Urban violence is a major preoccupation of policy-makers, planners, and development practitioners in cities around the world. States routinely seek to contain such violence through repression and its exportation to and containment at the periphery of metropolitan centres. Yet urban violence is a highly heterogeneous phenomenon and not amenable to reified diagnosis and coercive intervention. Muscular state-led responses tend to overlook and conceal the underlying factors shaping the emergence of urban violence, as well as the motivations and means of so-called "violence entrepreneurs". This is very obviously the case of urban gangs in Central America, which are regularly labelled a "new urban insurgency" threatening the integrity of governments and public order. This article considers both the shape and character of Central American gang violence and attempts at reducing it, highlighting the complex relationship between these two phenomena. We advance a threefold approach to measuring the effectiveness of interventions, focusing alternately on discursive, practical and outcomebased criteria. In this way the article demonstrates how, contrary to their reported success in diminishing gang violence, repressive first generation approaches have tended instead to radicalise gangs, potentially pushing them towards more organised forms of criminality. Moreover, although credited with some modest successes, more preventive second generation interventions seem to have yielded more rhetorical advances than meaningful reductions in gang violence.

This article presents a critical overview of the contemporary practice of post-conflict peacebuilding (PCPB), arguing that contemporary post-conflict operations rest upon the assumption that a sophisticated social engineering approach could replace, or accelerate, a process of state formation that occurs rather more organically. Yet, PCPB is subject to the same tensions and dilemmas as the process of state formation. Many recent post-conflict reconstruction and rehabilitation programmes have been conducted with little critical self-reflection on the underlying assumptions or structural biases of PCPB efforts. One major reason for this is the missing connection, in the minds of policymakers and practitioners, between security and development concerns. The concept of human security can help bridge this gap and is also compatible with a form of Popperian ‘piecemeal’ social engineering that is more consistent with a critical approach to PCPB.

Although he is widely regarded as the 'founding father' of realism in International Relations, this book argues that Hans J. Morgenthau's legal background has largely been neglected in discussions of his place in the 'canon' of IR theory. Morgenthau was a legal scholar of German-Jewish origins who arrived in the United States in 1938. He went on to become a distinguished professor of Political Science and a prominent commentator on international affairs. Rather than locate Morgenthau's intellectual heritage in the German tradition of 'Realpolitik', this book demonstrates how many of his central ideas and concepts stem from European and American legal debates of the 1920s and 1930s. This is an ambitious attempt to recast the debate on Morgenthau and will appeal to IR scholars interested in the history of realism as well as international lawyers engaged in debates regarding the relationship between law and politics, and the history of International Law.

Focusing on the disconnect between mainstream “liberal” peacebuilding and the discourses and practices of “new” and “alternative” peacebuilding actors, this article develops a nonbinary approach that goes beyond norm localization to capture the ways in which major powers influence the nature, content, and direction of normative change. Within the context of their bilateral and multilateral contributions to the “global peacebuilding order,” what forms and types of interventions are conceived by these actors as peacebuilding? How, in turn, has the substantive content of their peacebuilding practices (re)shaped norms and narratives in international peacebuilding efforts? Based on extensive empirical research of the peacebuilding policies and activities of China, Japan, and Russia, this article analyzes the way in which these “top-top” dynamics between norms embedded in the liberal narrative and major powers with competing visions can influence peacebuilding as practiced and pursued in host states. In doing so, it brings together research on global norms and peacebuilding studies and offers a simple yet analytically powerful tool to better understand the evolution of global peacebuilding order(s) and the role of rising powers in (re)shaping global governance.

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