Abstract
The book concludes that an examination of the persistence of violence in El Salvador’s postwar era can serve as the groundwork on which to critique official representations of this country’s democracy and the tenets underlying democratization studies, specifically the antinomy that has been erected between violence and democracy. It also suggests that rather than serving to address deep-rooted problems of socio-economic inequality, El Salvador’s democratization process has allowed parallel economic liberalization to go unquestioned. In a context of persistent public and economic insecurity, the term ‘democracy’ works as a signifier for a variety of political configurations, some of them contradictory, as exemplified by ordinary people’s disillusionment with democracy and their simultaneous upholding of democratic ideals that make them yearn for substantive citizenship.
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Notes
- 1.
I refer here to the notion of ‘critical events ’ coined by Das (1995) in her analysis of various traumatic events that occurred in India after this country’s partition in 1947. By ‘critical events’, she refers to events that institute new modes of action and being, imbuing old concepts with new meaning (Das 1995: 3–4).
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Montoya, A. (2018). Conclusion. In: The Violence of Democracy. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76330-9_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76330-9_8
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