When violence statistics are reported at the national level, something crucial is lost. An average homicide rate for Mexico, Brazil, or Colombia flattens the enormous differences between a peaceful rural municipality and a city neighbourhood controlled by armed actors. It is precisely this flattening that Tina Hilgers and Laura Macdonald set out to correct in Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean: Subnational Structures, Institutions, and Clientelistic Networks, published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.

The volume's central argument is methodological and political at once: to understand violence in the region, you have to go down to the subnational scale — to the neighbourhood, the municipality, the region — where history, institutions, economic structures, and clientelistic networks combine into configurations that national aggregates cannot reveal. This book examines violence at the subnational level to illuminate how practices of violence are embedded within subnational configurations of space and clientelistic networks.

"Within subnational arenas, unique configurations of historical legacies, economic structures, identities, institutions, actors, and clientelistic networks result in particular patterns of violence and vulnerability that are often strikingly different from what is portrayed by aggregate national-level statistics."

— Hilgers & Macdonald, Introduction

The ten empirical chapters cover an impressive geographic breadth: Mexico City's clientelist police, Rio de Janeiro's criminal factions and militias, Kingston's garrison communities, El Salvador's gang truce, subnational Colombia and Argentina, and the state of Bahía, Brazil. Each chapter draws on original primary fieldwork, giving the collection a texture and specificity that distinguishes it from desk-based comparative work.

What makes the volume particularly valuable for LLACS's research community is its insistence on the relationship between violence and clientelism. Clientelistic networks, they show, are often the very channels through which violence is organized, contained, or mobilized — and understanding this relationship requires precisely the kind of subnational, ethnographically-informed analysis that the Informal Cities Working Group has been developing at Concordia.