Exploring Latin America

Complex post-cold war politics, depoliticizing and Human Rights – week 12

Posted by in Week 12

As we get closer to the modern day in our learning on the politics of Latin America, it seems the issues seemingly become more complex. Perhaps it is the lack of temporal distance; these events are discussions are not clarified by historical distance. Also, as the polarizing and binarizing tendencies of cold war ‘camps’ dissolve, so our compartmentalizing of stakeholders becomes unstructured. Perhaps this dissolution leaves bare these political events, which can no longer be reduced to capitalist versus communist. As these structures lift, we can only wonder how much…read more

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Week 5

Posted by in Week 5

In the period following “independence” of the former Spanish Empire in the Americas, many of the new nation-states struggled to establish peaceful regimes in the ensuing vacuum of power. What becomes clear is a linear conception of development (in the broad, historical sense) largely defined by Eurocentric (and therefore colonial) ideology. The binary between barbarism and civilization points to the two extremes of this imported historical-determinist trajectory. In turn, the ideal of civilization became dominated by the subsequent royalist-republican binary (along liberal-conservative lines). Through the analysis of the concept of…read more

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