Hugo Chávez won re-election in the 2012 Venezuelan presidential election, despite a closer margin between candidates than in previous elections. The results were puzzling for those who believed that Chávez’s government had long ago reached its limits, while Chávez’s supporters were struck by the growth of the opposition vote. Thus understanding the Venezuelan election of 2012 has proved to be challenging, with various recent studies focused upon it. Luis F. Angosto Ferrández’s book advances two ideas not previously discussed: the relationship between electoral behavior in Venezuela and contemporary Latin American geopolitics, and the way that relationship is projected through the candidates’ appeal to narratives that situate Venezuela at the core of a heroic Latin American tradition and of a new regional process of integration. This edited volume first contextualizes and explains the results of the last re-election of Hugo Chávez in terms of its geopolitical conditionings and implications. Contributors tackle Latin American geopolitics by analyzing Venezuelan foreign policy and the country's role in continental projects of supra-national integration. Contributors also examine electoral strategy and tactics in order to show how the two main candidates built their campaign on emotional grounds as much on rational ones. This will be connected to the investigation of new narratives of national identification in contemporary Venezuela and how they may have practical implications in the design of policies addressing issues such as indigenous rights, community media and national security. Compiling state-of-the-art research on Latin American and Venezuelan politics, this book will appeal to academics and professionals who specialize in Latin American studies, international relations, democracy, and indigenous peoples.

Challenging the common view that Latin America has lagged behind Europe and North America in the global history of science, this volume reveals that the region has long been a center for scientific innovation and imagination. It highlights the important relationship between science, politics, and culture in Latin American history.

Introduction -- Latin America as a place -- Urban bias -- An ideological vacuum -- Fragile democracies -- The business of being in business -- Environmental degradation -- Malls -- Crime -- The poor -- Struggling for gender equality -- El Gringo -- What to paint? -- Migration -- Conclusion.

Brazil’s soft power path to major power status. The largest country in South America by land mass and population, Brazil has been marked since its independence by a belief that it has the potential to play a major role on the global stage. Set apart from the rest of the hemisphere by culture, language, and history, Brazil has also been viewed by its neighbors as a potential great power and, at times, a threat. But even though domestic aspirations and foreign perceptions have held out the prospect for Brazil becoming a major power, the country has lacked the capabilities—particularly on the military and economic dimensions—to pursue a traditional path to greatness. Aspirational Power examines Brazil as an emerging power. It explains Brazil’s present emphasis on using soft power through a historical analysis of Brazil’s three past attempts to achieve major power status. Though these efforts have fallen short, this book suggests that Brazil will continue to try to emerge, but that it will only succeed when its domestic institutions provide a solid and attractive foundation for the deployment of its soft power abroad. Aspirational Power concludes with concrete recommendations for how Brazil might improve its strategy, and why the great powers, including the United States, should respond positively to Brazil’s emergence.

"Is Democracy in Decline? is a short book that takes up the fascinating question on whether this once-revolutionary form of government--the bedrock of Western liberalism--is fast disappearing. Has the growth of corporate capitalism, mass economic inequality, and endemic corruption reversed the spread of democracy worldwide? In this incisive collection, leading thinkers address this disturbing and critically important issue. Published as part of the National Endowment for Democracy's 25th anniversary--and drawn from articles forthcoming in the Journal of Democracy--this collection includes seven essays from a stellar group of democracy scholars: Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, Thomas Carothers, Marc Plattner, Larry Diamond, Philippe Schmitter, Steven Levitsky, Ivan Krastev, and Lucan Way. Written in a thought-provoking style from seven different perspectives, this book provides an eye-opening look at how the very foundation of Western political culture may be imperiled"--

Latin America has experienced a profound transformation in the first two decades of the 21st century: it has been fully incorporated into the global economy, while excluding regions and populations devalued by the logic of capitalism. Technological modernization has gone hand-in-hand with the reshaping of old identities and the emergence of new ones. The transformation of Latin America has been shaped by social movements and political conflicts. The neoliberal model that dominated the first stage of the transformation induced widespread inequality and poverty, and triggered social explosions that led to its own collapse. A new model, neo-developmentalism, emerged from these crises as national populist movements were elected to government in several countries. The more the state intervened in the economy, the more it became vulnerable to corruption, until the rampant criminal economy came to penetrate state institutions. Upper middle classes defending their privileges and citizens indignant because of corruption of the political elites revolted against the new regimes, undermining the model of neo-developmentalism. In the midst of political disaffection and public despair, new social movements, women, youth, indigenous people, workers, peasants, opened up avenues of hope against the background of darkness invading the continent. This book, written by two leading scholars of Latin America, provides a comprehensive and up-do-date account of the new Latin America that is in the process of taking shape today. It will be an indispensable text for students and scholars in Latin American Studies, sociology, politics and media and communication studies, and anyone interested in Latin America today.

This study investigates the three main waves of political regime contention in Europe and Latin America. Surprisingly, protest against authoritarian rule spread across countries more quickly in the nineteenth century, yet achieved greater success in bringing democracy in the twentieth. To explain these divergent trends, the book draws on cognitive-psychological insights about the inferential heuristics that people commonly apply; these shortcuts shape learning from foreign precedents such as an autocrat's overthrow elsewhere. But these shortcuts had different force, depending on the political-organizational context. In the inchoate societies of the nineteenth century, common people were easily swayed by these heuristics: jumping to the conclusion that they could replicate such a foreign precedent in their own countries, they precipitously challenged powerful rulers, yet often at inopportune moments - and with low success. By the twentieth century, however, political organizations had formed. As organizational ties loosened the bounds of rationality, contentious waves came to spread less rapidly, but with greater success.

This book theorizes a mechanism underlying regime-change waves, the deliberate efforts of diffusion entrepreneurs to spread a particular regime and regime-change model across state borders. Why do only certain states and nonstate actors emerge as such entrepreneurs? Why, how, and how effectively do they support regime change abroad? To answer these questions, the book studies the entrepreneurs behind the third wave of democratization, with a focus on the new eastern European democracies - members of the European Union. The study finds that it is not the strongest democracies nor the democracies trying to ensure their survival in a neighborhood of nondemocracies that become the most active diffusion entrepreneurs. It is, instead, the countries where the organizers of the domestic democratic transitions build strong solidarity movements supporting the spread of democracy abroad that do. The book also draws parallels between their activism abroad and their experiences with democratization and democracy assistance at home.

Itineraries of Expertise contends that experts and expertise played fundamental roles in the Latin American Cold War. While traditional Cold War histories of the region have examined diplomatic, intelligence, and military operations and more recent studies have probed the cultural dimensions of the conflict, the experts who constitute the focus of this volume escaped these categories. Although they often portrayed themselves as removed from politics, their work contributed to the key geopolitical agendas of the day. The paths traveled by the experts in this volume not only traversed Latin America and connected Latin America to the Global North, they also stretch traditional chronologies of the Latin American Cold War to show how local experts in the early twentieth century laid the foundation for post–World War II development projects, and how Cold War knowledge of science, technology, and the environment continues to impact our world today. These essays unite environmental history and the history of science and technology to argue for the importance of expertise in the Latin American Cold War.

Alejandro de la Fuente and George Reid Andrews offer the first systematic, book-length survey of humanities and social science scholarship on the exciting field of Afro-Latin American studies. Organized by topic, these essays synthesize and present the current state of knowledge on a broad variety of topics, including Afro-Latin American music, religions, literature, art history, political thought, social movements, legal history, environmental history, and ideologies of racial inclusion. This volume connects the region's long history of slavery to the major political, social, cultural, and economic developments of the last two centuries. Written by leading scholars in each of those topics, the volume provides an introduction to the field of Afro-Latin American studies that is not available from any other source and reflects the disciplinary and thematic richness of this emerging field.