Rising levels of crime and insecurity affect the quality of life. A fundamental question for the prospects of democracy is whether voters, in hopes of reaching better solutions to conditions of prevailing insecurity, can hold their elected officials accountable for such situations. This article argues that electoral accountability amid criminal violence requires voters to be able to assign responsibility for crime, and that partisan alignment across levels of government facilitates this task. Recent Mexican elections are examined to test this argument. Relying on both aggregate electoral data and individual survey evidence, this study shows that voters hold politicians accountable for crime in the narrow circumstances of organized crime–related violence and political alignment. This evidence not only provides additional caveats to issue voting models, but also opens new avenues of research on electoral accountability.

Despite increasing awareness of human trafficking in Canada (and internationally), there is limited knowledge about how local communities are responding to the experiences of trafficked persons. By focusing on the case of counter-trafficking responses in a major city in western Canada, this project represents the first Canadian attempt to document how a major urban centre is addressing human trafficking. The exploratory project surveyed 53 respondents representing agencies involved in the counter-trafficking response, which in various capacities serve individuals victimized by trafficking. Building on the survey findings, five focus group discussions were also conducted. The article suggests that, while a criminal justice framework is important for addressing human trafficking, local strategies will benefit from an emphasis on cross-sector collaboration that emphasizes the rights of the trafficked persons above the needs of law enforcement. Implications for (inter)national responses are also presented.

The United Nations Commission on Crime Prevention and Treatment of Offenders treats domestic violence as a serious offence that affects groups of vulnerable populations, such as children, women and ethnic minorities. In Indonesia, the National Commission on Violence Against Women notes that in 2015 alone, there are recorded reports of 11,207 cases of domestic violence and 60% of those cases are violence against spouses, especially wives. However, many studies that have been done on domestic violence tend to take an indirect route towards reformation in the criminal justice system. This study tries to address some major obstacles to establish a more responsive criminal justice system in handling domestic violence cases. Through a qualitative analysis with statute and case approaches of Indonesian court judgements, this study analyses the system’s way of protecting/neglecting victims’ rights. There are four main obstacles to be discussed. First, many judges still regard domestic violence as a less serious offence, especially in regard to psychological intimidation. Second, punishment for the perpretators is quite moderate compared with the sufferings of the victims. Third, victims are only regarded in court as witnesses and denied their rights as victims. Fourth, there is a kind of social resistance from the community to report domestic violence as a crime. In sum, these obstacles illustrate a culture of neglect that is continuously reinforced by the community and the criminal justice system towards the victims’ physical and mental sufferings in the case of domestic violence.

The Guatemalan peace process provides an excellent opportunity to revisit a number of discussions about political democratization and social justice in Latin America. It is the premise of this article that fulfillment of the peace accords, particularly on demilitarization, is the necessary precondition for full development of political democracy in Guatemala. The article first summarizes how, beyond ending the war, the peace process has contributed to Guatemala’s democratization, and then analyzes the Guatemalan experience since the early 1980s as a means to address some of the broad theoretical debates.

During 1995, the 50th anniversary year of the United Nations (UN), news of the failure of its peacekeeping missions in Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda dominated the media and political rhetoric. In El Salvador, however, a UN mission with a legitimate claim to success was able to close its doors on 30 April 1995. How is this remarkable achievement to be explained? And, what are the lessons — positive and negative — that can be learned from the 45 months during which the United Nations Observer Mission in El Salvador (Misión de Obseruadores de las Naciones Unidas en El Salvador or ONUSAL) oversaw a transition from war to peace and verified a lengthy set of peace accords?

The success of ONUSAL was anything but assured when it began in July 1991, some six months before there was even a cease-fire.

Colombian Politics, by 1982, were characterized by stagnation, increased levels of violence, and diminished regime legitimacy. In the face of an active, though limited, guerrilla insurgency as well as nascent labor unrest and popular protest, the successive governments of the National Front had come to depend on the coercive powers of the state to preserve public order and political stability. Colombia's peace process, initiated during the government of Conservative President Belisario Betancur (1982- 1986), was a recognition of the limits, indeed the failure, of the military solution to the maintenance of public order.