After a landslide electoral victory in 2006, Evo Morales became the first indigenous President of Bolivia. Morales’s stunning ascent was mirrored by the rising fortunes of his political party, the leftist Movimiento al Socialismo, which today continues to challenge the status quo in Bolivian politics and implement ambitious social reforms. This study examines how the state and social movements have impacted democratization in Bolivia, along with other sectors such as NGOs and the media. Soledad Valdivia Rivera’s analysis helps us to understand how the movement's relationships have come to transform the Bolivian political process as we know it.
Serie de cuatro volúmenes que condensan la colección de dieciséis tomos que fue publicada en 2010 bajo el título de Los grandes problemas de México, con motivo de las conmemoraciones del bicentenario de la Independencia, del centenario de la Revolución y de los setenta años de El Colegio de México. Cada capítulo reproduce una estructura que contiene un diagnóstico, un pronóstico cuando es posible, y propuestas de acción en torno a problemas específicos. El presente volumen trata los principales problemas de carácter social en México: Desigualdad social, Movimientos sociales, Educación, Relaciones de género y Culturas e identidades
This book takes a new, critical, and multidisciplinary look at experiences and meanings of social intervention in different social contexts, taking the approaches of social constructionism as a theoretical approach. The volume collects the results of theoretical-practical experiences that social science professionals with critical and constructionist visions linked to social work intervention have carried out in different spaces. It considers the way social work intervention models are built, their foundation, and their application. It provides the findings on tested intervention models built according to the basis of social constructionism in specific social scenarios, providing interesting findings that show intervention alternatives beyond traditional approaches. The social intervention strategies discussed take place in diverse situations, including health recovery and reconstruction in breast cancer, family abandonment issues of institutionalized adolescents, institutional care of refugee families, women caregivers of children with disabilities, men who exercise violence, and more.
Latin America has been a complex laboratory for the development of international investment law. While some governments and non-state actors have remained true to the Latin American tradition of resistance towards the international investment law regime, other governments and actors have sought to accommodate said regime in the region. Consequently, a profusion of theories and doctrines, too often embedded in clashing narratives, has emerged. In Latin America, the practice of international investment law is the vivid amalgamation of the practice of governments sometimes resisting and sometimes welcoming mainstream approaches; the practice of lawyers assisting foreign investors from outside and within the region; and the practice of civil society, indigenous peoples and other actors in their struggle for human rights and sustainable development. Latin America and international investment law describes the complex roles that governments have played vis-à-vis foreign investors and investments; the refreshing but clashing forces that international organizations, corporations, civil society, and indigenous peoples have brought to the field; and the contribution that Latin America has made to the development of the theory and practice of international investment law, notably in fields in which the Latin American experience has been traumatic: human rights and sustainable development. Latin American scholars have been contributing to the theory of international investment law for over a century; resting on the shoulders of true giants, this volume aims at pushing this contribution a little further.
The public authorities have not successfully resolved the management of the traumatic memory of the wars, dictatorships and massacres to which the European project was always intended to be a counterpoint. The conflict of memories and the public discourses about the past are latent on ideological, political and cultural levels. However, if in the past the conflict concerning memories tended to develop inside the borders of countries, it has now leapt into the European arena. This has also led to the confrontation and questioning of the great narratives established in the common memory, especially with countries of the East joining the European Union. Each community, group or nation maintains common memories that do not always fit in or converge with a general overall account. The origins of the UB Solidarity Foundation’s European Observatory on Memories lie in these debates, and through this book — which includes the contributions of specialists in multiple disciplines and the speeches that were given at the first international symposium, “Memory and Power: A Transnational Perspective” — it hopes to present some of the key challenges that this conflict of memories has in store for us in the present and in the future.
El presente volumen aborda el análisis de los procesos electorales de ámbito presidencial y legislativo celebrados en América Latina en el bienio 2014-2105. Se trata de elecciones celebradas en once países cuyo estudio se desarrolla en igual número de capítulos. Se cubren comicios simultáneos a ambas instancias en Argentina, Bolivia, Brasil, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panamá y Uruguay. En El Salvador y en Colombia, aunque se celebraron en tiempos distintos, ambos tipos de comicios se consideran en el mismo capítulo; allí, las presidenciales precedieron a las legislativas con un año de diferencia en el primer país y las legislativas antecedieron por tres meses a las presidenciales en el segundo. Se recogen también en capítulos independientes las elecciones únicamente legislativas de México y Venezuela. Si bien el criterio temporal siempre puede calificarse de caprichoso en este caso sigue la preocupación iniciada hace ocho años de dar cumplida cuenta del acontecer electoral en la región, en el ámbito de los dos poderes representativos del Estado por excelencia. En efecto, este volumen da continuidad a anteriores trabajos. El bienio aquí analizado da cabida a un nivel promedio de elecciones presidenciales, si se tiene en cuenta el acumulado en la región desde hace 30 años, por lo cual es representativo del quehacer político latinoamericano. Así, la Tabla 1 recoge las 117 elecciones presidenciales que se han llevado a cabo en la región entre 19861 y 2015 cuyo resultado no fue cuestionado; su media es de cuatro procesos electorales por año y aquí el número de elecciones que se recogen son nueve.
In The Impasse of the Latin American Left, Franck Gaudichaud, Massimo Modonesi, and Jeffery R. Webber explore the region’s Pink Tide as a political, economic, and cultural phenomenon. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Latin American politics experienced an upsurge in progressive movements, as popular uprisings for land and autonomy led to the election of left and center-left governments across Latin America. These progressive parties institutionalized social movements and established forms of state capitalism that sought to redistribute resources and challenge neoliberalism. Yet, as the authors demonstrate, these governments failed to transform the underlying class structures of their societies or challenge the imperial strategies of the United States and China. Now, as the Pink Tide has largely receded, the authors offer a portrait of this watershed period in Latin American history in order to evaluate the successes and failures of the left and to offer a clear-eyed account of the conditions that allowed for a right-wing resurgence.