You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The last quarter of the twentieth century was a period of economic crises, increasing indebtedness as well as financial instability for Latin America and most other developing countries; in contrast, China showed amazingly high growth rates during this time and has since become the third largest economy in the world. Based on several case studies, this volume assesses how China's rise - one of the most important recent changes in the global economy - is affecting Latin America's national politics, political economy and regional and international relations. Several Latin American countries benefit from China's economic growth, and China's new role in international politics has been helpful to many leftist governments' efforts in Latin America to end the Washington Consensus. The contributors to this thought provoking volume examine these and the other causes, effects and prospects of Latin America's experiences with China's global expansion from a South - South perspective.
As the United States struggled to survive the recent recession, China quietly acquired a vast amount of U.S. Treasury bills and bonds. With China now holding so much of America‘s debt, currency valuation issues have already caused tensions between the two superpowers. Couple this with Iran‘s efforts to develop into a nuclear power in an area that l
Riobamba and Cuenca, two intermediate cities in Ecuador, have become part of global networks through transnational migration, incoming remittances, tourism, and global economic connections. Their landscape is changing in several significant ways, a reflection of the social and urban transformations occurring in contemporary Ecuadorian society. Exploring the discourses and actions of two contrasting population groups, rarely studied in tandem, within these cities—popular-settlement residents and professionals in the planning and construction sector—this study analyzes how each is involved in house designs and neighborhood consolidation. Ideas, ambitions, and power relations come into play at every stage of the production and use of urban space, and as a result individual decisions about both house designs and the urban layout influence the development of the urban fabric. Knowledge about intermediate cities is crucial in order to understand current trends in the predominantly urban societies of Latin America, and this study is an example of needed interdisciplinary scholarship that contributes to the fields of urban studies, urban anthropology, sociology, and architecture.
This book is open access under a CC-BY license. The multiple purposes of nature – livelihood for communities, revenues for states, commodities for companies, and biodiversity for conservationists – have turned environmental governance in Latin America into a highly contested arena. In such a resource-rich region, unequal power relations, conflicting priorities, and trade-offs among multiple goals have led to a myriad of contrasting initiatives that are reshaping social relations and rural territories. This edited collection addresses these tensions by unpacking environmental governance as a complex process of formulating and contesting values, procedures and practices shaping the access, control and use of natural resources. Contributors from various fields address the challenges, limitations, and possibilities for a more sustainable, equal, and fair development. In this book, environmental governance is seen as an overarching concept defining the dynamic and multi-layered repertoire of society-nature interactions, where images of nature and discourses on the use of natural resources are mediated by contextual processes at multiple scales.
Scholarship related to environmental questions in Latin America has only recently begun to coalesce around citizenship as both an empirical site of inquiry and an analytical frame of reference. This has led to a series of new insights and perspectives, but few efforts have been made to bring these various approaches into a sustained conversation across different social, temporal and geographic contexts. This volume is the result of a collaborative endeavour to advance debates on environmental citizenship, while simultaneously and systematically addressing broader theoretical and methodological questions related to the particularities of studying environment and citizenship in Latin America. Providing a window onto leading scholarship in the field, the book also sets an ambitious agenda to spark further research.
This new collection critically examines the new global policy of 'good governance'. This catchphrase of aid policy and development thinking has been the subject of too little analysis to date. This book redresses the balance. It places the prefix 'good', and exactly what that means, under the microscope and examines the impact of neoliberal governance in a wide range of countries and territories, including Chile, Russia, Argentina and Indonesia.
This volume is a critical inquiry into the social project and socioeconomic realities of emerging Brazil, a country that faces profound changes. A team of acknowledged specialists on Brazil’s complex configuration addresses state policies, social dynamics and economic constraints and opportunities for emancipation. Chapters adopt long-run perspectives on the development of the Brazilian welfare state, limits and opportunities for emancipation in the labor market, the scope and depth of social policies such as "Bolsa Família" and Rio’s Peacemaking Police Units (UPP), social movements - in particular, the Movement of the Landless (MST) - cultural policies at the federal level, the role of media in the country’s democratization project, and how two important commodities (sugar and oil) shape the identities of blacks and whites in Bahia. This book is essential reading for all those interested in understanding what kind of Brazil has acquired a prominent global position and what hurdles it faces to consolidate its position as a global player.
This book studies the experiences of Brazil and India, the major economic powerhouses of the 21st century, during the neoliberal era. Both the nations have become important players in global markets and their economic performance has captured the attention of policymakers and academicians across the world. The book explores the patterns of growth and the changing status of human development in the two regions, since the 1980s. In an attempt to better grasp the subtleties of their developmental experiences, it also highlights the political and institutional dynamics that have under girded the liberalization of the two countries.
The genesis of this book was a workshop entitled 'Empire or Empowerment? The Role of International Law in Building Democracy and Justice after Conflict' held at the Australian National University in Canberra on 9-10 August 2007
Willem Assies died in 2010 at the age of 55. The various stages of his career as a political anthropologist of Latin American illustrate how astute a researcher he was. He had a keen eye for the contradictions he observed during his fieldwork but also enjoyed theoretical debate. A distrust of power led him not only to attempt to understand “people without voice” but to work alongside them so they could discover and find their own voice. Willem Assies explored the messy, often untidy daily lives of people, with their inconsistencies, irrationalities, and passions, but also with their hopes, sense of beauty, solidarity, and quest for dignity. This collection brings together some of Willem Assies’s best, most fascinating, and still highly relevant writings.