Gendering violent pluralism: women’s political organising in Latin America

As a theory on violent democracies, the theory of violent pluralism is silent on the gendered realities of this violence as it plays out in Latin America. To bridge that knowledge gap, this article begins to develop a theory of the ‘gender of violent pluralism’. The article builds on socio-legal research on displaced women’s political organising in a violent context in Colombia (2010–2014) while also drawing on empirical examples of violence against women activists from Brazil, Central America and Mexico in the same period. The article proposes to unpack this concept as a three-pronged relationship between political organising and gendered violence: political organising as a response to gendered violence, gendered violence as an obstacle to organising and finally, political organising as a cause of further gender-based violence. Ultimately, the article is also an attempt to articulate a more general critique of the concept of violent pluralism – its conception of democracy, its possible erasure of the efforts of non-violent actors and how it calibrates the scope and intensity of political violence.