Recommending Books for Purchase (Bulletin 79 - June 2020): Latin American Politics

This book aims to reconstruct the role played by left movements and organizations in Brazil from their process of renewal in the 1980s as they fought against the civil-military dictatorship, going through the Workers' Party's governments in the 2000s, until the Party's dramatic defeat with a parliamentary coup in 2016. Henceforth, there have been attacks on social and political rights that severely affect the lower classes and reverted progressive policies on various issues. Through a historical reconstruction, this book analyzes how different left movements and organizations contributed to the democratization of Brazilian society, and how their contradictions contributed to the actual conservative turn. The essays also focus the development of Brazilian Left in the light of socialist politics and especially Marxism, both in terms of political organizations and theory. In this sense, the essays in this collection represent an effort to rethink some aspects of the history of the Brazilian left and how it can reorganize itself after the conservative turn.

This book examines the nature of transnational organized crime and gangs, and how these diverse organizations contribute to violence, especially in so-called fragile states across Central and Latin America. While the nature of organized crime and violence differs depending on the context, the authors explain how and why states plagued by weak institutions tend to foster criminal organizations and violence, and why counter-crime initiatives often result in higher levels of violence. By examining the consequences of tough on crime policies (e.g., mano dura) in places like Mexico, El Salvador, and Colombia, the volume offers a new perspective on the link between state fragility, crime, and violence.

This book analyses the crucial role that guns play in the dynamics of extreme violence engulfing Latin America and the policies that are being implemented to confront it. Gun control is surprisingly not a prominent issue in most countries of the region, but this situation is rapidly changing as proliferation and violence dramatically increase. The book adopts an extended version of John Kingdon's influential Multiple Streams Framework to explore how gun control enters political agendas and why some countries act to end gun violence and others do not. In this effort, the Brazilian Disarmament Statute and the Uruguayan Responsible Firearm Ownership Law serve as in-depth case studies that exhibit the region's heterogeneity and put Kingdon's policy theory to the test. Gun Control Policies in Latin America is an essential reading for anyone interested in Latin American security and public policies.

This book examines the construction of an innovation system in Brazil's health industries over the past twenty years. The authors argue that the system has remained active despite the crisis that began in 2014. However, while this crisis has led to cuts in public spending on research and health, it has simultaneously tended to stimulate local production and invention aimed at reducing deficits in the trade in medicines and medical technologies. The contributors highlight a model combining the acquisition of new technologies with social justice and the right to health, and introduce new concepts of the "nationalization" of technologies, innovation through copying and civil society regulation of industrial property and of the medicinal drug market.

This book explores contemporary cultural, historical and geopolitical connections between Latin America and Australia from an interdisciplinary perspective. It seeks to capitalise on scholarly developments and further unsettle the multiple divides created by the North-South axis by focusing on processes of translocal connectivities that link Australia with Latin America. The authors conceptualise the South-South not as a defined geographic space with clear boundaries, but rather as a mobile terrain with multiple, evolving and overlapping translocal processes. 

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 protests and protests by socioeconomically disadvantaged people outside the formal economy. Drawing on a systematic review of comparative research on Latin America, the authors argue that the dynamics of socioeconomic contention in contemporary Egypt and Tunisia reflect a deep-seated crisis of popular sector incorporation. This work promises to enrich the scholarly and the political debates on Egypt and Tunisia, the MENA region and on contentious politics in times of political change. Chapter 10 of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com. 

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the implementation, functioning, and impact of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), cornerstone of Venezuelan foreign policy and standard-bearer of "postneoliberal" regionalism during the "Left Turn" in Latin America and the Caribbean (1998-2016). It reveals that cooperation via ALBA's regionalised social missions, state multinationals, development bank, People's Trade Agreement, SUCRE virtual currency, and Petrocaribe soft-loan scheme has often been hampered by complexity and conflict between the national political economies of Ecuador, Dominica, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua and Barbuda, and especially Venezuela. Shared commitments to endogenous development, autonomy within mutlipolarity, and novel sources of legitimacy are undermined by serious deficiencies in control and accountability, which stem largely from the defining influence of Venezuela's dysfunctional economy and governance. This dual dependency on Venezuela leaves the future of ALBA hanging in the balance.