TINA HILGERS

This book improves understandings of how and why clientelism endures in Latin America and why state policy is often ineffective. Political scientists and sociologists, the contributors employ ethnography, targeted interviews, case studies, within-case and regional comparison, thick descriptions, and process tracing.

TINA HILGERS AND LAURA MACDONALD

Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean is no longer perpetrated primarily by states against their citizens, but by a variety of state and non-state actors struggling to control resources, territories, and populations. This book examines violence at the subnational level to illuminate how practices of violence are embedded within subnational configurations of space and clientelistic networks. In societies shaped by centuries of violence and exclusion, inequality and marginalization prevail at the same time that democratization and neoliberalism have decentralized power to regional and local levels, where democratic and authoritarian practices coexist. Within subnational arenas, unique configurations - of historical legacies, economic structures, identities, institutions, actors, and clientelistic networks - result in particular patterns of violence and vulnerability that are often strikingly different from what is portrayed by aggregate national-level statistics.

TINA HILGERS AND JORGE LUIZ BARBOSA

Este livro é resultado do workshop “Clientelismo e Violência na América Latina e no Caribe”, realizado emdezembro de 2013, na Universidade de Carleton, Ottawa, Canadá. O workshop e o livro foram financiados pelo Social Sciences andHumanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Connection Grant. O livro reúne as contribuições de estudiosos de diversos países da região da América Latina e do Caribe que, com exceção dos acadêmicos canadenses Macdonald, Mayer e Hilgers, são também profissionais atuantes nos países pesquisados. Os capítulos são baseados em suas pesquisas acadêmicas e políticas,combinadas com o profundo conhecimento prático a respeitodas populações e dos territórios analisados. Jorge Luiz Barbosa, Ana Thereza Barbosa, Raquel Willadino, Rodrigo Nascimentoe Eduardo Alves, fazem parte da equipe e do corpo diretivo do Observatório de Favelas, instituição sediada na cidade do Rio deJaneiro, Brasil; Horace Levy é membro-fundador da Iniciativade Gestão da Paz (Peace Management Initiative), Jamaica; e Iván Darío Ramírez é membro-fundador da Corporación Mandala Porla Vida y el Territorio em Medellín, Colômbia.

PAUL W. POSNER, VIVIANA PATRONI AND JEAN FRANÇOIS MAYER

In recent decades, Latin American countries have sought to modernize their labor market institutions to remain competitive in the face of increasing globalization. This book evaluates the impact of such neoliberal reforms on labor movements and workers’ rights in the region through comparative analyses of labor politics in Chile, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. Using these five key cases, the authors assess the capacity of workers and working-class organizations to advance their demands and bring about a more just distribution of economic gains in an era in which capital has reasserted its power on a global scale. In particular, their findings challenge the purported benefits of labor market flexibility—the freedom of employers to adjust their workforces as needed—which has been touted as a way to reduce income inequality and unemployment.

NORA E. JAFFARY

In this history of childbirth and contraception in Mexico, Nora E. Jaffary chronicles colonial and nineteenth-century beliefs and practices surrounding conception, pregnancy and its prevention, and birth. Tracking Mexico’s transition from colony to nation, Jaffary demonstrates the central role of reproduction in ideas about female sexuality and virtue, the development of modern Mexico, and the growth of modern medicine in the Latin American context.

KREGG HETHERINGTON

The Government of Beans is about the rough edges of environmental regulation, where tenuous state power and blunt governmental instruments encounter ecological destruction and social injustice. At the turn of the twenty-first century, Paraguay was undergoing dramatic economic, political, and environmental change due to a boom in the global demand for soybeans. Although the country's massive new soy monocrop brought wealth, it also brought deforestation, biodiversity loss, rising inequality, and violence. Kregg Hetherington traces well-meaning attempts by bureaucrats and activists to regulate the destructive force of monocrops that resulted in the discovery that the tools of modern government are at best inadequate to deal with the complex harms of modern agriculture and at worst exacerbate them.