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The end of Cold War apparently put the South America region out of the main concerns of the US security agenda. After 9/11, such perception has gained importance in literature, when US global strategy focused on an otherness whose geographic position was nothing but distant from the southern territories of the Americas. Otherwise, this article general aim is to discuss the space occupied by South America in the US current security concerns and goals through the analyses of the US war on drugs. We argue that the US counter-narcotics policy is a local variation of its global security strategy. Through a historical perspective, we present a transition from an approach that associates the war on drugs with a Cold War enemy, particularly the communist guerrillas, toward another one that recognises the fight against illegal drugs as itself a threat to the US national security and a justification for the US intelligence and military presence in South America.

The end of Cold War apparently put the South America region out of the main concerns of the US security agenda. After 9/11, such perception has gained importance in literature, when US global strategy focused on an otherness whose geographic position was nothing but distant from the southern territories of the Americas. Otherwise, this article general aim is to discuss the space occupied by South America in the US current security concerns and goals through the analyses of the US war on drugs. We argue that the US counter-narcotics policy is a local variation of its global security strategy. Through a historical perspective, we present a transition from an approach that associates the war on drugs with a Cold War enemy, particularly the communist guerrillas, toward another one that recognises the fight against illegal drugs as itself a threat to the US national security and a justification for the US intelligence and military presence in South America.

AbstractRegional security in South America cannot be explained simply by considering balance of power or security-community governance mechanisms. In this article, we present and discuss a hybrid security-governance approach for talking about governance security in the Americas, particularly, South America. We hypothesize that there exists a new security-governance configuration in which the traditional governance mechanisms—balance of power and security community—are not mutually exclusive, but overlap and coexist, leading to the emergence of a regional hybrid security architecture. Beyond explaining the reasons and causes for the overlap between security community and balance of power, we show the hybrid nature of regional security governance and point out how taking the hybridity conceptual approach fills the gaps within current research. We first offer a critique of two leading approaches to thinking about security in the Americas (balancing and security communities). Next, we show how the overlapping configurations in South America's regional security governance happen, testing Adler and Greve's (2009, "When Security Community Meets Balance of Power: Overlapping Regional Mechanisms of Security Governance." Review of International Studies 35[S1]: 59–84) framework against historical evidence. Last, we provide evidence of a hybrid security governance in the region. We complement our analysis with qualitative data from interviews with scholars, political, diplomatic, and military actors conducted in various countries across the region. Our contribution is a significant step toward understanding how security-governance formations come about in non-Western regions of the world, privileging its specificities. More importantly, we offer a novel angle to escape straitjacket hypotheses to security governance grounded in Western hegemonic ideal types, which have focus either on balance of power or on security-community models.

ABSTRACTContending rationales of peace and conflict coexist between countries and within regional spaces as conditions that motivate or constrain militarized behaviors. While the idea of balancing is still a relevant concept to understand contemporary security in South America, the region produces patterns of a nascent security community. This article argues that the regional repertoire of foreign and security policy practices draws on a hybrid security governance mechanism. The novelty brought by the cumulative interaction among South American countries is that the coexistence turns into a hybrid between both practices and discourses. To explain how hybrid formations are produced, this study analyzes the most empirically intense and academically controversial political and security interactions from interstate relations in the two security complexes in the region, the Southern Cone and the Northern Andes.

In several Latin American countries, social violence has risen to warlike levels. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to the extent of social violence and the new (informal) forms of governance generated by the so-called violent nonstate actors (VNSAs). Where a state's forces fail to provide for the physical protection and social security of its citizens, some areas are governed by a mix of formal (vertical) and informal (horizontal) forms of governance, mixing state and nonstate actors. In these socially bounded spaces, nonstate actors produce and distribute public goods similarly as the state does. In this article, we explore how hybrid governance has appeared in the South American region, considering the operation of two regional VNSAs, the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) in Brazil and the Bandas Criminales (BACRIM) in Colombia. We show that such VNSAs are significant agents for security governance, as they challenge preconceived notions of state authority (legitimacy).