Social Movements, Indigenous Politics and Democratisation in Guatemala

Social Movements, Indigenous Politics and Democratisation in Guatemala
Author: Roderick Leslie Brett
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2008
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9004165525

Drawing on social movement theory, this book presents a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of collective action during Guatemalaa (TM)s democratic transition (1985-1996) and the accompanying impact of social movements on democratisation, focusing on three indigenous peoplesa (TM) social movement organisations.

Indigenous Movements and Their Critics

Indigenous Movements and Their Critics
Author: Kay B. Warren
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 1998-12-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780691058825

In this first book-length treatment of Maya intellectuals in national and community affairs in Guatemala, Kay Warren presents an ethnographic account of Pan-Maya cultural activism through the voices, writings, and actions of its participants. Challenging the belief that indigenous movements emerge as isolated, politically unified fronts, she shows that Pan-Mayanism reflects diverse local, national, and international influences. She explores the movement's attempts to interweave these varied strands into political programs to promote human and cultural rights for Guatemala's indigenous majority and also examines the movement's many domestic and foreign critics. The book focuses on the years of Guatemala's peace process (1987--1996). After the previous ten years of national war and state repression, the Maya movement reemerged into public view to press for institutional reform in the schools and courts and for the officialization of a "multicultural, ethnically plural, and multilingual" national culture. In particular, Warren examines a group of well-known Mayanist antiracism activists--among them, Demetrio Cojt!, Mart!n Chacach, Enrique Sam Colop, Victor Montejo, members of Oxlajuuj Keej Maya' Ajtz'iib', and grassroots intellectuals in the community of San Andr s--to show what is at stake for them personally and how they have worked to promote the revitalization of Maya language and culture. Pan-Mayanism's critics question its tactics, see it as threatening their own achievements, or even as dangerously polarizing national society. This book highlights the crucial role that Mayanist intellectuals have come to play in charting paths to multicultural democracy in Guatemala and in creating a new parallel middle class.

Social Movements, Indigenous Politics and Democratisation in Guatemala, 1985-1996

Social Movements, Indigenous Politics and Democratisation in Guatemala, 1985-1996
Author: Mark G. Brett
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2008-02-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9047433076

This book analyses patterns of collective action that emerged during Guatemala’s democratic transition between 1985 and 1996, focusing in particular on the role of indigenous actors in the political processes undergirding and shaping democratisation and the respective impact of the transition upon indigenous social movements. Comparatively little has been written about collective action in Guatemala within the discipline of political science, despite the mobilisation of a wide range of social movements in response to the brutal armed conflict; rather, literature has focused principally on the role of elite actors in democratisation. This study presents a fresh perspective, presenting an analysis of the political evolution of three social movements and their human rights platforms through the framework of social movement theory.

The Judicialization of Politics in Latin America

The Judicialization of Politics in Latin America
Author: Rachel Sieder
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2016-04-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1137108878

During the last two decades the judiciary has come to play an increasingly important political role in Latin America. Constitutional courts and supreme courts are more active in counterbalancing executive and legislative power than ever before. At the same time, the lack of effective citizenship rights has prompted ordinary people to press their claims and secure their rights through the courts. This collection of essays analyzes the diverse manifestations of the judicialization of politics in contemporary Latin America, assessing their positive and negative consequences for state-society relations, the rule of law, and democratic governance in the region. With individual chapters exploring Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru and Venezuela, it advances a comparative framework for thinking about the nature of the judicialization of politics within contemporary Latin American democracies.

Contesting Citizenship in Latin America

Contesting Citizenship in Latin America
Author: Deborah J. Yashar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2005-03-07
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781139443807

Indigenous people in Latin America have mobilized in unprecedented ways - demanding recognition, equal protection, and subnational autonomy. These are remarkable developments in a region where ethnic cleavages were once universally described as weak. Recently, however, indigenous activists and elected officials have increasingly shaped national political deliberations. Deborah Yashar explains the contemporary and uneven emergence of Latin American indigenous movements - addressing both why indigenous identities have become politically salient in the contemporary period and why they have translated into significant political organizations in some places and not others. She argues that ethnic politics can best be explained through a comparative historical approach that analyzes three factors: changing citizenship regimes, social networks, and political associational space. Her argument provides insight into the fragility and unevenness of Latin America's third wave democracies and has broader implications for the ways in which we theorize the relationship between citizenship, states, identity, and social action.

The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Social Movements

The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Social Movements
Author:
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 849
Release: 2023-03-28
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0190870362

Since the re-democratization of much of Latin America in the 1980s and a regional wave of anti-austerity protests in the 1990s, social movement studies has become an important part of sociological, political, and anthropological scholarship on the region. The subdiscipline has framed debates about formal and informal politics, spatial and relational processes, as well as economic changes in Latin America. While there is an abundant literature on particular movements in different countries across the region, there is limited coverage of the approaches, debates, and theoretical understandings of social movement studies applied to Latin America. In The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Social Movements, Federico M. Rossi presents a survey of the broad range of theoretical perspectives on social movements in Latin America. Bringing together a wide variety of viewpoints, the Handbook includes five sections: theoretical approaches to social movements, as applied to Latin America; processes and dynamics of social movements; major social movements in the region; ideational and strategic dimensions of social movements; and the relationship between political institutions and social movements. Covering key social movements and social dynamics in Latin America from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Social Movements is an indispensable reference for any scholar interested in social movements, protest, contentious politics, and Latin American studies.

The Inclusionary Turn in Latin American Democracies

The Inclusionary Turn in Latin American Democracies
Author: Diana Kapiszewski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 587
Release: 2021-02-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 110890159X

Latin American states took dramatic steps toward greater inclusion during the late twentieth and early twenty-first Centuries. Bringing together an accomplished group of scholars, this volume examines this shift by introducing three dimensions of inclusion: official recognition of historically excluded groups, access to policymaking, and resource redistribution. Tracing the movement along these dimensions since the 1990s, the editors argue that the endurance of democratic politics, combined with longstanding social inequalities, create the impetus for inclusionary reforms. Diverse chapters explore how factors such as the role of partisanship and electoral clientelism, constitutional design, state capacity, social protest, populism, commodity rents, international diffusion, and historical legacies encouraged or inhibited inclusionary reform during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Featuring original empirical evidence and a strong theoretical framework, the book considers cross-national variation, delves into the surprising paradoxes of inclusion, and identifies the obstacles hindering further fundamental change.

The Last Colonial Massacre

The Last Colonial Massacre
Author: Greg Grandin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2011-07-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0226306909

After decades of bloodshed and political terror, many lament the rise of the left in Latin America. Since the triumph of Castro, politicians and historians have accused the left there of rejecting democracy, embracing communist totalitarianism, and prompting both revolutionary violence and a right-wing backlash. Through unprecedented archival research and gripping personal testimonies, Greg Grandin powerfully challenges these views in this classic work. In doing so, he uncovers the hidden history of the Latin American Cold War: of hidebound reactionaries holding on to their power and privilege; of Mayan Marxists blending indigenous notions of justice with universal ideas of equality; and of a United States supporting new styles of state terror throughout the region. With Guatemala as his case study, Grandin argues that the Latin American Cold War was a struggle not between political liberalism and Soviet communism but two visions of democracy—one vibrant and egalitarian, the other tepid and unequal—and that the conflict’s main effect was to eliminate homegrown notions of social democracy. Updated with a new preface by the author and an interview with Naomi Klein, The Last Colonial Massacre is history of the highest order—a work that will dramatically recast our understanding of Latin American politics and the role of the United States in the Cold War and beyond. “This work admirably explains the process in which hopes of democracy were brutally repressed in Guatemala and its people experienced a civil war lasting for half a century.”—International History Review “A richly detailed, humane, and passionately subversive portrait of inspiring reformers tragically redefined by the Cold War as enemies of the state.”—Journal of American History

Mobilizing Democracy

Mobilizing Democracy
Author: Paul Almeida
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2014-08-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1421414104

What are the conditions and factors that drive people to protest against government economic policies in the developing world? Distinguished Scholarship Award of the Pacific Sociological Association (2015) Paul Almeida’s comparative study of the largest social movement campaigns that existed between 1980 and 2013 in every Central American country (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama) provides a granular examination of the forces that spark mass mobilizations against state economic policy, whether those factors are electricity rate hikes or water and health care privatization. Many scholars have explained connections between global economic changes and local economic conditions, but most of the research has remained at the macro level. Mobilizing Democracy contributes to our knowledge about the protest groups “on the ground” and what makes some localities successful at mobilizing and others less successful. His work enhances our understanding of what ingredients contribute to effective protest movements as well as how multiple protagonists—labor unions, students, teachers, indigenous groups, nongovernmental organizations, women’s groups, environmental organizations, and oppositional political parties—coalesce to make protest more likely to win major concessions. Based on extensive field research, archival data of thousands of protest events, and interviews with dozens of Central American activists, Mobilizing Democracy brings the international consequences of privatization, trade liberalization, and welfare-state downsizing in the global South into focus and shows how persistent activism and network building are reactivated in these social movements. Almeida enables our comprehension of global and local politics and policy by answering the question, “If all politics is local, then how do the politics of globalization manifest themselves?” Detailed graphs and maps provide a synthesis of the quantitative and qualitative data in this important study. Written in clear, accessible prose, this book will be invaluable for students and scholars in the fields of political science, social movements, anthropology, Latin American studies, and labor studies.