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Chronicle of a Failure Foretold charts the progress and failure of Colombian President Andrés Pastrana's efforts to bring an end to sixty years of civil war.
This volume presents and critiques the distorted effects of the international human rights movement's focus on the fight against impunity.
Conventional wisdom holds that trust is essential for cooperation between individuals and institutions—such as community organizations, banks, and local governments. Not necessarily so, according to editors Karen Cook, Margaret Levi, and Russell Hardin. Cooperation thrives under a variety of circum-stances. Whom Can We Trust? examines the conditions that promote or constrain trust and advances our understanding of how cooperation really works. From interpersonal and intergroup relations to large-scale organizations, Whom Can We Trust? uses empirical research to show that the need for trust and trustworthiness as prerequisites to cooperation varies widely. Part I addresses the sources of gr...
Explores why indigenous movements have recently won elections for the first time in the history of Latin America.
"Colombia's deeply rooted and ambiguous warfare has reached crisis proportions in that Colombia's "Hobbesian Trinity" of illegal drug traffickers, insurgents, and paramilitary organizations are creating a situation in which life is indeed "nasty, brutish, and short." The first step in developing a macro-level vision, policy, and strategy to deal with the Colombian crisis in a global context is to be clear on what the Colombian crisis is, and what the fundamental threats implicit (and explicit) in it are. Political and military leaders can start thinking about the gravity of the terrorist strategy employed by Colombia's stateless adversaries from this point. It is also the point from which leaders can begin developing responses designed to secure Colombian, Hemispheric, and global stability. The author seeks to explain the Colombian crisis in terms of nonstate threats to the state and to the region--and appropriate strategic-level responses."--SSI site.
This book analyzes how replacing democratic constitutions may contribute to the improvement or erosion of democratic principles and practices.
Constitutional reform has been one of the most significant aspects of democratization in late twentieth century Latin America. In The Friendly Liquidation of the Past—one of the first texts to examine this issue comprehensively —Van Cott focuses on the efforts of Bolivia and Colombia to incorporate ethnic rights into their fragile democracies. In the1990s, political leaders and social movements in Bolivia and Colombia expressed dissatisfaction with the quality of democracy--its exclusionary nature, the distance and illegitimacy of the state, and the empty promise of citizenship. The highly symbolic act of constitution making elevated a public struggle for rights to the level of a discuss...
Colombia's deeply rooted and ambiguous warfare has reached crisis proportions in that Colombia's 'Hobbesian Trinity' of illegal drug traffickers, insurgents, and paramilitary organizations are creating a situation in which life is indeed 'nasty, brutish, and short'. The first step in developing a macro-level vision, policy, and strategy to deal with the Colombian crisis in a global context is to be clear on what the Colombian crisis is, and what the fundamental threats implicit (and explicit) in it are. Political and military leaders can start thinking about the gravity of the terrorist strategy employed by Colombia's stateless adversaries from this point. It is also the point from which leaders can begin developing responses designed to secure Colombian, Hemispheric, and global stability. The author seeks to explain the Colombian crisis in terms of nonstate threats to the state and to the region--and appropriate strategic-level responses.
The study of institutions, a core concept in comparative politics, has produced many rich and influential theories on the economic and political effects of institutions, yet it has been less successful at theorizing their origins. In Fixing Democracy, Javier Corrales develops a theory of institutional origins that concentrates on constitutions and levels of power within them. He reviews numerous Latin American constituent assemblies and constitutional amendments to explore why some democracies expand rather than restrict presidential powers and why this heightened presidentialism discourages democracy. His signal theoretical contribution is his elaboration on power asymmetries. Corrales dete...
Foreign capital and free trade policies have provoked fierce conflicts in South America in recent years. People in Colombia and Peru engaged in often violent clashes to defend their livelihoods against the encroachments of the free market and the impositions of Wall Street. Farmers organized to save their lands from foreign mining corporations, and cities fought to save their water from contamination. Native Americans blocked highways to preserve ancestral lands, while students paralyzed universities and called for reforms to higher education. The shift toward socialism in Venezuela, led by President Hugo Chavez, was bitterly opposed by privileged groups. Governments tried to quell the turmoil through repression, political maneuvering and propaganda. This book provides a dramatic account of the struggles.