From Bullets to Development: Developmental Security Governance in Latin America

Zhu Y.; Zhou G.; Liu Y.; Rodriguez C.A. · Bulletin of Latin American Research (2026) · DOI: 10.1111/blar.70094

Resumen

Existing research on Latin America's non-traditional security challenges has generated important insights into structural inequality, institutional weakness, and external dependence, yet less attention has been paid to how these conditions can be translated into sustainable governance pathways. This article examines how security can be strengthened through development-oriented governance under conditions of spatial fragmentation, weakened state–society trust, and limited state capacity. Within the framework of Developmental Security Governance (DSG), security is understood as the capacity of a socio-political-economic system to resist, adapt to, and recover from internal and external shocks through everyday governance practices. This process operates through three interconnected mechanisms: structural prevention, relational restructuring, and endogenous empowerment. An in-depth case study of Ecuador's ECU 911 project illustrates how development-oriented intervention can reduce governance fragmentation, rebuild institutional trust, and foster endogenous capacity through the interaction of these mechanisms. The findings suggest that effective security governance depends not only on immediate crisis response, but on whether development processes can be institutionally organized to generate durable governance resilience. In this sense, the article shifts the analytical focus from episodic crisis management to understanding security as a long-term effect of developmental governance.

Instituciones: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos