The following paper intends to study the nature, the objectives and the causes of the rise of self - defense forces across the Americas, including the USA, and to develop a typology of them. Different American countries experience, to different degrees, the rise of common people who claim that their home States do not guarantee them completely their safety, integrity, property and lives, thus these people justify the formation of self defense forces against crime, especially, organized crime. This current critical situation in some American countries make us ask the following question: What did specifically lead to this terrible situation? There is an important gap in the academic literature in order to understand completely the rise of civil society's self defense forces, from a comparative perspective, across the Americas, so this paper intends to fill this gap through the comparison of qualitative and quantitative empirical evidences on the subject.
