After the Pink Tide


Book Description

The left-wing Pink Tide movement that swept across Latin America seems now to be overturned, as a new wave of free-market thinkers emerge across the continent. This book analyses the emergence of corporate power within Latin America and the response of egalitarian movements across the continent trying to break open the constraints of the state. Through an ethnographically grounded and localized anthropological perspective, this book argues that at a time when the regular structures of political participation have been ruptured, the Latin American context reveals multiple expressions of egalitarian movements that strive (and sometimes momentarily manage) to break through the state’s apparatus.




Seeking Rights from the Left


Book Description

Seeking Rights from the Left offers a unique comparative assessment of left-leaning Latin American governments by examining their engagement with feminist, women's, and LGBT movements and issues. Focusing on the “Pink Tide” in eight national cases—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Venezuela—the contributors evaluate how the Left addressed gender- and sexuality-based rights through the state. Most of these governments improved the basic conditions of poor women and their families. Many significantly advanced women's representation in national legislatures. Some legalized same-sex relationships and enabled their citizens to claim their own gender identity. They also opened opportunities for feminist and LGBT movements to press forward their demands. But at the same time, these governments have largely relied on heteropatriarchal relations of power, ignoring or rejecting the more challenging elements of a social agenda and engaging in strategic trade-offs among gender and sexual rights. Moreover, the comparative examination of such rights arenas reveals that the Left's more general political and economic projects have been profoundly, if at times unintentionally, informed by traditional understandings of gender and sexuality. Contributors: Sonia E. Alvarez, María Constanza Diaz, Rachel Elfenbein, Elisabeth Jay Friedman, Niki Johnson, Victoria Keller, Edurne Larracoechea Bohigas, Amy Lind, Marlise Matos, Shawnna Mullenax, Ana Laura Rodríguez Gustá, Diego Sempol, Constanza Tabbush, Gwynn Thomas, Catalina Trebisacce, Annie Wilkinson




The Ebb of the Pink Tide


Book Description

Following events such as the Cochabamba Water War in Bolivia and the election of Hugo Chavez to the presidency in Venezuela, Latin American politics over the past two decades have been radicalized, their governments populated with former activists and trade union leaders. Yet, in the past few years, Latin America's left have suffered many setbacks and reactionary challenges, leading many to wonder whether the "Pink Tide" is now on the wane. In this book, renowned Latin Americanist Mike Gonzalez explores the rocky course of the left in Latin American politics. Although the left-wing developments of the past twenty years have been widely celebrated by activists, Gonzalez cautions us to consider the problems and conflicts that have arisen during their tenure as well. Through critical examination of the failings of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, and Venezuela, Gonzalez is able to identify both weaknesses and strengths, and to suggest possible future pathways for the renewal of the left in nations across Latin America. Providing a critical but sympathetic analysis of the records of the left governments across the continent, Gonzalez offers a refreshing reflection on the prospects and future of Latin American politics.




The Resurgence of the Latin American Left


Book Description

Latin America experienced an unprecedented wave of left-leaning governments between 1998 and 2010. This volume examines the causes of this leftward turn and the consequences it carries for the region in the twenty-first century. The Resurgence of the Latin American Left asks three central questions: Why have left-wing parties and candidates flourished in Latin America? How have these leftist parties governed, particularly in terms of social and economic policy? What effects has the rise of the Left had on democracy and development in the region? The book addresses these questions through two sections. The first looks at several major themes regarding the contemporary Latin American Left, including whether Latin American public opinion actually shifted leftward in the 2000s, why the Left won in some countries but not in others, and how the left turn has affected market economies, social welfare, popular participation in politics, and citizenship rights. The second section examines social and economic policy and regime trajectories in eight cases: those of leftist governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Venezuela, as well as that of a historically populist party that governed on the right in Peru. Featuring a new typology of Left parties in Latin America, an original framework for identifying and categorizing variation among these governments, and contributions from prominent and influential scholars of Latin American politics, this historical-institutional approach to understanding the region’s left turn—and variation within it—is the most comprehensive explanation to date on the topic.




The Last Day of Oppression, and the First Day of the Same


Book Description

Throughout the 2000s Latin America transformed itself into the leading edge of anti-neoliberal resistance in the world. What is left of the Pink Tide today? What is their relationship to the explosive social movements that propelled them to power? As China's demand slackens for Latin American commodities, will governments continue to rely on natural resource extraction? In an accessible and penetrating volume, Jeffery Webber examines the most important questions facing the Latin American left today.




Latin American Extractivism


Book Description

This cutting-edge book presents a broad picture of global capitalism and extractivism in contemporary Latin America. Leading scholars examine the cultural patterns involving gender, ethnicity, and class that lie behind protests in opposition to extractivist projects and the contrast in responses from state actors to those movements.




Legacies of the Left Turn in Latin America


Book Description

Legacies of the Left Turn in Latin America: The Promise of Inclusive Citizenship contains original essays by a diverse group of leading and emerging scholars from North America, Europe, and Latin America. The book speaks to wide-ranging debates on democracy, the left, and citizenship in Latin America. What were the effects of a decade and a half of left and center-left governments? The central purpose of this book is to evaluate both the positive and negative effects of the Left turn on state-society relations and inclusion. Promises of social inclusion and the expansion of citizenship rights were paramount to the center-left discourses upon the factions' arrival to power in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This book is a first step in understanding to what extent these initial promises were or were not fulfilled, and why. In analyzing these issues, the authors demonstrate that these years yield both signs of progress in some areas and the deepening of historical problems in others. The contributors to this book reveal variation among and within countries, and across policy and issue areas such as democratic institution reforms, human rights, minorities’ rights, environmental questions, and violence. This focus on issues rather than countries distinguishes the book from other recent volumes on the left in Latin America, and the book will speak to a broad and multi-dimensional audience, both inside and outside the academic world. Contributors: Manuel Balán, Françoise Montambeault, Philip Oxhorn, Maxwell A. Cameron, Kenneth M. Roberts, Nathalia Sandoval-Rojas, Daniel M. Brinks, Benjamin Goldfrank, Roberta Rice, Elizabeth Jelin, Celina Van Dembroucke, Nora Nagels, Merike Blofield, Jordi Díez, Eve Bratman, Gabriel Kessler, Olivier Dabène, Jared Abbott, Steve Levitsky




Reclaiming Latin America


Book Description

Reclaiming Latin America is a one-stop guide to the revival of social democratic and socialist politics across the region. At the end of the Cold War, and through decades of neoliberal domination and the 'Washington Consensus' it seemed that the left could do nothing but beat a ragged retreat in Latin America. Yet this book looks at the new opportunities that sprang up through electoral politics and mass action during that period. The chapters here warn against over-simplification of the so-called 'pink wave'. Instead, through detailed historical analysis of Latin America as a whole and country-specific case studies, the book demonstrates the variety of approaches to establishing a lasting social justice. From the anti-imperialism of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas in Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba, to the more gradualist routes being taken in Chile, Argentina and Brazil, Reclaiming Latin America gives a real sense of the plurality of political responses to popular discontent.




The Political Economy of Latin America


Book Description

This brief text offers an unbiased reflection on the neoliberalism debate in Latin America and the institutional puzzle that underlies the region's difficulties with democratization and development.




Welfare and Social Protection in Contemporary Latin America


Book Description

Social protection serves as an important development tool, helping to alleviate deprivation, reduce social risks, raise household income and develop human capital. This book brings together an interdisciplinary team of international experts to analyse social protection systems and welfare regimes across contemporary Latin America. The book starts with a section tracking the expansion of social assistance and social insurance in Latin America through the state-led development era, the neoliberal era and the pink-tide. The second section explores the role played by local and external actors modelling social policy in the region. The third and final section addresses a variety of contemporary debates and challenges around social protection and welfare in the region, such as gender roles and the empowerment of CCT beneficiaries, and welfare provision for rural outsiders. The book touches on key topics such as conditional cash transfer programmes, trade union inclusionary strategies, transnational social policy, state-led versus market-led welfare provision, explanatory factors in the emerging dualism of social protection institutions, social citizenship rights as a consequence of changing social policy architecture and different poverty reduction strategies. This interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to economists, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and historians working on social protection in Latin America, or interested in welfare systems in the global south.