Introduction to ‘Pink Tides, Right Turns in Latin America’ special issue

ABSTRACT

This special issue emerged from the seminar of the same name in which took place at the Université du Québec en Outaouais in Gatineau, Quebec in June 2019. It focused on two interrelated political and economic dynamics currently taking place in Latin America. First, the decline of the wave of Left and Centre-Left governments that emerged in the region in the early 2000s, known as the Pink Tide. Second is the recent emergence of the region’s new right-wing political and social movements, which picked up in intensity and influence around 2015.

KEYWORDS:

• Latin America
• social movements
• politics
• agency
• political economy
• democracy

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 ECLAC (2014) data indicate that between 2005 and 2011 there was a reduction of extreme poverty from 10.7% to 6.1% and of poverty from 36.4% to 20.9%.

2 This trend is partially due to the decentralisation of the state that took place during the 1990s where social and health services are often ambiguously shared among different levels of the state.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

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).

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 been published in a number of international journals, including Latin American Perspectives, Historical Materialism, and the Canadian Journal of Development Studies.