By Raúl Zepeda Gil

Violence rising in Latin America since the early 1990s has puzzled media, policymakers and academia. Characterising high scales of violence in non-political confrontations has been one of the main challenges. The main argument of this essay is that the hybrid criminal nature of violence in Latin America by non-state organisations has pushed the discussion to several misinterpretations and conceptual stretching that produces fog rather than clarity. Instead, this essay proposes a conceptof criminal war that can capture the complex nature of violence in Latin America by drawing convergences and divergences from diverse fields of literature and confronting usual mischaracterisations in current Latin American research.

Third World QuarTerly2023, Vol. 44, No. 4, 776–794

Organized Crime and National Security in Spain:

Challenges and Responses

Edited by Andrés de Castro

This book offers an analysis of how organized crime operates in Spain and the security apparatus designed to contain it. Organized crime is currently one of the most serious security threats facing democratic societies. Despite its intense presence and the responses that states have articulated in recent decades, little attention has been paid to the measurement of the effectiveness of the means adopted to combat it. Thus, this volume delves into this issue and performs an analysis of the police dimension of the response to organized crime in Spain. Firstly, this volume describes the international phenomenon of organized crime and its evolution in Spain, and continues by analyzing the profile and the characteristics of the different police forces and their resources and capabilities. This book then discusses the consequences of the measures at international level, European Union level, and local level, in relation to other police forces. Finally, the volume addresses the legal and public policy efforts that Spanish Law Enforcement Agencies have made in supervising or regulating their own police forces, which is necessary to carry out a detailed analysis of the consequences on the presence and strength of organized crime in the structures, strategies and decisions that Spain adopted over the last decades. As a result, this book builds on and updates the previous work by international scholars and proposes an interesting methodology that can contribute to the advancement of security studies.

London; New York: Routledge, 2025. 265p.