Roundtable: the Latin American state, Pink Tide, and future challenges

ABSTRACT

In May 2020, the guest editors of this special number organized a roundtable discussion centred on six themes and covered a broad range of topics pertaining to Latin American development, politics and economics. The context of ‘pink tides’ and ‘right turns’ are a backdrop that represent both the consequences and the lead up to what comes next. At the centre of the analysis are the core dynamics of the political systems we intend to explore. The perspectives of the roundtable represent a theoretical and methodological spectrum ranging from neoWeberianinstitutionalism closely associated with the work of O'Donnell, and comparative studies of democratization, to critical-world systems analysis, associated with Marxian historical materialism, typically found within the development studies and political economy disciplines. Although the authors may draw more from one end of the spectrum than from the other, throughout their research careers, they have considered all of them in their intellectual reflections.

KEYWORDS:

• Latin America
• political economy
• politics
• civil society
• democracy

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank our research assistant Monika Imeri for transcribing the roundtable session. This article was made possible thanks to an SSHRC Insight Grant.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As shown by Bértola and Ocampo (2013) regarding the Economic Development of Latin American, the income gap between LA and the Expanded West has widened on a regular basis (p. 4) throughout the twentieth century.

2 Evangelicals have laid out a very wise strategy. They are present in most parties at the Parliament (there are 36!). This makes them much stronger because their demands are not an issue raised by a few parties, but rather flagships incorporated by a wide range of political parties, from the left to the right.

3 I think Venezuela went farther than any other country in terms of challenging the power of the entrepreneurial elite, but that is probably because Venezuela had an extraordinarily weak private sector, by virtue of just being an oil economy.

4 We define the greening as the set of theories that advocate a socially just and ecologically sustainable economy and society breaking with unlimited economic growth and consumption inherent in capitalism. They go beyond the monetization of Green policies and practices within capitalism and aim at an anti-capitalist adoption of policies for de-growth.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 777967].

Notes on contributors

Manuel Larrabure

Manuel Larrabure is Assistant Professor at the Department of International Relations at Bucknell University. He holds a PhD. in political science from York University and carried out his Post-doctoral studies at the University of California Santa Cruz. Professor Larrabure does research in Political Economy, Globalization and Social Movements. His research is on post-capitalism and social movements in twenty-first-century Latin America. His work has published in a number of international journals, including Latin American Perspectives, Historical Materialism, and the Canadian Journal of Development Studies.

Charmain Levy

Charmain Levy is a professor of social sciences at the Université du Québec en Outaouais since 2005 where she teaches international development studies. Her research specializes in the fields of international development studies, feminist studies, political sociology and Latin American Studies on which she has published several articles and book chapters. She is a member of the Research team on Inclusion and Governance in Latin America (ÉRIGAL) and the Quebec Feminist Studies and Research Network (Réqef). Her most recent publication is the volume twenty-first-century Feminismos: Women's Movements across Latin America and the Caribbean (co-edited with Simone Bohn).

Maxwell A. Cameron

Maxwell A. Cameron is Professor in the Department of Political at the University of British Columbia. He specializes in comparative politics, democracy and ethics. His publications include Democracy and Authoritarianism in Peru (St. Martin's 1994), The Peruvian Labyrinth (Penn State University Press, 1997), Latin America's Left Turns (Lynne Rienner, 2010), Democracia en la Region Andina (Lima: IEP, 2010), New Institutions for Participatory Democracy in Latin America (Palgrave 2012), The Making of NAFTA (Cornell, 2000), Strong Constitutions (Oxford University Press 2013), Political Institutions and Practical Wisdom (Oxford University Press, 2018) and over 50 peer-reviewed articles. Cameron has taught at Carleton University, Yale University and the Colegio de Mexico. Between 2011 and 2019 he served as the Director of the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions. In 2013 Cameron won a UBC Killam Teaching Prize and in 2020 he became the Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies’ Distinguished Fellow.

Joe Foweraker

Joe Foweraker has published extensively on democracy and democratic government in Latin America, focussing first on social mobilization and citizenship rights, and subsequently on comparative democratic performance and democracy’s discontents. His recent work on POLITY (Lynne Rienner Publishers 2018) constructs a novel framework for analysing the democratic regimes of Latin America in the context of specific patterns of state formation that support the survival and expansion of oligarchic powers and prerogatives in the region, while his latest book on OLIGARCHY IN THE AMERICAS (Palgrave Macmillan 2021) compares modes of oligarchic rule in Latin America and the United States and reveals a close resemblance between them that challenges claim to US exceptionalism and the superiority of its democracy. He demonstrates that the populist insurgencies of recent decades – whether of the ‘left’ or the ‘right’ – can best be explained by the recurrent tensions between oligarchic rule and democratic appeals to popular sovereignty.

Lena Lavinas

Lena Lavinas is a Professor of Welfare Economics at the Institute of Economics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Most of her research focuses on how welfare regimes adjust to changes in contemporary capitalism, especially under the aegis of financialization. She is member of the International Advisory Board of Development and Change (2018–2023), among others. She was a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 2019–2020 and a 2016–2017 Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Among her recent publications: Lavinas L. ‘The Collateralization of Social policy by Financial Markets in the Global South’ (The Routledge International Handbook of Financialization, edited by Mader, Mertens and Van der Zwan, Routledge 2020); The Takeover of Social Policy by Financialization: The Brazilian paradox (Palgrave Macmillan 2017) and A Moment of Equality for Latin America? Challenges for Redistribution, along with Barbara Fritz (Ashgate 2015).

Susan Jane Spronk

Susan Spronk teaches at the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her research focuses on the impact of neoliberalism on the transformation of the state, social policy, and the rise of anti-privatization movements in Latin America and South Africa. She is also a research associate with the Municipal Services Project, an international research project that focuses on policy alternatives in municipal service delivery in Africa, Asia and Latin America (http://www.municipalservicesproject.org). Her articles have appeared in Studies in Political Economy, Water Alternatives, Latin American Perspectives, International Labor and Working-Class History, amongst others. Her most recent book in English and Spanish is Public Water and Covid-19: Dark Clouds and Silver Linings (with David A. McDonald and Daniel Chavez).