In the meeting of September 22, 2014 Política y Gobierno's editorial board decided to make a call for papers for a special bilingual issue on "Conflict, violence and democracy in Latin America". Ana Arjona and Luis de la Calle joined assitant editor Gabriela Cantú and myself as invited editors and experts on the topic of this issue. The call for papers was open for a little longer than three months, it closed on January 15, 2015. We received seventeen submissions, nine of them originally written in Spanish and the rest in English. Following our regular editorial process, the editors in charge of this special issue reviewed exhaustively the submissions and we decided to desk-reject eight of them. Based on the excellent feedback provided by a host of generous reviewers, we then decided to reject two more submissions and invited the authors of the rest to revise and resubmit their papers. The reader has in her hands six of those papers; the other submission was rejected for this issue. The accepted submissions were then translated into Spanish or English thanks to the support and patience of Natalia Cervantes and her team at the CIDE's Publications Area. The editors of this issue then revised the translated versions. Thank you to all those who participated in the production of this special issue, in particular to Ana Arjona and Luis de la Calle who went well beyond duty and with interest and enthusiasm made of this editorial experience a rich learning process.