Unsettling Statecraft: Democracy and Neoliberalism in the Central Andes

Catherine M. Conaghan · James Malloy

Nov 2010 · Pitt Latin American Series Book 349 · University of Pittsburgh Pre

About this ebook

Latin America in the 1980s was marked by the transition to democracy and a turn toward economic orthodoxy. Unsettling Statecraft analyzes this transition in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, focusing on the political dynamics underlying change and the many disturbing tendencies at work as these countries shed military authoritarianism for civilian rule.Conaghan and Malloy draw on insights from the political economy literature, viewing policy making as a "historically conditioned" process, and they conclude that the disturbing tendencies their research reveals are not due to regional pathology but are part of the more general experience of postmodern democracy.

About the author

Catherine M. Conaghan is professor of political science at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. Her research has included fieldwork in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. She is the author of Fujimori’s Peru: Deception in the Public Sphere and Restructuring Domination: Industrialists and the State in Ecuador, and is the coauthor of Unsettling Statecraft: Democracy and Neoliberalism in the Central Andes. She has been a visiting scholar at Princeton University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Miami, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the University of San Diego, the Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, American University, and the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales-Ecuador. In 2013 she was appointed as the Sir Edward Peacock Professor of Latin American Politics.