Latin America is home to emerging global powers such as Brazil and Mexico and has important links to other titans including China, India, and Africa. Global Latin America examines a range of historical events and cultural forms in Latin America that continue to influence peoples’ lives far outside the region. Its innovative essays, interviews, and stories focus on insights from public intellectuals, political leaders, artists, academics, and activists from the region, allowing students to gain an appreciation of the global relevance of Latin America in the twenty-first century.
What are Latin America’s prospects for the twenty-first century, in the face of rapidly changing international conditions and increasing internal social pressures? In this volume eminent Latin American scholars and activists explore their collective future. They analyze a wide range of issues, including economic alternatives to neoliberal policies,
The question of development is a major topic in courses across the social sciences and history, particularly those focused on Latin America. Many scholars and instructors have tried to pinpoint, explain, and define the problem of underdevelopment in the region. With new ideas have come new strategies that by and large have failed to explain or reduce income disparity and relieve poverty in the region. Why Latin American Nations Fail brings together leading Latin Americanists from several disciplines to address the topic of how and why contemporary development strategies have failed to curb rampant poverty and underdevelopment throughout the region. Given the dramatic political turns in contemporary Latin America, this book offers a much-needed explanation and analysis of the factors that are key to making sense of development today.
This clearly written and comprehensive text examines the uprising of politically and economically marginalized groups in Latin American societies. Specialists in a broad range of disciplines present original research from a variety of case studies in a student-friendly format. Part introductions help students contextualize the essays, highlighting social movement origins, strategies, and outcomes. Thematic sections address historical context, political economy, community-building and consciousness, ethnicity and race, gender, movement strategies, and transnational organizing, making this book useful to anyone studying the wide range of social movements in Latin America.
Latin America has experienced a profound transformation in the first two decades of the 21st century: it has been fully incorporated into the global economy, while excluding regions and populations devalued by the logic of capitalism. Technological modernization has gone hand-in-hand with the reshaping of old identities and the emergence of new ones. The transformation of Latin America has been shaped by social movements and political conflicts. The neoliberal model that dominated the first stage of the transformation induced widespread inequality and poverty, and triggered social explosions that led to its own collapse. A new model, neo-developmentalism, emerged from these crises as national populist movements were elected to government in several countries. The more the state intervened in the economy, the more it became vulnerable to corruption, until the rampant criminal economy came to penetrate state institutions. Upper middle classes defending their privileges and citizens indignant because of corruption of the political elites revolted against the new regimes, undermining the model of neo-developmentalism. In the midst of political disaffection and public despair, new social movements, women, youth, indigenous people, workers, peasants, opened up avenues of hope against the background of darkness invading the continent. This book, written by two leading scholars of Latin America, provides a comprehensive and up-do-date account of the new Latin America that is in the process of taking shape today. It will be an indispensable text for students and scholars in Latin American Studies, sociology, politics and media and communication studies, and anyone interested in Latin America today.
This interdisciplinary edited volume explores the political economy of regionalism in Latin America. It identifies convergent forces which have existed in the region since its very conception and analyses these dynamics in their different historical, geographic and structural contexts. Particular attention is paid to key countries such as Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, as well as subregions like the Southern Cone and Central America. To understand the resilience of regionalism in Latin America, this book proposes to highlight four main issues. Firstly, that resilience is linked to mechanisms of self-enforcement that are part of the accumulation of experiences, institution building and common cultural features described in this book as regionalist acquis. Secondly, the elements and driving forces behind the promotion and expression of the regionalist acquis are influenced and shaped by nested systems in which social processes are inserted. Thirdly, when looking at systems, there is a particular influence by national and global ones, which condition the form and endurance of regional projects. Finally, beyond systems, the book highlights the relevance of agents as crucial players in the shaping of the resilience of regionalism in Latin America. This insightful collection will appeal to advanced students and researchers in international economics, international relations, international political economy, economic history and Latin American studies.
This timely book explores the unique challenges facing the left in Latin America today. The contributors offer clear and comprehensive assessments of the difficult conditions and conflicting forces that have brought to power the current leftist regimes in Latin American and the Caribbean and are shaping their development. With its balanced and thorough assessment, this study will provide readers with a deep and nuanced understanding of the complexity of the political, economic, and sociocultural reality of contemporary Latin America and the Caribbean.
Winner of the first Paul A. Baran-Paul M. Sweezy Memorial Award for an original monograph concerned with the political economy of imperialism, John Smith's Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century is a seminal examination of the relationship between the core capitalist countries and the rest of the world in the age of neoliberal globalization.Deploying a sophisticated Marxist methodology, Smith begins by tracing the production of certain iconic commodities-the T-shirt, the cup of coffee, and the iPhone-and demonstrates how these generate enormous outflows of money from the countries of the Global South to transnational corporations headquartered in the core capitalist nations of the Global North. From there, Smith draws on his empirical findings to powerfully theorize the current shape of imperialism. He argues that the core capitalist countries need no longer rely on military force and colonialism (although these still occur) but increasingly are able to extract profits from workers in the Global South through market mechanisms and, by aggressively favoring places with lower wages, the phenomenon of labor arbitrage. Meticulously researched and forcefully argued, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century is a major contribution to the theorization and critique of global capitalism.
The way external forces influence political and economic outcomes in developing countries is an ongoing concern of scholars and policymakers. In the 1970s and 1980s, dependency analysis was a popular way of approaching this topic, but it later fell into disrepute. This Element argues that it may be useful to revamp dependency to interpret China's new relationships with developing countries, including Latin America. Economic links with China have become important determinants of the region's development. Stallings discusses the dependency debates, reviews the way dependency operated in the US-Latin American case, and analyzes the growing Chinese presence within a dependency framework.
This tour of the histories of North and South America explains how Latin America has become a vital part of the global community and discusses how its consumers, resources and emigrants will become big factors in the future.
