Here are 100 books that Latin American Politics and Society fans have personally recommended if you like
Latin American Politics and Society.
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I fell in love with Latin America as I meandered around Mexico in the summer of 1969. The passion has never died. Within a year I walked into Brazil’s ‘wild west’ to research the violence along its moving frontier, while over fifty years later I am an emeritus professor of Latin American politics at the University of Oxford and an honorary professor at the University of Exeter. An early decision to look at politics from the ‘bottom up’ led to a life-long inquiry into the theory and practice of democracy, and the publication of many essays and books that are available to view on my Amazon author page.
This is an original, close-focus, and fully comparative account of the democratic politics of Latin America that demonstrates beyond any doubt that no analysis of its democracies can succeed without equal attention to the processes of State formation in the region. I do not say that I find its analytical approach well founded in every respect or that I agree with all of its conclusions, but it’s an argument that poses and wrestles with the difficult questions and engages with a wide range of theoretical and empirical inquiry into order to do so.
Latin America is currently caught in a middle-quality institutional trap, combining flawed democracies and low-to-medium capacity States. Yet, contrary to conventional wisdom, the sequence of development - Latin America has democratized before building capable States - does not explain the region's quandary. States can make democracy, but so too can democracy make States. Thus, the starting point of political developments is less important than whether the State-democracy relationship is a virtuous cycle, triggering causal mechanisms that reinforce each other. However, the State-democracy interaction generates a virtuous cycle only under certain macroconditions. In Latin America, the State-democracy interaction has not generated…
I fell in love with Latin America as I meandered around Mexico in the summer of 1969. The passion has never died. Within a year I walked into Brazil’s ‘wild west’ to research the violence along its moving frontier, while over fifty years later I am an emeritus professor of Latin American politics at the University of Oxford and an honorary professor at the University of Exeter. An early decision to look at politics from the ‘bottom up’ led to a life-long inquiry into the theory and practice of democracy, and the publication of many essays and books that are available to view on my Amazon author page.
The author list combines a leading sociological theorist, a premier scholar of Latin American political economy, and a sophisticated practitioner of statistical analysis who between them have written one of the great classical works on Latin American economy and democracy.
The book itself combines a rounded theoretical approach, a comparative framework that extends to Europe and North America, and a thorough grounding in Latin American history. Though published some thirty years ago, it remains a must-read for those trying to get to grips with Latin American democracy.
How are capitalism and democracy related? Does capitalist development today generate pressures for democratization in the same way it did earlier in the core countries of capitalism? Past research has come to divergent conclusions on these questions. Cross-national statistical research has found that capitalist development and democracy are consistently correlated. By contrast, comparative historical studies have argued that economic development and democracy was and is compatible with a variety of political forms, and that in some cases economic development imperatives have led to the authoritarian eclipse of political competition, and that the chances of democracy in developing countries are rather…
I fell in love with Latin America as I meandered around Mexico in the summer of 1969. The passion has never died. Within a year I walked into Brazil’s ‘wild west’ to research the violence along its moving frontier, while over fifty years later I am an emeritus professor of Latin American politics at the University of Oxford and an honorary professor at the University of Exeter. An early decision to look at politics from the ‘bottom up’ led to a life-long inquiry into the theory and practice of democracy, and the publication of many essays and books that are available to view on my Amazon author page.
You have to ask how is it that Argentina has produced so many world-class authors, artists, and intellectuals? Roberto Gargarella is one such, and he has succeeded in turning the apparently dry topic of constitutionalism into the key to explaining the central paradoxes of Latin American democratic development. Before this book, constitutionalism was often dismissed as irrelevant to an understanding of Latin American democracy – very different to that of the United States – but Gargarella comes to the analytical rescue of the constitution and makes it central to his perceptive and counterintuitive analysis.
Latin America possesses an enormously rich constitutional history, but this legal history has only recently begun to be subjected to scholarly inquiry. As Roberto Gargarella contends, contemporary constitutional and political theory has a great deal to learn from this history, as Latin American constitutionalism has endured unique challenges that have not appeared in other regions. Such challenges include the emergence of egalitarian constitutions in inegalitarian contexts; deliberation over the value of "importing" foreign legal instruments; a long-standing exercise of socio-economic rights (which is only just starting in other areas of the world); issues of multiculturalism and indigenous rights; substantial experience…
I fell in love with Latin America as I meandered around Mexico in the summer of 1969. The passion has never died. Within a year I walked into Brazil’s ‘wild west’ to research the violence along its moving frontier, while over fifty years later I am an emeritus professor of Latin American politics at the University of Oxford and an honorary professor at the University of Exeter. An early decision to look at politics from the ‘bottom up’ led to a life-long inquiry into the theory and practice of democracy, and the publication of many essays and books that are available to view on my Amazon author page.
Anyone who aspires to an understanding of Latin American democracy must read the work of Guillermo O’Donnell, who almost single-handedly set the terms of the key debates over a period of thirty to forty years; and the only possible reason for this not being my 1st pick is that it is a collection of essays, not a monograph. O’Donnell was a passionate scholar, and both his passionate engagement and meticulous scholarship are amply illustrated in the discussions here of the vicissitudes and possibilities of democracy in Latin America, his wide survey encompassing everything from democratic struggles against authoritarian regimes to the flaws arising in the new democracies from defective institutionalism and extreme social inequalities. Read and admire.
The central, driving theme of this volume is democracy, its vicissitudes and its possibilities in Latin America. Guillermo O’Donnell considers the pattern of political and social alliances that have shaped Argentina’s agitated history, and focuses on the tensions and intrinsic weaknesses of bureaucratic-authoritarianism, especially in its most repressive guises, at a time when it projected itself as an enduring, efficient, and potentially legitimate form of political authority. He includes detailed empirical analysis of daily life under extremely repressive regimes and argues throughout that the struggle for democracy is the most appropriate way, both morally and strategically, to take advantage of…
I lived in Peru for five years, working as a writer, filmmaker, and anthropologist and have travelled extensively in South America, voyaging 4,500 miles from the northern tip of the Andes down to the southern tip of Patagonia, lived with a recently-contacted tribe in the Upper Amazon, visited Maoist Shining Path “liberated zones” in Peru and later made a number of documentaries on the Amazon as well as have written a number of books. Historically, culturally and biologically, South America remains one of the most interesting places on Earth.
The author spent many years in Brazil and Peru, editing the Americas’ section of The Economist andknows the region well. He does a great job of providing the reader with a broad, contemporary view of modern-day Central and South America, weaving together their many historical threads. If you want an insider’s account of Latin America by someone who thoroughly knows the area, then this is the book for you.
A newly updated edition of the best-selling primer on the social, political, and economic challenges facing Central and South America
Ten years after its first publication, Michael Reid's best-selling survey of the state of contemporary Latin America has been wholly updated to reflect the new realities of the "Forgotten Continent." The former Americas editor for the Economist, Reid suggests that much of Central and South America, though less poor, less unequal, and better educated than before, faces harder economic times now that the commodities boom of the 2000s is over. His revised, in-depth account of the region reveals dynamic societies…
I worked at the International Center for Transitional Justice in 2009 when Uruguay held a second referendum to overturn the country’s amnesty law that protected the police and military from prosecution for human rights abuses during the country’s dictatorship. Despite the country’s stable democracy and progressive politics in the 21st century, citizens quite surprisingly rejected the opportunity to overturn the state-sanctioned impunity law. My interest in broader accountability efforts in the world and that seemingly shocking vote in Uruguay drove me to want to study the roots of that failed effort, ultimately compelling a broader investigation into how human rights culture in Uruguay evolved, particularly during and after its period of military rule.
The oldest book on my list, it is still my go-to for understanding and writing about how human rights are understood by activists and organizations working in complex conditions of ongoing conflict and violence.
The stories Tate tells are compelling and a reminder amid the country’s continued grappling with this period of violence of what has been at stake and the uphill battles activists have faced for decades.
At a time when a global consensus on human rights standards seems to be emerging, this rich study steps back to explore how the idea of human rights is actually employed by activists and human rights professionals. Winifred Tate, an anthropologist and activist with extensive experience in Colombia, finds that radically different ideas about human rights have shaped three groups of human rights professionals working there - nongovernmental activists, state representatives, and military officers. Drawing from the life stories of high-profile activists, pioneering interviews with military officials, and research at the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, "Counting the…
During the later Cold War, I grew up in neutral and peaceful Switzerland. My German mother’s family lived apart in divided Germany. I knew as a child that I would become a historian because I wanted to find out what had happened to my mother’s home and why there was a Cold War in the first place. My father’s service as a Swiss Red Cross delegate in Korea after 1953 raised my interest in East Asia. After learning Russian and Chinese, I wrote my first book on The Sino-Soviet Split. When I was finishing the book, I resolved to reinvent myself as a global historian, which is why I wrote my second book as a reinterpretation of the global Cold War as a series of parallel regional Cold Wars in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe.
An edited collection, Latin America and the Global Cold Waractuallydoes what the field of Cold War studies has talked about for decades—decentering the Cold War. Breaking with the long-standing idea that Latin America was merely the backyard of U.S. imperialism, the 14 contributions show how deeply Latin American countries were connected to other parts of the Global South. Bringing together junior and senior scholars from three continents, the volume is a refreshing and a much-needed eye-opener for all historians of international relations.
Latin America and the Global Cold War analyzes more than a dozen of Latin America's forgotten encounters with Africa, Asia, and the Communist world, and by placing the region in meaningful dialogue with the wider Global South, this volume produces the first truly global history of contemporary Latin America. It uncovers a multitude of overlapping and sometimes conflicting iterations of Third Worldist movements in Latin America, and offers insights for better understanding the region's past, as well as its possible futures, challenging us to consider how the Global Cold War continues to inform Latin America's ongoing political struggles.
I've been interested in U.S.-Latin American relations ever since my junior year in college when I studied abroad in Chile, a country that had only two years prior been run by dictator Augusto Pinochet. Often referred to as America’s “backyard,” Latin America has often been on the receiving end of U.S. machinations and expansions. In terms of the history of American foreign policy, it's never a dull moment in U.S. involvement in its own hemisphere. I have now had the privilege to work inside the executive branch of the U.S. government on Latin America policy, stints which have forced me to reconsider some of what I had assumed about U.S. abilities and outcomes.
Lucidly written and soberly considered, Latin America’s Cold War is one top-five pick for a host of reasons, not least of which is that it forces us to consider that the usually potent Uncle Sam did mean that Latin American actors did not have influence, for good or ill. Rightist Latin American militaries, for a searing case, had their reasons for combatting leftist guerrillas, not just serving Washington’s bidding.
For Latin America, the Cold War was anything but cold. Nor was it the so-called "long peace" afforded the world's superpowers by their nuclear standoff. In this book, the first to take an international perspective on the postwar decades in the region, Hal Brands sets out to explain what exactly happened in Latin America during the Cold War, and why it was so traumatic.
Tracing the tumultuous course of regional affairs from the late 1940s through the early 1990s, Latin America's Cold War delves into the myriad crises and turning points of the period-the Cuban revolution and its aftermath; the…
I accidentally fell in love with Latin America, a love that has lasted my lifetime. When I was young, I lived in a Dominican neighborhood in New York, learning Spanish from my neighbors. After I graduated from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism I got a job covering the Cuban community in New Jersey because I spoke Spanish. Eventually I ended up living in Colombia and then Managua as a foreign correspondent. Now I edit a magazine at Harvard about Latin America. It's not just the news that interests me; I love the cadence of the language, the smell and taste of its varied cuisine, the warmth of the people, the culture, and, yes, soccer.
Mexican-born, Bogotá-based New Yorker writer Alma Guillermoprieto writes about Latin America in a vivid, compassionate way, using individual stories to tease out trends and shed a light on history. I've loved all of Guillermoprieto's books, including her wonderful chronicles about dancing in Cuba and Brazil, but this volume is a true classic. She captures the feeling of the spirit of Latin America and Latin Americans. Even when I've been to the places she describes, she makes me see them in a different way through her meticulous reporting and lush descriptions.
What I like best about Guillermoprieto is that she looks into ordinary lives, ranging from Mexican garbage pickers to the window-pane fixers who make a living in Bogotá after glass is shattered by bombs.
An extraordinarily vivid, unflinching series of portraits of South America today, written from the inside out, by the award-winning New Yorker journalist and widely admired author of Samba.
I’m always delighted when a reader asks, “Did you work for the CIA?” It tells me I achieved the verisimilitude I was striving for in Under a False Flag. I’m also proud that my novel has been included in a university-level Latin American history curriculum. That tells me I got the history right. No aspect of modern history is more intriguing or controversial than the role covert action played, for better or worse, in the Cold War. With the exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which took us to the brink of nuclear disaster, the Cold War in Latin America was mostly fought in the shadows with markedly ambivalent achievements.
The 1973 coup in Chile violently destroyed the freely elected Marxist government of Salvador Allende and installed the brutal 17-year dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. For years afterward suspicions swirled that the U.S. was behind the event. But evidence was largely anecdotal. What is so impressive about this book is Kornbluh’s persistence deploying the Freedom of Information Act to obtain thousands of classified documents related to the coup. Kornbluh connects the dots and reveals the smoking guns. Through facsimiles of actual cables, telexes, and phone memos (many still highly redacted) this dossier allows you to draw your own conclusions about what really happened in Chile.
The Pinochet File reveals a record of complicity with atrocity by the U.S. government. The documents, first declassified for the original edition of the book, formed the heart of the campaign to hold Gen. Pinochet accountable for murder, torture and terrorism. The New York Times wrote of the original 2003 edition, 'Thanks to Peter Kornbluh, we have the first complete, almost day-to-day and fully documented record of this sordid chapter in Cold War American History.' With this 40th anniversary edition, the record is even more complete and up-to-date.
