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This volume offers a comparative analysis of the role of the military in Latin America in domestic politics and governance after 2000. Divided into four parts covering the entirety of Latin America, the book argues that the Latin American military as semi-autonomous political actors have not faded away since 2000 and may even have been making a comeback in various countries. Each part outlines scenarios which effectively frame the various pathways taken to post-military democratic society. Part...

This book analyzes Mexican migrant organizations in the US and their political influence in home communities in Mexico. By connecting multifaceted arenas of Mexican migrant's activism, it traces the construction of transnational political spaces. The author's ethnographic work in the state of Michoacan and in Chicago shows how these transnational arenas overcome the limits of traditional political spaces - the nation state and the local community - and bring together intertwined facets of 'the p...

In developing countries, the extent to which intellectuals disengage themselves in state activities has widespread consequences for the social, political, and economic development of those societies. Roderic Camps' examination of intellectuals in Mexico is the first study of a Latin American country to detail the structure of intellectual life, rather than merely considering intellectual ideas. Camp has used original sources, including extensive interviews, to provide new data about the evoluti...

Capitalism is a system in crisis. In the context of an urgent need for an alternative system, Cuba provides valuable lessons. The Cuban Revolution's unique features have allowed it to survive both the conditions that brought about the collapse of the Soviet model of socialism and the renewed assault of US imperialism. The Revolution also serves as an inspiration for developing countries seeking to escape the clutches of global capitalism. Henry Veltmeyer examines the Cuban Revolution from the pe...

November 1, 1958, A Cubana de Aviación Flight 495, a Vickers Viscount, en route from Miami to Varadero to Havana is hijacked by Cuban militants. The hijackers were trying to land at Sierra Cristal in Eastern Cuba to deliver weapons to Fidel Castro's rebels. As night approached, the plane ran out of fuel and tried an emergency landing at the Preston sugar mill. It did not make it and instead landed in the ocean and broke apart, killing most passengers and crew. There were six survivors.

On the southern end of the Grand Rue, a major thoroughfare that runs through the center of Port-au-Prince, waits the Haitian capital's automobile repair district. This veritable junkyard of steel and rubber, recycled parts, old tires, and scrap metal might seem an unlikely foundry for art. Yet, on the street's opposite end thrives the Grand Rue Galerie, a working studio of assembled art and sculptures wrought from the refuse. Established by artists Andre Eugene and Celeur in the late 1990s, the...

When the Brazilian public intellectual Marcia Tiburi published The Psycho-Cultural Underpinnings of Everyday Fascism in 2015, fascism was yet to return to the public consciousness. But Tiburi was motivated by the kind of fascism she was noticing in daily life — people who fail to practise any kind of reflection about society, betraying a pattern of everyday thought characterized by the repetition of clichés and the angry language of hatred. Three years later, Brazil elected the far-right Preside...

For Americans the Civil War was simply an internal conflict, and they have emphasized its military exploits and the romantic myths that have grown up around it. They have given little regard to its international aspects. In truth, however, the American Civil War attracted worldwide attention. Other nations followed the fortunes of the war and sought to understand its goals because they saw that the fate of the American system would likely have a profound effect on their own social and political...

People are increasingly unhappy with their governments in democracies around the world. In countries as diverse as India, Ecuador, and Uganda, governments are responding to frustrations by mandating greater citizen participation at the local and state level. Officials embrace participatory reforms, believing that citizen councils and committees lead to improved accountability and more informed communities. Yet there's been little research on the efficacy of these efforts to improve democracy, de...

The Andean region has been, and continues to be, at the center of a struggle over embracing economic globalization and market democracies or eschewing such models for various nationalist/socialist strategies of development and politics. The regions militaries have not been outside of this struggle, with factions in Venezuela or Ecuador working to frustrate the establishment and/or maintenance of neoliberal regimes, while militaries in Colombia, Peru, and to an extent in Bolivia, playing crucial...

The possibility of violence beneath a thin veneer of civil society is a fact of daily life for twenty-first-century Guatemalans, from field laborers to the president of the country. Crisis of Governance in Maya Guatemala explores the causes and consequences of governmental failure by focusing on life in two K'iche' Maya communities in the country's western highlands. The contributors to this volume, who lived among the villagers for some time, include both undergraduate students and distinguishe...

This edited volume presents a detailed account of the dynamics of socioeconomic contention in Egypt and Tunisia since 2011. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, it analyses what has happened to the socioeconomic grievances that played a key role in the mass mobilizations of 2010 and 2011. The book is based on an original data set of socioeconomic protests in the two countries and on in-depth case studies that cover the two most important types of socioeconomic contention: labor prot...

Sir William Arthur Lewis moved from the realm of brilliant scholar into the realm of legend when he won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1979. Yet, little has been recognised of his scholarship beyond the field of economics, a scholarship that complemented and enhanced his economic thought. In this collection of essays, borne out of the Sir Arthur Lewis Memorial Symposium and the Sir Arthur Lewis Distinguished Lecture 2018, contributors present W. Arthur Lewis not only as a renowned Nobel Laurea...

This timely and interdisciplinary volume analyzes the many impacts of and contrasting responses to the Argentine political, economic, and social crises of 2001-02. Chapters offer original theoretical models and examine the relationship between political, cultural, economic, and societal spheres.

The book aims to counter the normative functioning of creativity in contemporary capitalism with a plethora of alternatives to radical creative practices. In the first part, titled "Creative Capitalism", five authors analyze the forms of contemporary capitalism: on the one hand, there are new ways of working which include flexibility, mobility, and especially precarity; on the other, there are new forms of recovery and accumulation. In the second part, titled "Multitudinous Creativities: Radica...

Over the last two decades, military and authoritarian regimes in Latin America have receded as indigenous social movements and popular protests have demanded and won peaceful transitions to democratically-elected governments. Across the entire Southern hemisphere, democracy has developed with a radical flourish, bringing dramatic changes in politics, education, civil society, and the media. Historically, revolution in Latin America has been depicted as civil war, violent conflict, and armed resi...

On January 1, 1994, the most indigenous Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) launched a revolt in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, protesting centuries of discrimination, violence, appalling living conditions and diminishing economic prospects. This single event catapulted to the consciousness of the international community the frustration and growing militance of indigenous peoples throughout Latin America. This book, commissioned by the Inter-American Dialogue, a policy institution...