Social Movements, Hegemony, and New Forms of Resistance (original) (raw)

Social movements and the state: political power dynamics in Latin America

2006

Abstract In Latin America, it is possible to identify three basic modalities of social change and political power: electoral politics, the construction of social movements, and social action in the direction of local development. But radical politics of mass mobilisation remains the indispensable condition for advancing the struggle for social change towards a new world of social justice and real development based on popular power.

Neoliberalism, Democracy, and Contemporary Social Movements in Latin America

Latin American Politics and Society, 2011

These four books combined offer a wealth of interesting, rich ethnographic data and novel analysis of contemporary Latin America ¶s leftist political parties, social movements, and civil society. During the past 20 years they cover, the region underwent important changes as neoliberalism stormed throughout Latin America in the wake of the military dictatorships that paved its way. The authors of these volumes focus on the innovative, bold, daring, and clever initiatives of social actors in the public sphere, who can be credited with, if not altogether stopping neoliberalism, certainly altering its course, forcing changes, advancing democracy, and in some cases, even overthrowing corrupted national governments. This essay will offer a brief summary of each book, take a look at its research methodology, analyze how the different pieces ³talk´ to each other, and assess their contributions to the field.

Social Movements in Latin America: A historical stocktaking

2006

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the peasant movements in Latin America had been seeking for agrarian reform while the urban workers' movements gradually constituted themselves more clearly as wage-earners' movements. Such set of social movements that arose over the course of the first decades of the twentieth century, with projects of their own, was to have an opportunity to approach power in the 1930s and 1940s with the constitution of popular and populist governments. Since the Cold War, anti-imperialism social movements have been giving motivation to the national struggles in the continent under the domination of U.S. capitalism.