Download or read book Colombian Peasants in the Neoliberal Age written by Nazih F. Richani and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2023-08-01 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting the historical, socioeconomic, political, and security conditions experienced by three peasant communities, Colombian Peasants in the Neoliberal Age provides readers with the most up-to-date and comprehensive assessment of Colombia's peasants currently available. Nazih F. Richani examines their adaptive strategies and resistance to subsumption processes and the prospects for the sustainability of their modes of production, culture, and livelihood. In addition, he explores each communities' level of agency that has allowed them to respond to the encroachments of rentier economy by devising adaptive strategies and building collaborative networks, forging new partners at the national, regional, and global levels. These findings are timely given the historic change in Colombia's leadership as represented by President Gustavo Petro, a former rebel and a leftist leader, and his vice president Francia Elena Marquez, an Afro-Colombian woman activist. The Petro administration offers an exceptional opportunity for radical policy change toward national development, particularly towards peasants and agrarian issues. The research undertaken in this book holds the potential to enrich political discussions and inform new policies.

Download or read book Revolutionary Rehearsals in the Neoliberal Age written by Colin Barker and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2021-07-01 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ambitious volume examines revolutionary situations during a non-revolutionary historical conjuncture--the neoliberal era. The last three decades have seen an increase in the number of political upheavals that challenge existing power structures, many of them taking the form of urban revolts. This book compellingly explores a series of such upheavals--in Eastern Europe, South Africa, Indonesia, Argentina, Bolivia, Venezuela, sub-Saharan Africa (including Congo, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso) and Egypt. Each chapter studies the ways in which protest movements developed into insurgent challenges to state power, and the strategies that regimes have deployed to contain and repress revolt. In addition to empirical chapters, the book engages in theorization of revolution, dealing with questions such as the patterning of revolution in contemporary history, the relationship between class struggle and social movements, and the prospects of socialist revolution in the twenty-first century.

Download or read book Global Capitalism Democracy and Civil Military Relations in Colombia written by William Aviles and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the lens of global capitalism theory, William Avilés examines democratization and civil-military relations in Colombia to explain how social and international forces led to the ostensibly contradictory outcome of democratic and economic reform coinciding with political repression. Focusing on the administrations in power from 1990 to the present, Avilés argues that the reduction in the institutional powers of the military within the state reflected changes in the structure of the global economy, the emergence of globalizing technocrats and politicians, and shifts in U.S. foreign policy strategies toward "democracy promotion." These same factors explain Colombia's establishment of a low-intensity democracy—a structure of elite rule in which the strategies of coercion (state and para-state repression) and consensus (competitive elections, civilian control over the military) maintain control and legitimacy. In the age of capitalist globalization, a low-intensity democracy is most concomitant with neoliberalism, establishing the political and economic environment most suitable to the investments of transnational corporations.

Download or read book The Tyranny of Common Sense written by Irmgard Emmelhainz and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2021-11-01 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As one of the first countries to implement a neoliberal state apparatus, Mexico serves as a prime example of the effects of neoliberal structural economic reform on our sensibility. Irgmard Emmelhainz argues that, in addition to functioning as a form of politico-economic organization, neoliberalism creates particular ways of seeing and inhabiting the world. It reconfigures common sense, justifying destruction and dispossession in the name of development and promising to solve economic precarity with self-help and permanent education. Pragmatism reigns, yet in always aiming to maximize individual benefit and profit, such common sense fuels a culture of violence and erodes the distinction between life and death. Moreover, since 2018, with the election of a new Mexican president, neoliberalism has undergone what Emmelhainz calls "post-neoliberal conversion," intensifying extractavism and ushering in a novel form of moral, political, and intellectual hegemony rooted in class tensions and populism. Integrating theory with history and lived reality with art, film, and literary criticism, The Tyranny of Common Sense will appeal to academics and readers interested in the effects of neoliberalism and, now, post-neoliberalism in Mexico from a broader, global perspective. Originally published in Spanish in 2016 as La tiranía del sentido común: La reconversión neoliberal de México, the English edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded to encompass a critical vision of the current regime.

Download or read book Race and Rurality in the Global Economy written by Michaeline A. Crichlow and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2018-09-26 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays that examine globalization’s effects with an emphasis on the interplay of race and rurality as it occurs across diverse geographies and peoples. Issues of migration, environment, rurality, and the visceral “politics of place” and “space” have occupied center stage in recent electoral political struggles in the United States and Europe, suffused by an antiglobalization discourse that has come to resonate with Euro-American peoples. Race and Rurality in the Global Economysuggests that this present fractious global politics begs for closer attention to be paid to the deep-rooted conditions and outcomes of globalization and development. From multiple viewpoints the contributors to this volume propose ways of understanding the ongoing processes of globalization that configure peoples and places via a politics of rurality in a capitalist world economy, and through an optics of raciality that intersects with class, gender, identity, land, and environment. In tackling the dynamics of space and place, their essays address matters such as the heightened risks and multiple states of insecurity in the global economy; the new logics of expulsion and primitive accumulation dynamics shaping a new “savage sorting”; patterns of resistance and transformation in the face of globalization’s political and environmental changes; the steady decline in the livelihoods of people of color globally and their deepened vulnerabilities; and the complex reconstitution of systemic and lived racialization within these processes. This book is an invitation to ask whether our dystopia in present politics can be disentangled from the deepening sense of “white fragility” in the context of the historical power of globalization’s raced effects.

Download or read book Blood and Capital written by Jasmin Hristov and published by Ohio University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Blood and Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia, Jasmin Hristov examines the complexities, dynamics, and contradictions of present-day armed conflict in Colombia. She conducts an in-depth inquiry into the restructuring of the state’s coercive apparatus and the phenomenon of paramilitarism by looking at its military, political, and legal dimensions. Hristov demonstrates how various interrelated forms of violence by state forces, paramilitary groups, and organized crime are instrumental to the process of capital accumulation by the local elite as well as the exercise of political power by foreign enterprises. She addresses, as well, issues of forced displacement, proletarianization of peasants, concentration of landownership, growth in urban and rural poverty, and human rights violations in relation to the use of legal means and extralegal armed force by local dominant groups and foreign companies. Hristov documents the penetration of major state institutions by right-wing armed groups and the persistence of human rights violations against social movements and sectors of the low-income population. Blood and Capital raises crucial questions about the promised dismantling of paramilitarism in Colombia and the validity of the so-called demobilization of paramilitary groups, both of which have been widely considered by North American and some European governments as proof of Colombian president Álvaro Uribe’s advances in the wars on terror and drugs.

Download or read book Evil Hour in Colombia written by Forrest Hylton and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Colombia is the least understood of Latin American countries. Its human tragedy, which features terrifying levels of kidnapping, homicide and extortion, is generally ignored or exploited. In this urgent new work Forrest Hylton, who has extensive first-hand experience of living and working in Colombia, explores its history of 150 years of political conflict, characterized by radical-popular mobilization and reactionary repression. Evil Hour in Colombia shows how patterns of political conflict, from the mid-nineteenth century to today's guerilla narco-traffickers and paramilitaries, explain the wear currently destroying Colombian lives, property, communities and territory. In doing so, it traces how Colombia's "coffee capitalism" gave way to the cattle and cocaine republic of the 1980s, and how land, wealth and power have been steadily accumulated by the light-skinned top of the social pyramid through a brutal combination of terror, expropriation and economic depression.

Download or read book Accumulation and Subjectivity written by Karen Benezra and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1970s, sociocultural analysis in Latin American studies has been marked by a turn away from problems of political economy. Accumulation and Subjectivity challenges this turn while reconceptualizing the relationship between political economy and the life of the subject. The fourteen essays in this volume show that, in order to understand the dynamics governing the extraction of wealth under contemporary capitalism, we also need to consider the collective subjects implied in this operation at an institutional, juridical, moral, and psychic level. More than merely setting the scene for social and political struggle, Accumulation and Subjectivity reveals Latin America to be a cauldron for thought for a critique of political economy and radical political change beyond its borders. Combining reflections on political philosophy, intellectual history, narrative, law, and film from the colonial period to the present, it provides a new conceptual vocabulary rooted in the material specificity of the region and, for this very reason, potentially translatable to other historical contexts. This collection will be of interest to scholars of Marxism, Latin American literary and cultural studies, and the intellectual history of the left.

Download or read book Circle of Goods written by Tressa Berman and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Circle of Goods compiles the stories of Native American women and examines their kinship, wage work, and informal economies. Responding to the upheavals of reservation life brought about by federal policies—from commodity rations to welfare reform—Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara women, each with distinct histories and cultural practices, stand at the center of the Fort Berthold reservation economy. Berman introduces the concept of ceremonial relations of production to explain the contradictory effects of economic incentives and cultural commitments, and argues that the historical movement of people and goods through a series of structured dependencies often gives rise to creative strategies for survival and new social identities.

Download or read book The Left Strikes Back written by James Petras and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-02-19 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Petras shows that the current stage of capital globalization and the weakening of the ability of established popular groups to defend themselves have generated an important organized response on the part of those whose standard of living is most undermined and threatened by the process. The book argues convincingly that we can now see the emerging forms of resistance in new, popular organizations that, while frequently local and provincial, nevertheless have developed an international consciousness. By discussing their spatial-economic focus, social base, style of political action, and political perspective, The Left Strikes Back both identifies and differentiates the different waves of the left. Further, it presents data documenting the growth, contradictions, and political challenges that confront these burgeoning socio-political movements.

Download or read book Law in a Lawless Land written by Michael Taussig and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2005-11-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A modern nation in a state of total disorder, Colombia is an international flashpoint—wracked by more than half a century of civil war, political conflict, and drug-trade related violence—despite a multibillion dollar American commitment that makes it the third-largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid. Law in a Lawless Land offers a rare and penetrating insight into the nature of Colombia's present peril. In a nuanced account of the human consequences of a disintegrating state, anthropologist Michael Taussig chronicles two weeks in a small town in Colombia's Cauca Valley taken over by paramilitaries that brazenly assassinate adolescent gang members. Armed with automatic weapons and computer-generated lists of names and photographs, the paramilitaries have the tacit support of the police and even many of the desperate townspeople, who are seeking any solution to the crushing uncertainty of violence in their lives. Concentrating on everyday experience, Taussig forces readers to confront a kind of terror to which they have become numb and complacent. "If you want to know what it is like to live in a country where the state has disintegrated, this moving book by an anthropologist well known for his writings on murderous Colombia will tell you."—Eric Hobsbawm

Download or read book Plan Colombia written by Gabriel Marcella and published by . This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 54 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume in our "Plan Colombia" series contains four expert presentations which were made to the February 2001 Miami symposium. The writers are a high-ranking retired military commander from Colombia and one from the United States, a leading Panamanian political figure, and a U.S. journalist. As might be expected, they look at the complex dilemma of Colombia from somewhat different angles. Yet, unlike the fable of the elephant and the blind men, the authors offer us more elements in common than contrasting views. First, it is clear that none of them offers a panacea or quick-fix solution or even believes that any short-term solution is possible. That judgment is critical for the Bush administration as it faces the need to develop and explain its own approach to the Congress and to the American public, audiences who are inherently against long-term involvements when they can be avoided.

Download or read book Why Nations Fail written by Daron Acemoglu and published by Currency. This book was released on 2013-09-17 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine? Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence? Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or lack of it). Korea, to take just one of their fascinating examples, is a remarkably homogeneous nation, yet the people of North Korea are among the poorest on earth while their brothers and sisters in South Korea are among the richest. The south forged a society that created incentives, rewarded innovation, and allowed everyone to participate in economic opportunities. The economic success thus spurred was sustained because the government became accountable and responsive to citizens and the great mass of people. Sadly, the people of the north have endured decades of famine, political repression, and very different economic institutions—with no end in sight. The differences between the Koreas is due to the politics that created these completely different institutional trajectories. Based on fifteen years of original research Acemoglu and Robinson marshall extraordinary historical evidence from the Roman Empire, the Mayan city-states, medieval Venice, the Soviet Union, Latin America, England, Europe, the United States, and Africa to build a new theory of political economy with great relevance for the big questions of today, including: - China has built an authoritarian growth machine. Will it continue to grow at such high speed and overwhelm the West? - Are America’s best days behind it? Are we moving from a virtuous circle in which efforts by elites to aggrandize power are resisted to a vicious one that enriches and empowers a small minority? - What is the most effective way to help move billions of people from the rut of poverty to prosperity? More philanthropy from the wealthy nations of the West? Or learning the hard-won lessons of Acemoglu and Robinson’s breakthrough ideas on the interplay between inclusive political and economic institutions? Why Nations Fail will change the way you look at—and understand—the world.

Download or read book Systems of Violence Second Edition written by Nazih Richani and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Expanded new edition of an important study of the protracted violence in Colombia. This book examines the political, economic, and military factors that have contributed to decades of violent conflict in Colombia during one of the longest protracted civil wars in the world. Using four years of field research, and more than two hundred interviews, Nazih Richani examines Colombia’s “war system”—the systemic interlacing relationship among actors in conflict, their respective political economy, and also the overall political economy of the system they help in creating. Several key questions are raised, including when and why do some conflicts protract, and what types of socioeconomic and political configurations make peaceful resolutions difficult to obtain? Also addressed are the lessons of other protracted conflicts, such as those found in Lebanon, Angola, and Italy. In this expanded second edition Richani contributes new chapters looking at developments in Colombia since the book’s initial publication a decade ago and a look at the challenges for peace that lie ahead.

Download or read book Violence and Resistance Art and Politics in Colombia written by Stephen Zepke and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-04-20 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the historical and contemporary connections between art and politics in Colombia. These relations are unique because of the ways in which they are saturated by violence, as the country has passed through conquest, struggles for Independence, fighting between political factions, civil war, paramilitaries, narco-traffickers and state violence. This seemingly unending stream of violence gives art in Colombia one of its main themes. The lavishly illustrated essays, written by Colombian authors, examine Colombian visual arts, music, theatre, literature, cinema, indigenous arts, popular culture, militant publications and recent protest movements, analysing them with tools drawn from contemporary philosophy and theory. Approaches include decolonisation theory, cosmopolitics, anthropology after the ontological turn, Colombian philosophy, feminism, and French theory. The essays all offer powerful understandings of how art has not only been complicit in perpetuating political violence in Colombia, but also how it has been a vital form of analysis and resistance.

Download or read book War Without Quarter written by Human Rights Watch (Organization) and published by Human Rights Watch. This book was released on 1998 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The laws of war and Colombia

Download or read book Encountering Development written by Arturo Escobar and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: 1995. Paperback reissue, with a new preface by the author.