Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at the gang truce in El Salvador in 2012 to analyse security perception among state elites in hybrid political orders.

Paper long abstract:

The call for security reforms in many countries of the world became louder with the emergence of human security and good governance concepts in the 1990s. Despite the debates about the concepts in academic and policy circles, there is still limited knowledge about what security actually means for state elites outside the Western world and why strengthening state institutions does not necessarily lead to security provision. This paper aims at understanding state security responses by looking at the attempt of the FMLN Government in El Salvador (since 2009) to establish a policy based on citizen security principles that would differ from the hard line Mano Dura approach of previous governments. Drawing on the concept of hybrid political orders, it is argued that security policies are often an outcome of formal and informal processes of negotiation between multiple state and private actors. The truce between the two biggest Salvadoran street gangs established in March 2012 serves as an example of the ambiguity of security policies: the process lacked transparency and the conditions of the truce are not fully known, but homicide rates dropped significantly since then. The gang truce never appeared in the government's official programme, yet it became an important issue on the security agenda. It shows that while many official measures to reduce and prevent violence could not be implemented straightforward, other unforeseen opportunities opened up in a space where the existence of powerful non-state actors was at least implicitly acknowledged.