In recent years the field of conflict studies has widened considerably as new analytical approaches have increasingly linked conflict with development, and related war and peace to broader historical, cultural, and economic processes. These contributions remind us that any analysis of violent conflict and postwar transitions needs to be grounded in an examination of particular social relations and historical legacies. Drawing from a variety of historical, anthropological, and sociological perspectives, this volume provides a much-needed interdisciplinary dialogue that sheds new light on the fine-grained complexities of the Salvadoran experience before, during, and after the 12-year civil war that wracked the small Central American country during the 1980s.

While the generalized nature of much previous writing on El Salvador has primarily addressed macro-structural issues and political violence, this book's most salient theme is its attention to how familiar large-scale, state-centered processes have been assembled out of locally-based, small-scale interactions and diverse actors. In particular, the book attempts to take apart overly schematic and simplistic assumptions that viewed coffee cultivation as a homogenizing force controlled by a small oligarchic elite, and strives to take the agency and autonomy of peasants more seriously as geographically and socially varied actors consciously manoeuvring in accordance with particular needs and interests.

The book is organized into three sections that follow a loose chronology. The first section, with chapters by Aldo Lauria-Santiago, Victor Hugo Acuna Ortega, Erik Ching, Kati Griffith and Leslie Gates, and Carlos Benjamin Lara Martinez, reconsiders prewar El Salvadoran history in a broad effort to clarify the linkages between local-level and national-level processes. This section provides a historical backdrop that attempts to connect the specific experiences of seemingly marginal people and communities with the formation of the national state since 1890. The chapters focus in turn upon struggles for local resources among a late-nineteenth century indigenous community; the complex relations of patronage and repression that linked a nascent military regime with local actors and elites during the 1930s; the existence and role of an often-overlooked middle class; the intersection of gender categories with labor-state relations in the 1950s and 1960s; and finally a study that traces the historical continuities and ruptures that connect the formation of rural peasant communities in the mid-twentieth century with the way these communities function in the present.

The second section considers El Salvador's civil war between 1980 and 1992 and its aftermath. While previous studies have traced the political and military chronology of the war, this section explores the micro-level dynamics and consequences of the revolutionary experience as well as the many dilemmas generated out of transitions to peace. Chapters by Leigh Binford, Elisabeth Wood, Vince McElhinny, Lisa Kowalchuk, and Irina Carlota Silber explore in turn the role of peasant catechists as organic intellectuals; the repopulation of a community in the conflicted Tenancingo municipality; the many dilemmas of post-war reconstruction for civil war ex-combatants; the internal organizational challenges within peasant movements in the post-war context; and the contradictions of post-war discourses of development leading to disillusionment and demoralization among formerly revolutionary, highly-organized peasant communities. The chapters in this section make an important contribution to the embryonic field of ethnographic/anthropological approaches to war and attempt to problematize how peace is ‘ lived' by the majority of poor Salvadorans.

The three chapters in the final section shift attention to several cross-cutting themes in Latin American social sciences: ethnicity, criminal violence, and migration. All three chapters draw on sophisticated discursive and culture studies techniques; Henrik Ronsbo explores the tensions between local, regional, and global accounts of indigenousness and the resulting contradictions for indigenous Salvadorans who do not fit within standard definitions of "Indianness"; Ellen Moodie explores discourses around violence and crime in post-war El Salvador; while David Pederson's study challenges dominant portrayals of remittance flows from Salvadorans living in the United States.

Ultimately, the essays collected in this volume provide the reader with a state-of-the-art survey of current social science research on El Salvador. The book is essential reading for Latin Americanists interested in the El Salvadoran experience, and is also useful as an anthropological study of conflict and the multi-faceted consequences of peace; this kind of sensitive treatment is urgently needed for other case studies. The depth with which the various contributors scrutinize local experiences is also a weakness, however, as such close attention to micro-level details and the interstices of "everyday life" in El Salvador limits the broader applicability of some of the chapters and risks losing sight of how these experiences are connected with wider national- and global-level trends and actors. In particular, detailed discussion of the peace process itself and subsequent structural reforms are noticeably absent, leaving the reader somewhat disconnected from the political and economic frameworks within which individual-and community-level experiences are located.

Nick Kaufman is a Master of Arts student in International Development Studies at Dalhousie University.