With an annual homicide rate of 44 per 100.000, Central America is considered the most dangerous place in the world, according to the UNDP (Opening Spaces to Citizen Security and Human Development: Human Development Report for Central America, HDRCA, 2009–10), notwithstanding war-torn countries such as Somalia or Afghanistan. Most analysts agree that the high levels of everyday violence (crime, ‘feminicide’, interpersonal violence) in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala are linked to histories of political violence. But few agree on how and to what extent; or, importantly, what such a link means for policy. Post-war transitions throughout the world have largely been focused on establishing peace between warring parties, but tend not to examine the structures that feed into violence in the first place and thus fail to deal with escalating everyday violence. An emerging school of thought argues that ‘positive peace’ (a term coined by Johan Galtung in 1969) or sustainable peace requires the presence of social justice and thus the transformation of the social, economic and political structures that influence everyday violence. In order to develop mechanisms and policies for such positive transformation, we need to understand how structural violence, everyday violence and political violence are linked. Cecilia Menjívar aims to contribute to such a diagnostic by examining the lives of ladina women in Eastern Guatemala.

Following critical anthropologists such as Arthur Kleinman, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Paul Farmer, Philippe Bourgois, Donna M. Goldstein and others, Menjívar argues that the particularly gendered violence that women experience, and which culminated in a wave of feminicides from the mid-1990s onwards, should be seen in the light of structural violence, a violence that is embedded in social relations and in institutions and is expressed in gross inequalities. She also follows these anthropologists in her methodology: Enduring Violence is based on long-term ethnographic research in Eastern Guatemala, and the analysis is based on the words of the women whose lives are examined and on the researcher's observations. Such a strategy makes for a generally engaging read, although the number of women's lives (30) that are examined, compared and highlighted does not allow us to get an in-depth understanding of any particular woman's life. It does, however, give us bits and pieces of lives to compare and contrast (perhaps this is because Menjívar is a sociologist, not an anthropologist). This is not necessarily a weakness: it provides an engaging but non-judgemental and non-emotional view of women's lives.

In her book (p. 4), Menjívar aims to do two things: (i) to ‘unearth the misrecognised violence that women routinely experience in familiar, commonplace spaces’, and (ii) to show how everyday suffering is linked to and embedded in the broader social order – local, national and international. Her first aim, to unearth ‘misrecognised’ violence, presents the author with a dilemma: Menjívar recognises that there are different interpretations of what violence is and she does not want to impose her interpretation upon others. She is careful therefore not to suggest that ladinas in Eastern Guatemala suffer from false consciousness; instead, she lets women talk about their suffering, about injustice in their lives. Nevertheless, the author then labels this suffering ‘violence’. The analytical step taken here is not always clearly spelled out, and often what Menjívar calls violence could also be labelled ‘inequality’. This indicates a weakness in the analytical framework presented in the first part of the book, and how this applies to this case study: while the different violences that contribute to women's daily suffering (structural violence, political violence and state terror, interpersonal violence and crime, symbolic violence and the internalisation of inequality, gender and gendered violence) are extensively discussed in chapter 2, these forms of violence are not always convincingly linked to women's stories.

Menjívar's second aim, to show the ways in which everyday suffering is linked to and embedded in the broader social order, is similarly weakened by the gap between the framework presented in chapters 1 and 2 and the five empirical chapters that follow. Despite her promises, the author fails to contextualise women's stories in Guatemala's structures of inequality, history of political violence and global political economy. She is more successful in showing how local social institutions such as family and Church reproduce gendered (and ethnic- and class-based) inequality, and in highlighting why and how certain inequalities lead to injury. Menjívar seems to know that the framework and the empirical data do not always fit; her introductions and conclusions are peppered with apologies that express a fear of being misunderstood, another notable difference between Menjívar and the critical anthropologists on which she builds her framework.

Although Enduring Violence does not entirely live up to its promise, it is an important book. Menjívar is one of the first scholars to look at gendered violence from a point of view that includes physical interpersonal violence, structural violence and the reproduction of inequality. A particular strength of the book is the focus on ladina women in Eastern Guatemala and the inclusion of women of different economic means in the study. This allows Menjívar to highlight the ways in which poverty may exacerbate suffering, but also examine the fact that wealth or status does not exempt better-off women from gendered violence. Menjívar's detailed analysis of the often-obscured gendered violences that women suffer is important in light of the high rates of feminicide in Guatemala and, indeed, in the broader region. In the conclusion she rightly discusses how the everyday reproduction and normalisation of gendered violence feed into the killing of women because they are women; if communities and national institutions alike consider violence against women to be normal or even justified, then feminicides are likely to be seen as normal and justifiable as well.

In the last sentence of her book, Menjívar expresses the hope that she has helped to ‘expose the normalisation of violence’. It is in this exposure of women's suffering and of their endurance of the everyday violence against their bodies, their freedom and their dignity that the strength of this book lies. The way in which Church, mothers and mothers-in-law, and indeed friends and neighbours encourage and oblige women to put up with everyday violence, a message normalised through daily repetition, is skilfully exposed by Menjívar. Enduring Violence is a welcome contribution to the literature on gender inequality and the reproduction of everyday violence in Central America and beyond, and will be read with great interest by critical anthropologists, analysts of increasing violence in the region and students interested in gendered violence in post-war settings.