Latin America In The Twenty First Century

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.

Twenty-first century Latin America is rich in history, culture, and political and social experimentation. In this fascinating and insightful analysis, Gardini looks at contemporary developments at three interconnected levels: state, region and globe. At the state level, leaders such as Evo Morales of Bolivia and Chavez of Venezuela embody a renewed intellectual autonomy in the continent, while revealing significant discrepancies between their rhetoric and their actions. At the regional level, while a consensus has emerged over Latin American unity as the only way towards development, the existence of several competing schemes of regional economic and political integration more accurately reflect the diversity of the area. At the global level, elements of change, such as the rise of Brazil and the involvement of China as a new trade partner, sit alongside traits of continuity, such as the crucial political, economic and ideational role played by Washington. Overall, Gardini argues that despite the numerous challenges to be faced, Latin America is now more wealthy, autonomous and better-placed in global geopolitics than at any time in its recent history.

This book explores the scope of reforms and changes in the social protection systems in Latin America that have started at the beginning of the 21st century. It describes how and to what extent changes in social protection systems and social policies have occurred in the region in recent decades. Taking a comparative approach, the volume identifies the triggers for the transformations and how such pressures are received by the welfare regime, or a specific policy sector, to finally yield a given type of reform. The analysis is characterized by the presence of certain factors that explain the development of social protection systems in Latin America, such as economic growth, the consolidation of democratic political regimes, and the region’s Left Turns. The book also examines to what extent common challenges and processes induced by international institutions have led to convergence among countries or welfare regimes, or whether each maintains its own identity.

Contributors to this volume take the long view of populism in Latin America—placing current movements into the context of the past. Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa have brought the subject of Latin American populism once again to the fore of scholarly and policy debate in the region. Latin American Populism in the Twenty-first Century explains the emergence of today’s radical populism and places it in historical context, identifying continuities as well as differences from both the classical populism of the 1930s and 1940s and the neo-populism of the 1990s. Leading Latin American, U.S., and European authors explore the institutional and socioeconomic contexts that give rise to populism and show how disputes over its meaning are closely intertwined with debates over the meaning of democracy. By analyzing the discourse and policies of populist leaders and reviewing their impact in particular countries, these contributors provide a deeper understanding of populism’s democratizing promise as well as the authoritarian tendencies that threaten the foundation of liberal democracy.

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.

Introduction to Latin America provides a completely new introduction to the political, social and economic forces shaping this essential region of undergraduate study today. It is the first textbook to place Latin America within a genuinely global context and introduce the debates and impact of globalization, neoliberalism, democratization, and the environment.

Latin America–European Union relations in the twenty-first century provides a valuable overview of transatlantic trade agreement negotiations and developments in the first decades of the twenty-first century. This edited collection examines key motivations behind trade agreements, traces the evolution of negotiations and explores some of the initial impacts of new generation trade agreements with the EU on South American countries. The book makes an important contribution to our understanding of relations between these regions by contextualising relations and trade agendas, both in terms of domestic political and economic policies and broader global trends. It demonstrates the importance of a shift toward mega-regional trade agreements in the 2010s, particularly under the Obama administration in the United States, in shaping South American and European agendas for trade agreement negotiations and their outcomes. Detailed case studies in the book investigate EU relations and negotiations with countries that have successfully negotiated new generation trade agreements with the EU: Mercosur, the Andean states, Chile and Mexico. Other contributions offer a wider overview of EU-Latin American relations, including parliamentary and civil society relations. The net result is a balanced analysis of contemporary EU relations with South America, useful for students and scholars of foreign policy and political economy in both regions.

Drawing on the research and experience of fifteen internationally recognized Latin America scholars, this insightful text presents an overview of inter-American relations during the first decade of the twenty-first century. This unique collection identifies broad changes in the international system that have had significant affects in the Western Hemisphere, including issues of politics and economics, the securitization of U.S. foreign policy, balancing U.S. primacy, the wider impact of the world beyond the Americas, especially the rise of China, and the complexities of relationships between neighbors. Contemporary U.S.-Latin American Relations focuses on the near-neighbors of the United States—Mexico, Cuba, the Caribbean and Central America—as well as the larger countries of South America—including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela. Each chapter addresses a country’s relations with the United States, and each considers themes that are unique to that country’s bilateral relations as well as those themes that are more general to the relations of Latin America as a whole. This cohesive and accessible volume is required reading for Latin American politics students and scholars alike.