Order and Violence in Postwar Guatemala

This dissertation argues that wartime experiences can influence postwar systems of social control. Although civil wars are commonly assumed to produce disorder, I argue that they can also produce order, shaping the ways that civilians provide for their own security in the wake of war.;The dissertation uses the case of Guatemala to build this argument. Since the end of the Guatemalan civil war (1960-1996), violence crime rates have skyrocketed in the country. But Guatemalans have responded to this new insecurity very differently. In some communities, a system of collective vigilantism predominates: organized security patrols roam the streets at night, and hundreds---or even thousands---of neighbors routinely gather to cheer the public torture and lynching of alleged criminals. In other communities, individuals act independently to deter crime and to avenge wrongs, swiftly and secretly executing their antagonists.;Qualitative data gathered in the municipalities of Joyabaj, El Quiche and Agua Blanca, Jutiapa suggests that these divergent outcomes can be traced back to the civil war. Communities that experienced high levels of violence and combat during the war are likely to engage in collective vigilantism today. The theory presented in the dissertation highlights three reasons for this relationship. In high-conflict zones, the war 1) heightened local residents' sensitivity to threats of violence, and made them more likely to perceive threats as collective; 2) established new beliefs about the strategic utility of spectacular, demonstrative punishment; and 3) created durable new local institutions, such as the civil patrols, that facilitate collective vigilantism.;I test the theory with an original, municipal-level dataset. Sub-national quantitative and spatial evidence is consistent with the theory's predictions: at the municipal level, wartime violence predicts postwar collective vigilantism, and today lynchings and security patrols are clustered in the same areas that were hot spots of violence during the civil war.;The dissertation contributes to our understanding of the causes of collective vigilantism, while also shedding light on the long-term social consequences of civil wars.