International Studies - Books by Region

This book discusses the issues of citizen rights, governance and political crisis in Brazil. The project has a focus on "citizenship in times of crisis," i.e., seeking to understand how citizenship rights have changed since the Brazilian political and economic crisis that started in 2014. Building on theories of citizenship and governance, the author examines policy-based evidence on the retractions of participatory rights, which are consequence of a stagnant economic scenario and the re-organization of conservative sectors. This work will appeal to scholarly audiences interested in citizenship, Brazilian politics, and Latin American policy and governance.

This book is the first comprehensive account of the Argentine magazine Punto de Vista (1978-2008), a cultural review that gathered together prominent Argentine intellectuals throughout the last quarter of the twentieth century. Directed by cultural historian and public intellectual Beatriz Sarlo, the story of the magazine serves as a lens to study the evolution of Argentine intellectuals from the leftist mobilization of the 1960s through periods of military dictatorship and then the shifting politics of democratization in the 1980s and 1990s. The book argues that the way in which the Argentine intellectual left negotiated the political and cultural transformations of the late twentieth century can be understood as the history of two political defeats: that of the revolutionary utopias of the 1960s and 1970s and that of the social democrat project in the 1980s. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, this book encompasses a wide range of debates taking place in Argentina, from the years prior to the dictatorship to the postdictatorship period.

This book provides an in-depth look into key political dynamics that obtain in a democracy without parties, offering a window into political undercurrents increasingly in evidence throughout the Latin American region, where political parties are withering. For the past three decades, Peru has showcased a political universe populated by amateur politicians and the dominance of personalism as the main party-voter linkage form. The study peruses the post-2000 evolution of some of the key Peruvian electoral vehicles and classifies the partisan universe as a party non-system. There are several elements endogenous to personalist electoral vehicles that perpetuate partylessness, contributing to the absence of party building. The book also examines electoral dynamics in partyless settings, centrally shaped by effective electoral supply, personal brands, contingency, and iterated rounds of strategic voting calculi. Given the scarcity of information electoral vehicles provide, as well as the enormously complex political environment Peruvian citizens inhabit, personal brands provide readymade informational shortcuts that simplify the political world. The concept of "negative legitimacy environments" is furnished to capture political settings comprised of supermajorities of floating voters, pervasive negative political identities, and a generic citizen preference for newcomers and political outsiders. Such environments, increasingly present throughout Latin America, produce several deleterious effects, including high political uncertainty, incumbency disadvantage, and political time compression. Peru's "democracy without parties" fails to deliver essential democratic functions including governability, responsiveness, horizontal and vertical accountability, or democratic representation, among others.

President Rafael Correa (2007-2017) led the Ecuadoran Citizens' Revolution that claimed to challenge the tenets of neoliberalism and the legacies of colonialism. The Correa administration promised to advance Indigenous and Afro-descendant rights and redistribute resources to the most vulnerable. In many cases, these promises proved to be hollow. Using two decades of ethnographic research, Undoing Multiculturalism examines why these intentions did not become a reality, and how the Correa administration undermined the progress of Indigenous people. A main complication was pursuing independence from multilateral organizations in the context of skyrocketing commodity prices, which caused a new reliance on natural resource extraction. Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and other organized groups resisted the expansion of extractive industries into their territories because they threatened their livelihoods and safety. As the Citizens' Revolution and other "Pink Tide" governments struggled to finance budgets and maintain power, they watered down subnational forms of self-government, slowed down land redistribution, weakened the politicized cultural identities that gave strength to social movements, and reversed other fundamental gains of the multicultural era.

This book is published open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book presents an ethnographic study of how grassroots activism in Venezuela during the Chávez presidency can be understood in relation to the country's history as a petro-state. Taking the contested relationship between the popular sectors and the Venezuelan state as a point of departure, Iselin Åsedotter Strønen explores how notions such as class, race, state, bureaucracy, popular politics, capitalism, neoliberalism, consumption, oil wealth, and corruption gained salience in the Bolivarian process. A central argument is that the Bolivarian process was an attempt to challenge the practices, ideas, and values inherited from Venezuela's historical development as an oil-producing state. Drawing on rich ethnographic material from Caracas' shantytowns, state institutions, as well as everyday life and public culture, Strønen explores the complexities and challenges in fostering deep social and political change.

Although sociological research has examined the reproduction of Chile's elites, there is little empirical evidence as to how different forms of capital operate within them. Based on a survey of the country's elites, this study examines the effect of different forms of capital (cultural, social and political) on access to strategic positions in the legislative and executive branches of government. It focuses on the political elite between 1990, when military dictator Augusto Pinochet handed over the presidency to Patricio Aylwin, his democratically elected successor, and 2010, the end of President Michelle Bachelet's first government. At least three points are germane to this analysis: (1) understanding the nature of the party elites during the political transition; (2) describing and explaining the main aspects of the party elites' background and social resources, including their family networks (independent variables); and (3) exploring the effect of those variables on individuals' chances of achieving strategic positions in the political field, comparing the legislative and executive branches as represented by deputies and ministers (dependent variable).

This book investigates the relation between left-wing populism and feminist politics by analysing three specific aspects. First, whether left-wing populist parties promote gender equality policies, against charges of a general inconsistency between both political projects; Second, how do these parties form their policy-making coalitions in the field of gender equality; Third, how much impact on policy do women's movements have when left-wing populists are in power. The book is focused on the case of Bolivia during the first twelve years of Evo Morales's presidency. The empirical analysis is based on the qualitative content analysis of documents and semi-structured interviews with women's movements' activists, policy-makers and experts in women's movements. The central issue of the book is present throughout the volume, but each empirical chapter can be also read as a semi-autonomous analysis of a specific aspect of the relation between left-wing populism and feminist politics, whichincreases the interest of the book for different audiences including experts in gender and politics and feminist activists, specialists in Latin American politics, indigenous politics and social movements.

This book unveils the political economy of land squatting in a third world city, Montevideo, in Uruguay. It focuses on the effects of democratization on the mobilization of the poorest as well as on the role played by different types of brokers, from radical Catholic priests to local leaders embedded in political networks. Through a multi-method endeavour that combines ethnography, historical sources, and quantitative time series, the author reconstructs the history of the informal city since the late 1940s to the present. From a social movements/contentious politics perspective, the book challenges the assumption that socioeconomic factors such as poverty were the only causes triggering land squatting. 

By challenging more common analyses that point to the existence of a "post-conflict scenario" in Colombia and those that resist the narrative of "success", both of which operate within the logic of presence/absence of violence, this book proposes instead that we think of "post-conflict" in terms of the transformation of the rules on the use of violence. The analysis unfolds in two parts: the first explores the conditions of possibility of the Colombian "success story" and the web of criteria legitimizing the "success", as well as the silencing mechanisms allowing for Colombia to circulate internationally as a formula to be replicated in other parts of the world; the second, focuses on the historicization of the mechanisms through which new rules are transmitted among the professionals of the public force, specifically the transformations of military schools and training centers in Colombia from times of "war" to "peace". The author argues that key to this transformation is a unique discursive articulation around the "military professional" which slides from "citizen-soldier" to "expert-soldier".

Paraguay is an under-examined, but remarkably fascinating country, where war, dictatorship, and elite capture have produced cycles of popular mobilization and repression. Yet, its social movements are less known to international audiences. This book analyzes Paraguay's principal social movements since the transition to democracy and examines how, in the context of a weak state, authoritarian political elite, and a deficient democratization process, they contribute to progressive policy, socio-economic development, and democracy. Using critical perspectives in sociology, anthropology, geography, and political science, we bring together scholars, activists, and practitioners of social critique and community organizing. They reflect on movements involving peasant, indigenous and agrarian rights to land and livelihoods, LGBTQ and feminist struggles, labor union struggles, and student demands for access to quality education and social development, while exploring how the particularisms of Paraguay result in differences from other Latin American movements and how overarching regional tendencies may explain the similarities. This volume is the first English-language book on social movements in Paraguay. As such, it aims to provide a deeper understanding Paraguay's principal social movements since the transition to democracy. This volume contributes to analyzing how social movements within the context of aweak state, authoritarian political elite, and a deficient democratization process contribute to progressive public policy, socio-economic development, and democracy. In addition, this book focuses on how Paraguayan social movements are similar to or different from their Latin American counterparts, how the particularism of Paraguay explains these variations and how overarching regional tendencies explain the similarities. The contribution of this volume is twofold: to provide new empirical examples in the study of Latin American social movements and theircontribution to development and democracy, as well as to validate or challenge social movement theories by employing empirical studies of Paraguayan social movements. Each chapter delves into the background to a specific movement, while closely analyzing the movement in the post-Lugo era (2012-2021). Together the chapters in this book contribute to a better understanding of social movements in Paraguay and Latin America thus dialoguing with the existing literature and social movement theories and considering how such studies can further our understanding of social movements in Paraguay and in Latin America in general. Finally, the study of different social movements within the Paraguayan context takes into consideration the links that each movement has forged with other such movements in Latin America, including the contributions that Paraguayan social movements have made to regional networks.