Paradoxes of grassroots peacemaking : warrior masculinity, violence and intergenerational dialogues in postwar El Salvador

This dissertation analyzes how the Salvadoran state, civil war veterans, and gang members share a common understanding of peace that enables them to occupy the paradoxical position of being both purveyors of violence and “peacemakers.” I conducted this work in a violent, distrustful and hyper-masculine context with the help of civil war veterans who were mentoring relatives in youth gangs to support their efforts to make peace with other gangs and the government. Throughout my 2011 - 2015 ethnographic research in San Salvador, I found that many women, relatives of civil war veterans and gang member interlocutors, characterized the 1992 Peace Accords as una paz masculinista (a masculinist peace). While la paz maculinista denotes the absence of violence between men in conflict, for women living with social and gender violence and struggling with poverty reinforced by neoliberal economic policies, life was anything but peaceful. I build on Johan Galtung’s concept of “negative” and “positive” peace by using an intersectional theory perspective. I argue that the postwar experience is shaped by a negative notion of peace that is highly gendered. I further complicate the state’s notion of postwar peacemaking through an analysis of the rise of gang and femicidal violence, and the state’s punitive responses to both as a measure to attain peace. I discovered that gangs use their own peacemaking efforts to question the state’s racialized violence and human rights violations against its members. However, neither top-down (state-led) nor bottom-up (gang-led) peacemaking efforts have seriously grappled with violence against women or with the harsh realities of living under neoliberalism. My dissertation contends that to build a lasting peace, peacemaking in El Salvador must address not just ending war, but transforming economic inequality, class-based political exclusion, and racialized and gendered violenceAnthropolog