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![The skyrocketing violence in Central America calls upon scholars to examine the needed conditions for peace. This article challenges the assumption that the absence of violence among factions in conflict is the chief goal around which peacemaking efforts should operate. Based on ethnographic research with women relatives of male gang members and civil war veterans in El Salvador, I argue that the 1992 Salvadoran Peace Accords that ended twelve years of civil war developed a male-centered notion of negative peace that ended the armed conflict while naturalizing racialized state violence as part of security measures and ongoing violence against women as low-grade part of everyday life. In the post-accords era, gang members advance their version of negative peace, promising to protect women and the nation while continuing to oppress their women relatives.[continued at link]](/pic/orig/media%2FHWTFN3zXQAIw3xe.png)
ALT The skyrocketing violence in Central America calls upon scholars to examine the needed conditions for peace. This article challenges the assumption that the absence of violence among factions in conflict is the chief goal around which peacemaking efforts should operate. Based on ethnographic research with women relatives of male gang members and civil war veterans in El Salvador, I argue that the 1992 Salvadoran Peace Accords that ended twelve years of civil war developed a male-centered notion of negative peace that ended the armed conflict while naturalizing racialized state violence as part of security measures and ongoing violence against women as low-grade part of everyday life. In the post-accords era, gang members advance their version of negative peace, promising to protect women and the nation while continuing to oppress their women relatives.[continued at link]
ALT Policy Innovation Day participants stand together in the Beckman Center lobby.
ALT Applications are now open for the African Peacebuilding and Developmental Dynamics (APDD) program’s fellowship awards. Research Policy Fellowship Deadline: November 6, 2026 Doctoral Dissertation Fellowships & Individual Research Fellowship Deadline: January 15, 2027
ALT Applications open now for the Rachel Tanur Memorial Prize for Visual Sociology
![This article lays out the work of Costs of War, a project of scholars creating public-facing knowledge toward the goal of challenging US militarism. Emerging from literature that critiques US imperial violence and deconstructs the commonplace understandings that support it, our efforts identify and confront pillars of belief about war that are shaped by the powerful military-industrial complex and rooted in an underlying devaluation of the lives of Muslims, people of color, women, and oppressed groups who bear the brunt of militarization both at home and abroad. We use our research and associated website (costsofwar.org) to reach out to journalists, editors, Congress, policymakers, civic groups, social movements, and the US public. [continued at link]](/pic/orig/media%2FHT94pYqWUAEV-Eo.png)
ALT This article lays out the work of Costs of War, a project of scholars creating public-facing knowledge toward the goal of challenging US militarism. Emerging from literature that critiques US imperial violence and deconstructs the commonplace understandings that support it, our efforts identify and confront pillars of belief about war that are shaped by the powerful military-industrial complex and rooted in an underlying devaluation of the lives of Muslims, people of color, women, and oppressed groups who bear the brunt of militarization both at home and abroad. We use our research and associated website (costsofwar.org) to reach out to journalists, editors, Congress, policymakers, civic groups, social movements, and the US public. [continued at link]
