Deborah J. Yashar is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, New Jersey; lead Editor of World Politics; co-chair of SSRC's Anxieties of Democracy project; an editor of the Cambridge Contentious Politics Series; and former President of the Politics and History section of American Political Science Association (APSA). She is the author of Demanding Democracy (1997), Contesting Citizenship in Latin America (Cambridge, 2005), among other publications; and is co-editor of three other books, including States in the Developing World with Miguel Centeno and Atul Kohli (Cambridge, 2016) and Parties, Movements, and Democracy in the Developing World with Nancy Bermeo (2017). She is the recipient of Fulbright, USIP, and other awards.

• Part I. Introduction: 1. Violence in third wave democracies; 2. Engaging the theoretical debate and alternative arguments; Part II. The Argument about Homicidal Ecologies: 3. Illicit economies and territorial enclaves: the transnational context and domestic footprint; 4. State capacity and organizational competition: strategic calculations about territory and violence; Part III. Divergent Trajectories in Central America: Three Post-Civil War Cases: 5. High violence in post-Civil-War Guatemala; 6. High violence in post-Civil War El Salvador; 7. Circumscribing violence in post-Civil War Nicaragua; Part IV. Looking Backwards and Forwards: 8. Concluding with states.

'A brilliant example of how careful social science research can illuminate the most pressing problems of our times, Homicidal Ecologies shows why democracy and the end of civil war didn't bring peace to Latin America. Rather than resulting from economic inequality or weak democratic institutions, homicidal violence soared along the routes of the Continental drug trade where cartels compete and the state is too weak or corrupt to rein them in.' Andreas Wimmer, author of Nation Building: Why Some Countries Come Together While Other Fall Apart