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

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A Requiem for Peacebuilding?

Part of the book series: Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies ((RCS))

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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.

A draft of this chapter was presented at the UCSIA International Workshop on Peacebuilding, University of Antwerp, 5–7 December 2018. The author would like to thank the participants of the Conflict and Security research seminar at Utrecht University for their comments on an earlier draft of this chapter, and Jorg Kustermans, Barbara Segaert and Tom Sauer for their comments on the last draft of the chapter. I am particularly grateful to the input of the late Ralph Sprenkels. I dedicate this chapter to him.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Conflict Studies, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Chris van der Borgh

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  1. Chris van der Borgh
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Correspondence to Chris van der Borgh .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, University of Antwerp, Antwerpen, Belgium

    Jorg Kustermans

  2. Department of Political Science, University of Antwerp, Antwerpen, Belgium

    Tom Sauer

  3. University Centre Saint-Ignatius Antwerp, Antwerpen, Belgium

    Barbara Segaert

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van der Borgh, C. (2021). Old and New Peace in El Salvador: How Peace Strategies Emerge, Disappear and Transform. In: Kustermans, J., Sauer, T., Segaert, B. (eds) A Requiem for Peacebuilding? . Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56477-3_6

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