The introductory chapter (Chapter 1) introduces the empirical and theoretical puzzles that motivate this project and presents a brief overview of the book as a whole. I present and motivate the empirical puzzle at the heart of the book and situate the reclassification reversal as a case of identity change and politicization. I then provide an overview of the central argument and mechanisms, and discuss alternative explanations tied to affirmative action and other prevailing explanations that do not adequately explain the puzzle. Next, I discuss the research design, methods, and positionality. I conclude the chapter with an outline of what is to come.

Chapter 2 focuses on establishing and motivating the empirical puzzle that motivates this study. I present descriptive data to document that reclassification is indeed taking place, and to lay to rest simple explanations that might account for this change. I then shift to motivate the puzzle theoretically. I situate these patterns against the well-established expectations of anthropological and sociological literatures, which emphasize how discrimination and stigmatization have long incentivized whitening, or at least lightening. Zooming out further, I situate these patterns historically, arguing that the recent reclassification reversal should be understood as simply the latest development in the evolution of racial subjectivity and state policy that has spanned three centuries in Brazil.

Focusing on contemporary life writing of chronic pain, specifically lyric essays, this chapter explores the language of pain, refuting its untranslatability, and suggesting that creative forms and experimental expression are helping to develop language to meet experience. Recent illness narratives are building a common language with which to articulate their physical sensations, with Eula Biss’s ‘The Pain Scale’ (2005) encouraging a community of pain expression, and becoming a generative intertext. While pain sufferers reclaim their experiences, they are also reclaiming and renewing diagnostic vocabulary, for example through ‘subterfuge‘, which requires readers to better engage in attentive listening, with an ethical obligation not to overlook or mishear marginalized voices. Alongside Biss, this chapter explores the work of Amy Berkowitz, Molly McCully Brown, Anne Boyer, Sinéad Gleeson, Sonya Huber, and Lisa Olstein.

Drawing on examples from across Latin America, Chapter 1 introduces the political exclusion of the working class and the puzzles that motivate the book: (1) Do citizens – and particularly working-class citizens – want to be represented by members of the working class? (2) Do citizens know workers are in office? (3) How do citizens evaluate workers who do not represent working-class policy interests? The chapter previews our theory in general terms and provides an overview of the data and cases we use to tackle these important questions. The chapter concludes by introducing the major implications of our findings.

The introductory chapter highlights the difficulty in engaging Latin American elites in the state-building enterprise, both historically and in the contemporary period, in spite of major crises. It introduces the puzzle by examining how the public-safety crisis in the region is different from previous patterns of violence: whereas historically business elites tended to benefit from state-led violence by eliminating competing political and economic projects, the new form of violence in democratic contexts affects them directly and more indiscriminately. Chapter 1 also discusses the stakes involved in successfully engaging elites in contemporary state building through taxation for public-safety purposes, as well as the book’s contributions to the literatures on state building, taxation, and public safety.

Competition is commonplace among militant groups. Although political scientists have begun recognizing its importance, they lag behind other fields in the general study of competition. This is critical due to the strategic depth that competition brings. How one group behaves affects another group, and vice versa. Moreover, target governments and international organizations can manipulate the environment in which the groups must then interact. This chapter argues that building models to examine these issues is a useful strategy, but that the literature on political violence has not yet explored the implications. We then set the stage for the results we develop throughout the book.

Chapter 1 introduces the questions this volume is going to address, the empirical approach it is going to adopt, and the three regions of Europe that are going to serve as a key structuring device in presenting the results. The volume descriptively addresses three claims that have been made in the literature on protest mobilization during the Great Recession: the existence of an internationally interconnected protest wave, the transformation of action repertoires, and the ‘return of the economy’ in the demands of protesters. Second, the volume asks about the drivers of protest mobilization, relying on three key concepts of social movement studies – grievances, resources, and political opportunity structures. More specifically, the chapters assess the role of economic and political grievances in driving protest: Do economic grievances mobilize or de-mobilize protest? They analyze the role of political parties in organizing protest in times of crisis and ask which parties take to the streets in times of crises, and they consider the role of political opportunity structures in moderating the link between economic grievances and protest. Since the distinction between the macro-regions is so important for the presentation of the results, the introduction also provides three sets of arguments why this distinction makes sense as a general grid in the analysis of the data. These three sets of arguments are linked to the same three sets of explanatory factors.