Culture of Social Violence in the State and the Citizenry

Abstract

The paper presents an original theoretical thesis prepared by building on the existence of ongoing mutations and social unrest producing consistent impact on a heterogeneous Salvadoran social formation, which contains four types of societies: the formal economy and the state, the informal economy, the transnational migration economy, and the asocial minority.

Various criminal social cycles are focused on, along with their corresponding intersections with state repression, clustered by year: 1993-1996; Post-Peace Agreement; 2005-2007; 2009-2011 post-declaration of war on gangs. The  emerging stakeholder is the asocial sub-society, and its structure based on gangs, criminal social networking and their organization in the territory, which generates a special situation of relevant criminal or antisocial actions.

This theory proposes that the phenomenon has evolved out of the very Salvadoran asocial rebellion, reinforced by the culture of social violence in the state and citizens. The interesting thing is that each rising wave of state repression has a corresponding criminal organizational and operational expansion. This is a useful context for assessing the understanding of gangs in 2012, for the long term and not just in the short term, which is where the underlying problems tend to be concealed.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5377/rpsp.v1i2.1362