Uruguay In Transnational Perspective

Most of the world knows Uruguay only for its soccer team, or its vaunted title as the "Switzerland of South America," an enduring moniker given to the country for its earlier social welfare policies and relative stability. Even many scholarly narratives of Latin America fail to integrate the country into historical accounts, reducing the country to, as one historian has explained, "a periphery within the periphery that is Latin America." This volume challenges that characterization, taking one of the most innovative small states in the region and analyzing its transnational influence on the world. Uruguay in Transnational Perspective takes a broad look at the country’s three-hundred-year history, connecting imperial practices and resistance, Afro-Latin movements, and feminist firebrands, among others to understand how the country and its citizens have influenced and shaped regional and global historical narratives in a way that has thus far been overlooked. With a true collaboration between scholars of the Global North and Global South, the volume is both transnational in its scholarly focus and its production. Its interdisciplinary nature offers a broad range of perspectives from leading scholars in the field to re-evaluate Uruguay’s impact on the global stage.

Latin America is a region made up of multiple states with a diversity of races, ethnicities, and cultures. In 'Transnational Perspectives on Latin America', Luis Roniger argues that a regional perspective is significant for understanding this part of the Western hemisphere. He claims that geopolitical, sociological, and cultural trends molded a contiguity of influences, shaping a transnational arena of connected histories, cross-border interactions, and shared visions, complementing the process of separate nation-state formation.--

This collection examines the subject of identification and surveillance from 16th C English parish registers to 21st C DNA databases. The contributors, who range from historians to legal specialists, provide an insight into the historical development behind such issues as biometric identification, immigration control and personal data use.

Offers a narrative approach to post-conflict intervention, showing how legalism following mass violence encourages dangerous binaries.

The duel, and the codes of honour that governed duelling, functioned for decades in many European and Latin American countries as a shadow legal system, regulating in practice what legislators felt free to say and what journalists felt free to write. Yet the duel was also an act of potentially deadly violence and a challenge to the authority of statutory law. When duelling became widespread in early twentieth-century Uruguay, legislators facing this dilemma chose the unique and radical path of legalization. The Pen, the Sword, and the Law explores how the only country in the world to decriminalize duelling managed the tension between these informal but widely accepted “gentlemanly laws” and its own criminal code. The duel, which remained legal until 1992, was meant to ensure civility in politics and decorum in the press, but it often failed to achieve either. Drawing on rich and detailed newspaper reports of duels and challenges, parliamentary debates, legal records, private papers, and interviews, David Parker examines the role of pistols and sabres in shaping the everyday workings of a raucous public sphere. Demonstrating that the duel was no simple throwback to archaic conceptions of masculine honour and chivalry, The Pen, the Sword, and the Law illustrates how duelling went hand in hand with democracy and freedom of the press in one of South America’s most progressive nations.

This volume explores several notable themes related to foreign affairs in Latin America and the reconfiguration of the power of the different states in the region. It offers insightful historical perspectives for understanding national, regional and global issues from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, from analysis of the traditional "hegemony" of the United States over Latin America through its military, and political influence due to the presence of the European Union, Russia, and China. These views cannot be reduced to a simplistic vision of the dominant and subordinate; rather, they attempt to seek lines of continuity by highlighting traditional interpretations of new scenarios such as regional trading and security blocs. The volume refuses to impose a traditional and uncritical linear historical narrative onto the reader but instead proposes an alternative interpretation of the past and its relation to the present. Finally, the growing importance of international mechanisms in enabling the success of certain Latin American regimes is also highlighted, in particular the influence of regional diffusion through international organizations or other networks.

In Becoming the Tupamaros, Lindsey Churchill explores an alternative narrative of US-Latin American relations by challenging long-held assumptions about the nature of revolutionary movements like the Uruguayan Tupamaros group. A violent and innovative organization, the Tupamaros demonstrated that Latin American guerrilla groups during the Cold War did more than take sides in a battle of Soviet and US ideologies. Rather, they digested information and techniques without discrimination, creating a homegrown and unique form of revolution. Churchill examines the relationship between state repression and revolutionary resistance, the transnational connections between the Uruguayan Tupamaro revolutionaries and leftist groups in the US, and issues of gender and sexuality within these movements. Angela Davis and Eldridge Cleaver, for example, became symbols of resistance in both the United States and Uruguay. and while much of the Uruguayan left and many other revolutionary groups in Latin America focused on motherhood as inspiring women's politics, the Tupamaros disdained traditional constructions of femininity for female combatants. Ultimately, Becoming the Tupamaros revises our understanding of what makes a Movement truly revolutionary.