Report On Chilean University Life

In this informative and highly readable book, first published in 1988, Charles Andrain explores the ways in which public policies and socio-political beliefs and structures cause political change in the Third World. The author examines 3 types of political change: (1) transitions in political leaders and their policies, (2) fundamental transformations in political structures, policy priorities, and political strategies for dealing with policy issues; and (3) the impact of economic, education, and health care policies on the society itself (including changes in unemployment, inflation, economic growth, literacy and birth and death rates). In the first part of the book, Professor Andrain presents a general overview of political change in the Third World, explaining how different models of political systems explain the dynamics of political events in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. In the second part of the book, he then applies these models to specific changes in five developing nations: Vietnam, Cuba, Chile, Nigeria and Iran. The book is unique in its careful blending of a policy focus with a structural analysis of nation states, domestic social groups, and international institutions in the often turbulent regions of the developing world. It thus provides a very useful systematic approach to political developments in the Third World that will be welcomed by students, faculty and general readers.

"Between 1973 and 1978, six thousand Chilean leftists came to Canada as exiles from the Pinochet coup d'état.

Chile is widely known as the first experiment in neoliberalism in Latin America, carried out and made possible through state violence. Since the beginning of the transition in 1990, the state has pursued a national project of reconciliation construed as debts owed to the population. The state owed a "social debt" to the poor accrued through inequalities generated by economic liberalization, while society owed a "moral debt" to the victims of human rights violations. Life in Debt invites us into lives and world of a poor urban neighborhood in Santiago. Tracing relations and lives between 1999 and 2010, Clara Han explores how the moral and political subjects imagined and asserted by poverty and mental health policies and reparations for human rights violations are refracted through relational modes and their boundaries. Attending to intimate scenes and neighborhood life, Han reveals the force of relations in the making of selves in a world in which unstable work patterns, illness, and pervasive economic indebtedness are aspects of everyday life. Lucidly written, Life in Debt provides a unique meditation on both the past inhabiting actual life conditions but also on the difficulties of obligation and achievements of responsiveness.