The fundamental point of contention between the works under review here (in my view) is whether or not the presence of systematic violence is primarily a feature or a bug of the given political system being studied. I do not mean this distinction in a normative sense, but rather an analytical one. In other words, should we view endemic political violence in ostensibly democratic states to be deviations from appropriate democratic behavior (i.e., a bug or flaw in a given system), or is it the case that the violence in question should be understood as an inherent part of the system, perhaps even if it is still to be considered a democracy (i.e., a feature or constituent element thereof)?

Further, part of the analytical tension between the works may be definitional, especially in terms of what is even meant by the notion of discussing “democracy.” Perhaps the major difficulty I have with the approach in the Arias and Goldstein text, and in Desmond Arias's review of my book, is that I come away unclear about what the connection is supposed to be between democracy and political violence. Can a democracy be called a democracy if it has systematic (perhaps even institutionalized) violence? Is it a flawed democracy because of the violence? Or is it just a democracy that has alternative methods of political expression contained within itself? At a minimum, I find the connection to be fuzzy and at other times, as I noted in my review, somewhat contradictory.

For example, in his review of Voting Amid Violence, Arias writes that “Taylor explicitly imposes a teleology on democratic experience.” Now, I think that there is a fair debate to be had on the question of whether the literature on democratization (or my own work) is being overly teleological in terms of normative preferences for certain ends states. However, my fundamental point is a definitional one: that democracy, to be democracy, should exhibit certain characteristics and that the presence of persistent violence is problematic, in definitional terms. In that same passage, Arias states that “Taylor repeats a common and, in the Colombian context, counterproductive trope in much of the literature of democracy in developing countries that sees fully realized democracy as a less violent alternative to other forms of government.” The question I come away with from that sentence is: should not fully realized democracy be, by definition, “a less violent alternative to other forms of government”? At a minimum, I think that the most fundamental difference between our approaches is to be found in that question. This is what I mean about the notion of violence as a “bug” in a democratic system.

To switch to a more specific element of Arias's review, I take the point that there is a need for subnational analysis of the parties and elections in Colombia (to deepen my existing national approach). This has become evident in recent years, especially with the increasingly overt political actions of paramilitary groups and the politicians and parties affiliated with them. Indeed, the Colombian case is perhaps the best in the region, if not the world, for which to attempt to address the critiques of the democratization literature that Arias raises. Such analysis is needed to better understand Colombian politics, and it a worthy addition to the “to do” list for Colombianists.