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