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293 results in Latin American government, politics and policy

Page 1 of 15

Beyond the War
  • Argentines and Islanders in an Unknown Falklands
  • Sebastián Carassai
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    May 2026
    Print publication:
    31 May 2026
  • Beyond the War reconstructs the often-overlooked history of the Falkland Islands before the 1982 conflict. Drawing on impressions of Argentine travellers and the island community, as well as British and Argentine diplomacy and politics, it reveals a world of mutual suspicions and tensions, but also of exchanges and collaborations, challenging the notion that war was inevitable. The book situates the islands within the broader history of the British Empire's reconfiguration during the UN-driven decolonization era, showing how global changes resonated in this remote setting. It examines decisive episodes, from the unprecedented period opened by the 1971 Communications Agreement to the influence of Argentine popular music, while analysing competing Argentine nationalisms that shaped an 'emotional community' around the islands. Based on new and little-explored sources, it offers a fresh perspective on evolving relations between islanders and Argentines, as well as postwar transformations that continue to shape the islands' identity today.

The Coup Trap in Latin America

The Rebirth of the Spanish Empire
  • War and Sacred Kingship in Early Bourbon Mexico
  • Frances L. Ramos
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2026
    Print publication:
    30 April 2026
  • The death of Carlos II in 1700 and the rise of Felipe V to the Spanish throne sparked a global war-and in New Spain, a cultural and political upheaval. As Bourbon loyalists staged elaborate ceremonies and circulated propaganda to legitimize the new dynasty, priests, artists, and local elites reimagined sacred kingship through vivid metaphors of death, rebirth, and regeneration. Sermons, rituals, devotional images, and unofficial texts anchored the new monarchy in familiar religious frameworks, linking the king's body to Christ's and reinforcing loyalty to both Church and Crown. In this contested public sphere, municipalities, religious orders, and colonial officials vied to display their allegiance and shape a renewed vision of empire. Frances L. Ramos's The Rebirth of the Spanish Empire offers a compelling and deeply researched account of how ritual, visual culture, and oratory redefined imperial identity in early eighteenth-century Mexico-illuminating the politics of loyalty and legitimacy during a time of dynastic change.

Accountability Shock
  • Why Transitional Justice Prevents Criminal Wars in New Democracies
  • Guillermo Trejo, Lucía Tiscornia, Juan Albarracín
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 March 2026
  • Accountability Shock presents the first systematic explanation of why some 'Third Wave' democracies developed peacefully while others became the world's most violent. The book demonstrates how robust transitional justice processes – combining truth commissions with prosecution of autocratic-era atrocities – prevent criminal violence in new democracies. By holding authoritarian specialists in violence accountable, new democracies can break state impunity, preventing them from becoming key actors in the production of large-scale criminal violence and reshaping the logic of state coercion in democracy. With in-depth analyses of six Latin American cases, the work illuminates why transitional justice is crucial for addressing state-criminal collusion in hybrid contexts. Forged out of a close collaboration between transitional justice scholars and practitioners, Accountability Shock strengthens existing connections while offering practical insights for countries still grappling with authoritarian legacies and violence.

An Unholy Pedagogy
  • Visions of Learning from Mesoamerica, 1300-1650
  • Joshua Jacob Fitzgerald
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    March 2026
    Print publication:
    31 March 2026
  • The traumatic Spanish invasion of Mesoamerica, and the Ibero-Catholic colonialism that followed, truly transformed Indigenous political, economic, and socio-cultural practices. Confronted by dogmatic European literary regimes, strident indoctrination, and acts of structural violence, how could 'Aztec' education have survived in colonial times? An Unholy Pedagogy rethinks education studies by centering discussions on Indigenous visions of learning that shaped schooling throughout the sixteenth century. Joshua Jacob Fitzgerald tracks education systems before the Spanish-Catholic invasion, examining the writings, art, and architecture of Nahua communities. He analyses Nahuatl primary sources and historical art and archaeological sources, focusing especially on materials produced by Indigenous and Indigenous-Christian artists and scribes. This fascinating interdisciplinary study reveals the ways that Nahua students transformed pedagogy, shaped learning, and preserved local knowledge.

Lawmaking under Authoritarianism
  • Factions, Institutions, and Outcomes Across Dictatorships
  • Alejandro Bonvecchi, Emilia Simison
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2026
    Print publication:
    28 February 2026
  • Why are legislatures in some authoritarian regimes more powerful than others? Why does influence on policies and politics vary across dictatorships? To answer these questions, Lawmaking under Authoritarianism extends the power-sharing theory of authoritarian government to argue that autocracies with balanced factional politics have more influential legislatures than regimes with unbalanced or unstable factional politics. Where factional politics is balanced, autocracies have reviser legislatures that amend and reject significant shares of executive initiatives and are able to block or reverse policies preferred by dictators. When factional politics is unbalanced, notary legislatures may amend executive bills but rarely reject them, and regimes with unstable factional politics oscillate between these two extremes. Lawmaking under Authoritarianism employs novel datasets based on extensive archival research to support these findings, including strong qualitative case studies for past dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil, and Spain.

Unity through Particularism
  • How Electoral Reforms Influence Parties and Legislative Behavior
  • Lucia Motolinia
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2026
    Print publication:
    31 January 2026
  • Why do supposedly accountability-enhancing electoral reforms often fail in young democracies? How can legislators serve their constituents when parties control the necessary resources? Unity through Particularism sheds light on these questions and more by explaining how parties can use personal vote-seeking incentives in order to decrease intra-party dissent. Studying a unique electoral reform in Mexico, the book provides a detailed description of how institutional incentives can conflict. It draws on a variety of rich, original data sources on legislative behavior and organization in 20 Mexican states to develop a novel explanation of how electoral reforms can amplify competing institutional incentives. In settings where legislative rules and candidate selection procedures favor parties, legislators may lack the resources necessary to build voter support. If this is the case, party leaders can condition access to these resources on loyalty to the party's political agenda.

Anchoring an Empire
  • Gender and Ethnicity in Colonial Panama
  • Bethany Aram
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2025
    Print publication:
    27 November 2025
  • Anchoring an Empire is a bottom-up exploration of how gender and ethnicity shaped the lived experience of Spanish subjects across the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century isthmus of Panama. Focusing on understudied historical actors, Bethany Aram sheds light on how indigenous Americans, Afro-descendants, and Europeans contributed to critical debates on race and gender. From the Caribbean port cities of Nombre de Díos and Portobello, to Panama Viejo on the Pacific coast, free, enslaved, and in-between women and men managed to become arbiters of Spanish and competing interests. Those who lived and died in these cities sustained them as hubs of interaction, communication, and commerce. Whether victims, beneficiaries – or both – of the slave trade, these individuals found ways to meet and to exploit the region's episodic demand for housing, provisions, and other services. Their expertise grounded global transport and trade, with a lasting impact on processes of mobility and globalization.

The Making of Brazilian Amazonian Societies
  • A Study in Ethnographic and Spatial History
  • Mark Harris
  • Published online:
    14 November 2025
    Print publication:
    20 November 2025
  • Amazonia presents the contemporary scholar with myriad challenges. What does it consist of, and what are its limits? In this interdisciplinary book, Mark Harris examines the formation of Brazilian Amazonian societies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing predominantly on the Eastern Amazon, what is today the states of Pará and Amapá in Brazil. His aim is to demonstrate how the region emerged through the activities and movements of Indigenous societies with diverse languages, cultures, individuals of mixed heritage, and impoverished European and African people from various nations. Rarely are these approaches and people examined together, but this comprehensive history insightfully illustrates that the Brazilian Amazon consists of all these communities and their struggles and highlights the ways the Amazon has been defended through partnership and alliance across ethnic identities.

Debts Unpaid
  • Two Centuries of Trouble and Conflict in Mexico's Economy
  • Louise E. Walker
  • Published online:
    04 November 2025
    Print publication:
    20 November 2025
  • Power struggles between debtors and creditors about unpaid debts have animated the history of economic transformation from the emergence of capitalist relations to the recent global financial crashes. Illuminating how ordinary people fought for economic justice in Mexico from the eve of independence to the early 2000s, this study argues that conflicts over small-scale debts were a stress test for an emerging economic order that took shape against a backdrop of enormous political and social change. Drawing on nearly 1,500 debt conflicts unearthed from Mexican archives, Louise E. Walker explores rapidly changing ideas and practices about property rights, contract law, and economic information. This combination of richly detailed archival research, with big historical and theoretical interpretations, raises provocative new questions about the moral economy of the credit relationship and the shifting line between exploitation and opportunity in the world of everyday exchange.

Armed Citizens and Citizens in Arms
  • The Military and the Creation of the State of Peru, 1800‒1860
  • Natalia Sobrevilla Perea
  • Published online:
    12 September 2025
    Print publication:
    25 September 2025
  • In this book, Natalia Sobrevilla Perea reconstructs the history of the armed forces in nineteenth-century Peru and reveals what it meant to be a member. By centering the experiences of individuals, it demonstrates how the armed forces were an institution that created social provision, including social care for surviving family members, pensions for the elderly, and assistance for the infirm. Colonial militias transitioned into professional armies during the wars of independence to become the institution underpinning and sustaining the organization of the republic. To understand the emergence and weaknesses of nineteenth-century Peru, it is imperative to interrogate how men of the sword dominated post-independence politics.

The Power of Dissent
  • Urban Political Culture and the Fall of Spanish Rule in Charcas
  • Sergio Serulnikov
  • Published online:
    07 August 2025
    Print publication:
    07 August 2025
  • The Power of Dissent examines the crisis of Spanish rule through the changing political culture of Chuquisaca (Bolivia), the most important city in the southern Andes. Sergio Serulnikov argues that in the four decades preceding the nineteenth-century wars of independence, a vibrant political public sphere emerged, both patrician and plebeian. It manifested itself in a variety of social domains: protracted legal battles, collective petitions, popular revolts, the culture of manly honor, disputes over the rights of city council members and university faculty to hold free annual elections to choose their authorities, clashes between urban militias and Spanish soldiers, and contested public ceremonies and rituals of state power. In the process, a discernible aspiration took shape: the full participation of the local population in public affairs. The culture of dissent undermined the very premises of Bourbon absolutism and, more broadly, imperial control.

Hispanic Technocracy
  • From Fascism to Catholic Authoritarianism in Spain, Argentina, and Chile, 1945–1991
  • Daniel Gunnar Kressel
  • Published online:
    07 August 2025
    Print publication:
    14 August 2025
  • Hispanic Technocracy explores the emergence, zenith, and demise of a distinctive post-fascist school of thought that materialized as state ideology during the Cold War in three military regimes: Francisco Franco's Spain (1939–1975), Juan Carlos Onganía's Argentina (1966–1973), and Augusto Pinochet's Chile (1973–1988). In this intellectual and cultural history, Daniel Gunnar Kressel examines how Francoist Spain replaced its fascist ideology with an early neoliberal economic model. With the Catholic society Opus Dei at its helm amid its 'economic miracle' of the 1960s, it fostered a modernity that was 'European in the means' and 'Hispanic in the ends.' Kressel illuminates how a transatlantic network of ideologues championed this model in Latin America as an authoritarian state model that was better suited to their modernization process. In turn, he illustrates how Argentine and Chilean ideologues adapted the Francoist ideological toolkit to their political circumstances, thereby transcending the original model.

Globalization in Latin America
  • The Law, Politics and Economics of Preferential Trade Agreements
  • Edited by Manfred Elsig, Rodrigo Polanco, Andrew Lugg
  • Published online:
    09 June 2025
    Print publication:
    26 June 2025
  • The approach of Latin American countries to preferential trade agreements (PTAs) is a fascinating topic. There is a rich history of policymakers using PTAs to pursue different economic and political models of integration. What really stands out is the diversity of approaches and attitudes to the use of PTAs. While some countries have been rule-makers and have made innovative attempts to introduce new issues, others have been reluctant to use PTAs. In response to the growing interest in and politicisation of PTAs in the wider public –  including renewed consideration of 'with whom to trade' – this book brings together scholars from inside and outside Latin America to address the past, present, and future challenges associated with PTAs. The contributions, from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, offer new insights into issues related to the design, diffusion, and impact of PTAs. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

The Birth of Democracy in South America
  • Raúl L. Madrid
  • Published online:
    04 June 2025
    Print publication:
    07 August 2025
  • South America contains some of the oldest democracies in the world, yet we still know relatively little about how and why democracy arose in the region. Raúl L. Madrid argues that three main developments – the professionalization of the military, the growth of parties, and splits within the ruling party – led to democratization in the early twentieth century. Military professionalization increased the incentives for the opposition to abandon the armed struggle and focus on the electoral path to power. The growth of parties boosted the capacity of the opposition to enact and enforce democratic reforms that would level the electoral playing field. And ruling party splits created the opportunity for the opposition and ruling party dissidents to ally and push through reforms. This persuasive and original book offers important implications for the study of democracy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Incumbency Bias
  • Why Political Office is a Blessing and a Curse in Latin America
  • Luis Schiumerini
  • Published online:
    17 May 2025
    Print publication:
    05 June 2025
  • The conventional wisdom in political science is that incumbency provides politicians with a massive electoral advantage. This assumption has been challenged by the recent anti-incumbent cycle. When is incumbency a blessing for politicians and when is it a curse? Incumbency Bias offers a unified theory that argues that democratic institutions will make incumbency a blessing or curse by shaping the alignment between citizens' expectations of incumbent performance and incumbents' capacity to deliver. This argument is tested through a comparative investigation of incumbency bias in Brazil, Argentina and Chile that draws on extensive fieldwork and an impressive array of experimental and observational evidence. Incumbency Bias demonstrates that rather than clientelistic or corrupt elites compromising accountability, democracy can generate an uneven playing field if citizens demand good governance but have limited information. While focused on Latin America, this book carries broader lessons for understanding the electoral returns to office around the world.

Poverty Shaping Politics
  • Machine Parties and Their Unexpected Challengers
  • Rodrigo Zarazaga
  • Published online:
    05 May 2025
    Print publication:
    22 May 2025
  • Drawing on substantial original interviews and fieldwork data from Argentina's marginalized urban areas, Poverty Shaping Politics reveals how the spatial segregation of slums and vulnerable neighborhoods compels the poor to seek out local political brokers to access resources, while politicians depend on these brokers to navigate poor areas and garner political support. Rodrigo Zarazaga uniquely demonstrates that the establishment of broker networks is driven more by the conditions of segregated poverty and vulnerability than by the inherent capabilities of 'machine-like' parties. Using the case of Cambiemos challenging Peronism in poor districts, Zarazaga provides the first account of a party building broker networks to contest a dominant machine party. While existing literature suggests that sustained economic development can weaken machine parties, this book shows that entrenched and widespread poverty can also threaten their hegemony.

Coups d'État in Cold War Latin America, 1964–1982
  • Edited by Sebastián Carassai, Kevin Coleman
  • Published online:
    24 April 2025
    Print publication:
    08 May 2025
  • The latest series of coups d'état in Latin America has left an enduring impact on the region's contemporary landscape. This book employs a comparative methodology that illuminates distinct national contexts, scrutinizing the fundamental causal factors that precipitated coups in Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Honduras, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The essays answer the following questions: when was a given transfer of power defined as a coup d'état? What were the objectives in overthrowing an existing regime? What role did the US government play, as well as local political actors? What were the various options considered by different sectors within each country? What kinds of resistance did the coups face? What were their sources of support? By comprehensively exploring these questions across each national case, this book dismantles the belief that the coups can be grouped into a single category, and marks the culmination of an era in the subcontinent.

Global Servants of the Spanish King
  • Mobility and Cosmopolitanism in the Early Modern Spanish Empire
  • Adolfo Polo y La Borda
  • Published online:
    20 February 2025
    Print publication:
    27 February 2025
  • From 1580 to 1700, low-ranking Spanish imperial officials ceaselessly moved across the Spanish empire, and in the process forged a single coherent political unit out of multiple heterogeneous territories, creating the earliest global empire. Global Servants of the Spanish King follows officials as they itinerated between the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Africa, revealing how their myriad experiences of service to the king across a variety of locales impacted the governance of the empire, and was an essential mechanism of imperial stability and integration. Departing from traditional studies which focus on high-ranking officials and are bounded by the nation-state, Adolfo Polo y La Borda centers on officials with local political and administrative duties such as governors and magistrates, who interacted daily with the crown's subjects across the whole empire, and in the process uncovers a version of cosmopolitanism concealed in conventional narratives.

Inside Criminalized Governance
  • How and Why Gangs Rule the Streets of Rio de Janeiro
  • Nicholas Barnes
  • Published online:
    06 February 2025
    Print publication:
    13 February 2025
  • For over four decades, drug trafficking gangs have monopolized violence and engaged in various forms of governance across hundreds of informal neighborhoods known as favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, over 200 interviews with gang members and residents, 400 archival documents, and 20,000 anonymous hotline denunciations of gang members, this book provides a comprehensive examination of the causes and consequences of these governance arrangements. The book documents the variation in gang-resident relationships – from responsive relations in which gangs provide a reliable form of order and stimulate the local economy, to coercive and unresponsive relations in which gangs offers residents few benefits – then identifies the factors that account for this variation. The result is an unprecedented ethnographic study that provides readers a unique, in-depth insight into the evolution of Rio de Janeiro's drug trafficking gangs from their emergence in the 1970s to the present day.

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