In the last three decades, violence and youth have coalesced to form a central issue of concern for scholars and practitioners across Latin America. These two groups regularly engage in parallel processes, which has meant that the issue of youth violence remains ‘profoundly misunderstood’ (p. 2) and subject to widespread sensationalism. Government data are weak and political imperatives rather than evidence are often what shape policy agendas. Repeatedly, policy initiatives ignore the ways in which broader processes of uneven and unequal political economy are generative of violent identities and practices, particularly at the urban margins. Governments, in particular, have focused on repressive policies that have been both narrow in their scope and largely unsuccessful at addressing the larger problems of violence. The misunderstandings of violence that inform such policies have a tendency to criminalise certain types of youth, notably those poor young people living on the urban margins.

Youth Violence in Latin America is an attempt to explore how this process of misunderstanding has very real material effects on the lives of young people in the region. It is a thoughtful collection of 11 chapters that engages with the development of youth violence in various contexts throughout the region. In the interests of space, this review will not provide a detailed examination of each chapter, but will offer a broad overview of the major interlinked themes of the book: the effects of economics, politics and violence on the everyday lived realities of youth in Latin America. The collection begins with a powerful testimony from Wagner, a survivor of a massacre in Rio de Janeiro in which eight street-living youth were killed and many more injured. Wagner's testimony exposes the immediacy and pervasiveness of the brutality that has shaped the world of youth on the margins. It tells a story about the intersections between deep structural inequalities, violence and impunity in which organisations of the state refuse justice to certain groups of people. This is very much Wagner's story but its themes are resonant throughout the books and, importantly, it also speaks of the tenacity and courage of individuals who are prepared to speak out against injustice despite the huge personal costs involved.

Wagner's testimony situates the terms of existing debates on youth violence very effectively. These are set up thoughtfully in the introduction by Jones and Rodgers, who set out an agenda to tease out the ‘big issues’ in youth violence research. Key here is an interrogation through detailed case studies of the recursive relationship between economics, politics and violence and, specifically, the wider effects of this brutal political economy (or political economy of brutality) on the embodied practices of youth violence. The case study chapters address specific aspects of these to produce a compelling sense of how these relationships are perceived, both discursively and in practice, by young people in the region. Issues of identity and embodied violent practices are touched upon in all chapters to give a sense of both the variation throughout the region and the commonalities across countries.

Rodgers' chapter on the development of youth violence in Nicaragua provides a rigorous ethnographic account of how the youth gangs of the 1990s morphed from a group of young people united by social ties into individual violent entrepreneurs, motivated principally by economic ends. Key to his argument is that the individualisation of violence reveals a broader form of ‘social death’ wherein the imperatives of neoliberalism have shrunk the space for the collective and closed off traditional channels for social interaction. The prevailing economic model which has led to the disintegration of the state monopoly of violence in Guadalajara is further used to explore the connections between violent and non-violent actors in chapter 3, in which Monique Sonnevelt argues that the lines between legitimate and illegitimate violent entrepreneurs have become blurred through the development of the private security apparatus. She argues that this has led to a complex and often ambiguous relationship between gangs and communities. Key here is a detailed discussion of what happens when violence becomes a commodity for open competition. Both these chapters stand out as excellent explications of the prosaic neoliberalisation of violence more generally, and of how certain young people have responded to the ‘opportunities’ presented by it.

Several chapters argue that the mano dura or zero-tolerance approaches that have dominated the state response to youth violence have been largely counterproductive and have created conditions in which violence mutates and becomes both more sophisticated and more widespread. In chapter 9, Graham Denyer Willis explores the professionalisation of the Primeiro Comando da Capital (First Capital Command, PCC), a ‘gang cartel’ that was originally founded for self-protection in the prison system but has since become a violent presence across the city's favelas. He argues that the so-called zero-tolerance policies combined with a partial absence of the state created opportune conditions for the PCC's development into a successful criminal organisation. Jones and Hector Castillo Berthier's examination of Mexico City demonstrates that repressive policies have led to a militarisation of public security and a policy discourse that purposively elides multiple forms of violence and youth behaviour. The authors' examination of the effects of such policies on citizens' understandings of violence and youth identities and interactions is compelling. Their account reveals precisely not only how youth violence is ‘misunderstood’, but also how these misunderstandings are both symptomatic of wider political tensions and productive of new landscapes of violence.

Political tensions within the state all too often shape the policy response to youth violence. This theme is explored by José Luis Rocha. His chapter problematises the state responses to violence in Nicaragua through an examination of two institutions charged with juvenile justice: the National Police and the Special Ombudsman for Children and Adolescents. Rocha argues that the contradictory practices of these organisations can be traced to political interests and to the disjuncture between the idealism of the law and the materialism of the juridical order, presenting very real challenges for the policing of youth. This is explored comparatively by Mark Ungar in the final chapter, in which Ungar suggests that the regional response to youth violence is ‘stuck’ between a long history of repressive policing and some very positive examples of community-based prevention. What this impasse generates is precisely the types of policies that prove counterproductive and that seek to remove youth from wider societal processes. Specific examples of such initiatives are explored in several chapters. For example, Strocka explores the manchas or gangs in the highlands of Peru, which may be numerically insignificant but whose effects are magnified within the public imagination. She offers an account of a camp with young men in Ayacucho that was specifically designed to encourage young men to turn away from violence. Its effects, she argues, may be positive, but only in the short term since the structural factors that underpin youth violence cannot be ignored.

The contribution of this collection of essays to our understanding of youth violence is significant. On an individual level, each chapter builds upon existing scholarship to explore the social embeddedness of youth violence – that is, youth violence as formative of identities and behaviours. The chapters show us how violence works through and transforms local violent realities. As a whole, the collection resists providing a neat and static account of violence to show how the interaction – or ‘murky links’ (p xi) – between gangs and state-sponsored systems of juvenile justice are themselves productive of violence. It is in the exploration of these productive interactions between youth and wider political economies of violence in detailed case studies that the book makes its most important contribution to scholarship.