Armies Without Nations: Public Violence and State Formation in Central America, 1821-1960

ISBN-13: 9780195310207 / Angielski / Miękka / 2006 / 352 str.

Robert H. Holden

Opis

Public violence, a persistent feature of Latin American life since the collapse of Iberian rule in the 1820s, has been especially prominent in Central America. Robert H. Holden shows how public violence shaped the states that have governed Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. Linking public violence and patrimonial political cultures, he shows how the early states improvised their authority by bargaining with armed bands or montoneras. Improvisation continued into the twentieth century as the bands were gradually superseded by semi-autonomous national armies, and as new agents of public violence emerged in the form of armed insurgencies and death squads. World War II, Holden argues, set into motion the globalization of public violence. Its most dramatic manifestation in Central America was the surge in U.S. military and police collaboration with the governments of the region, beginning with the Lend-Lease program of the 1940s and continuing through the Cold War. Although the scope of public violence had already been established by the people of the Central American countries, globalization intensified the violence and inhibited attempts to shrink its scope. Drawing on archival research in all five countries as well as in the United States, Holden elaborates the connections among the national, regional, and international dimensions of public violence. Armies Without Nations crosses the borders of Central American, Latin American, and North American history, providing a model for the study of global history and politics.

Armies without Nations was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title for 2005.

Recenzje

Contrary to much of the scholarly literature of the 1980s, which sought causes for Central American violence in U.S. policy, and contrary also to the official U.S. government view at the time, which blamed Soviet or Cuban meddling, Holden argues that the prevalence of public violence in the region is a product of its own history and not of intervention by external actors....Scholars interested in militarism and violence in public life in Latin America, and especially in Central America, will want to read and discuss this book.

O autorze

Robert H. Holden is an Associate Professor of History at Old Dominion University. He is the author of Mexico and the Survey of the Public Lands: The Management of Modernization, 1876-1911 and the co-editor of Latin America and the United States: A Documentary History (OUP, 2000).