María Isabel Véliz Franco's body was found in an empty lot—strangled, stabbed, raped, broken, and scratched—only two days after she disappeared in Guatemala. She had been tortured before she was killed, and her dead body thrown out into the public sphere with impunity. The Guatemalan police investigation was a farce at best, and her mother's story of searching for justice for her daughter is filled with pain, humiliation, and frustration with the fruitlessness of her efforts (pp. 273–74).

Rosa Franco's powerful testimonio is one of four in Terrorizing Women, which combines personal narratives and a range of research methods to explore the disturbing trend of wanton, public killings of women and girls in the Americas. The book, edited by Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Berjarano, ambitiously looks to theorize, account for, and hold perpetrators accountable for feminicide.

The book's editors prefer the term feminicide to femicide (p. 5), translating the Spanish word feminicidio to “feminicide.” If femicide is “the murder of women and girls because they are female,” then feminicide is the “murders of women and girls founded on a gender power structure,” implicating both the individual perpetrators and the social and political contexts in which the perpetration takes place (p. 5). This theoretical distinction, the editors argue, is part of a project of theorizing South to North (rather than just North to South), and highlighting the “local histories” of theoretical reflection on gender-based violence.

Telling those local histories, and theorizing with, in, and through them, is one of this book's major strengths. Nowhere is this stronger than in the book's Preface by Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos, a scholar and politician who has dedicated much of her career to fighting feminicide in Mexico. Rios tells of accountability campaigns and legal measures to try to stop the seemingly never-ending flow of violence against women. Throughout Ríos's long narrative history of feminicidal violence in Mexico, it is crystal clear both that feminicidal violence is not incidental or a crime of passion but institutional and structural, and that, for those reasons, it needs to be theorized significantly differently than conventional media accounts of women's disappearance and death explain it. At the same time, the editors' Introduction ensures that readers will continue to think about feminicide complexly: While refusing to see feminicidal violence as incidental or individual, they also refuse to ignore individual responsibility. In their view, feminicidal violence is “rooted in political, economic, cultural, and social inequalities [involving] systemic and structural forces, a multiplicity of factors and intersecting logics” (p. 12).

By exploring this multiplicity of factors and intersecting logics in a number of ways, this book is a theoretical tour de force and truly empirically innovative—easily placing it into the category of “must read.” In each of its three parts (localizing feminicide, transnationalizing justice, and new citizenship practices), the book combines powerful empirical material and incisive analysis of a variety of cases. Terrorizing Women discusses some of the more well known cases of feminicide in depth (such as the case of Ciudad Juárez), but also covers a range of lesser-known cases, such as those in Peru, Argentina, Costa Rica, and Guatemala. Several individual chapters make serious intellectual contributions.

For example, in Part I, Julia Estela Monárrez Fragoso's analysis of the victims of feminicide Ciudad Juarez as sexually fetishized commodities (where “the remains of bodies reveal to us the economic functionality of violence against women as an aberrant and absurd fantasy of gender, race, and social class,” [p. 68]) explores the intersection of political economies of pain and structural gender subordination in the symbolism and embodiment of women left dead in public places. Chapters by Rita Laura Segato about Mexico (“Territory, Sovereignty, and Crimes of the Second State”) and by Angélica Cházaro, Jennifer Casey, and Katherine Ruhl about Guatemala (“Getting Away with Murder”) tell strikingly similar stories about states implicated in the most extreme devaluation and dehumanization of women.

In Part II, some of the contributors are more sanguine than others about the possibility for state and/or transnational solutions to the structural problem of feminicide. Although Rios's Preface discussed some of the struggles of legislating even research about feminicide, much less solutions to it, a number of the other authors point out national and international legislation and social movements aimed at addressing feminicide. Both William Paul Simmons and Rebecca Coplan's chapter (“Innovative Transnational Remedies for the Women of Ciudad Juàrez”) and Christina Iturralde's chapter (“Searching for Accountability on the Border”) tell cautious tales of the possibility for change. Still, Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba and Patricia Ravelo Blancas (“Obedience without Compliance”) express concern that attempts to address systematic violence against women are more performance than genuine action.

Part III's discussion of how new citizenship practices emerge in response to feminicide includes compelling analyses of the relationship between the public and private spheres, particularly in Pascha Bueno-Hansen's chapter (“Feminicidio: Making the Most of an ‘Empowered Term’”). Bueno-Hansen uses a comparative study of nongovernmental organizations concerned with women's rights in Peru and Guatemala to explore the strategic deployment of feminicide as a concept, both by advocates and in legal developments.

Sometimes it is difficult for a reader to link these diverse contributions together to find a coherent narrative—since it is (and has to be) more than simply naming a term. Some repetition across chapters (especially the several chapters about Ciudad Juàrez) and awkward translation make the book less of a perfectly smooth read than one might wish for a work of this length and breadth.

That said, this book's combination of depth, innovation, and diversity is certainly its greatest strength. It includes authors from the United States and many places in Latin America, authors who are scholars and some who are practitioners, and traditional scholarly analyses and less-often-seen testimonials and photo essays. It covers a variety of cases, and it does so accessibly, despite a high level of theoretical depth and breadth. It embodies what many scholars simply attempt to describe when talking about methodological ideal types: multisited knowledge that is dominated by voices at the margins of global politics (see the discussion in Brooke Ackerly, Maria Stern, and Jacqui True, Feminist Methodologies for International Relations, 2006). The editors and authors also (importantly, in my mind) demonstrate a political commitment to stopping the injustice they see as they study the terrible phenomena of feminicide (see Ann Tickner, Gendering World Politics, 2001). They demonstrate this commitment not only on the pages of the book (as they look for policy solutions) but also in their individual advocacy work (as several authors describe). The editors and authors as a collective have also set up an Internet presence in order to share their discoveries and advocate against feminicide (at http://www.stopterrorizingwomen.com/); it brings life to their subject matter while assuring that their campaign against violence toward women in the Americas will be an important, lasting, and dynamic one.