Abstract
ABSTRACTThis article considers the adaptation of international peace mediation to the post-war context of urban gang-related violence. The 2012 OAS-brokered San Salvador gang truce represented a shift from the management of ‘criminal’ actors through liberal security measures and narrow pragmatic criminal pacts towards a new social inclusion strategy based on local political participation, social justice and programmes to address the socio-economic causes of gang-related violence. Mediators failed to engage key interested non-armed actors who reside outside ‘criminal’ gang-held territories, with the result that the truce lacked legitimacy at the city level. Inclusive national-level engagement is particularly important in the post-war democratic Central American city because gangs play a key role in shaping urban space and urban politics. The article depicts the politics of inclusion of gangs in peace mediation as part of a city-wide debate regarding the merits of the dominant liberal/pragmatic inclusion strategy versus ‘social’ inclusion. The spatial and discursive segregation of San Salvador into ‘political’ and ‘criminal’ realms promotes a preference for liberal security discourse and the exclusive local truce process that undermined the ‘social’ truce. City-wide inclusion is required to overcome the politics-crime divide and provide a platform to unite social justice advocates.
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