The skyrocketing violence in Central America calls upon scholars to examine the needed conditions for peace. This article challenges the assumption that the absence of violence among factions in conflict is the chief goal around which peacemaking efforts should operate. Based on ethnographic research with women relatives of male gang members and civil war veterans in El Salvador, I argue that the 1992 Salvadoran Peace Accords that ended twelve years of civil war developed a male-centered notion of negative peace that ended the armed conflict while naturalizing racialized state violence as part of security measures and ongoing violence against women as low-grade part of everyday life. In the post-accords era, gang members advance their version of negative peace, promising to protect women and the nation while continuing to oppress their women relatives. I suggest that the effective path to attain substantive peace is to proactively engage in intersectional justice to redress multiple and intersecting forms of violence. The consequences of peacemaking efforts without this attention will result in continued massive killing and immigration to the United States.

Researchers have long debated how radio broadcasts affected the dynamics of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, with some arguing that the radio was highly consequential, and others suggesting such effects have been overstated. This article contributes to these debates—as well as to debates regarding the role of old and new media in collective action—by examining whether and how Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (Radio RTLM) coverage was associated with two core aspects of the violence: (1) subnational onset of genocidal violence and (2) participation in genocidal violence across subnational spaces. Drawing on new data on Radio RTLM coverage, we find that areas with coverage were more likely to experience immediate onset of violence. However, our analysis of participation in the genocide—which uses more accurate measures of participation and of radio coverage than prior studies—finds no significant association between Radio RTLM coverage and subnational levels of participation. After illustrating that these results are robust to numerous model specifications, we theorize that information broadcast over the radio’s airways contributed to the creation of a critical mass that initiated genocide in localized spaces. We conclude by considering the importance of understanding the role of media in the subnational onset of violence.