Old and New Peace in El Salvador: How Peace Strategies Emerge, Disappear and Transform

Abstract

In the internationally supported Salvadoran peace process of the 1990s, high levels of consensus were reached about the road to peace and the type of legitimate order to make peace sustainable. While security arrangements based on liberal norms are widely considered as legitimate and preferable, there is a lack of consensus about the road to peace today. In that regard, the case of El Salvador reveals the tensions between the ideals of state power, rule of law and liberal norms, which still underpin most of the public and political discourses about El Salvador’s security governance, and the de facto strategies to contain violence and provide security, both at local and national levels. The first is about a type of order that is considered legitimate but only partly functioning, while the latter is about the really existing practices of (national and local) actors dealing in different ways with new power configurations and informal sovereignties. Van der Borgh illustrates these tensions with an analysis of the peace agreement of 1992 between rebel movement and government, and of a truce signed among El Salvador’s gangs in 2012