Building on their joint participation at the 2018 annual congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), the CCDP, together with the LSE's Latin America and Caribbean Centre and the Institute of Latin American Studies of the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA), have created a collaborative research partnership on violence, security, and peace: the Europe-Latin America VSP Network.

The collaboration will generate research-based knowledge and understanding of the crisis of violence and security in Latin America, inform policy debates on Latin America’s pathways to peace, and produce lessons relevant to other situations of violence, war, and post-war.

The newly formed network brings together three themes that are interconnected but require distinct academic treatment in order to deepen our understanding of each and explore their interlinkage. To build up momemtum behind this process, members of the network will host an itinerant VSP Network Seminar on each of the themes, engaging with key scholars internal and external to the network and identifying potential areas for research collaboration.

There will be three research workshops over the course of the next year: the first in Colombia in October 2018, the second in London in late 2018, and the third in Geneva in 2019. The network will also introduce a working-paper series on relevant, intersecting issues with contributions from leading scholars.

A special issue of the Journal of Peacebuilding entitled ‘Learning from Latin America’ and based on papers presented at the LASA panel will be prepared for publication in 2019. This special issues, edited by Carlos Mario Perea and Jenny Pearce, will conceptualise the debates around which this new network revolves.