Bureaucracy and Legitimacy: A Weberian Analysis of Domestic Violence in Peru Pamela Neumann University of Texas at Austin Introduction In 1995, thenPresident of Peru Alberto Fujimori spoke at the 4 th Annual World Conference on Women in Beijing, the only male head of state invited to do so (Boesten 2010). Two years earlier in 1993, Peru had become the first Latin American country to pass a law criminalizing violence against women (Boesten 2006). Yet, despite Peru’s position as an early adopter of such legislation, Peru remains one of the most dangerous countries for women in all of Latin America (WHO 2005). During the 1990s, the number of women filing domestic complaints climbed dramatically—from 6,181 in 1996 to 32,821 in 2001 in Lima alone, while 85,747 claims were filed nationally in 2006 (Manuela Ramos 2007). Today, approximately half of all Peruvian women (an estimated 7 out of 14 million) have been victims of domestic (physical, psychological or sexual) violence at some point in their lives (WHO 2005; Flora Tristan 2011). Repeated studies have criticized the ineffectiveness of the measures implemented by the Peruvian government to reduce violence against women due to limited resource allocation and distribution as well as the specific behavior of state actors (like police) charged with the implementation of related legal provisions and processes (Alcalde 2010; Boesten 2010; Defensoria 2002). In this paper, I examine the trajectory of the Peruvian government’s responses to domestic violence since the early 1990s using a Weberian lense in order to explore two