchers and PhD students to research on governance and security, using São Paulo as a laboratory to explore the institutional setting of Brazil. The workshop enjoyed the participation of members of the VSP network.
Pearce, J (2018). Elites and Violence in Latin America: Logics of the Fragmented Security State: Logics of the Fragmented Security State, Violence, Security, and Peace Working Papers, no.1, LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre.
Oettler, A (2019). The Struggle for Gendered Peace and LGBT Rights in Colombia, Violence, Security, and Peace Working Papers, no.2, LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre.