Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras are four Spanish speaking countries in Central America that possess uniformed military institutions. These four countries represent different approaches to reforms of civil-military relations, and embody varying degrees of success in both institutional democratization and the managing of security forces.

In this book, Orlando J. Perez expertly examines the competing theories of civil-military relations in Central America to advance our understanding of the origins, consequences and persistence of militarism in Latin...

Brazil has occupied a central role in the access to medicines movement, especially with respect to drugs used to treat those with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes the acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). How and why Brazil succeeded in overcoming powerful political and economic interests, both at home and abroad, to roll-out and sustain treatment represents an intellectual puzzle.

In this book, Matthew Flynn traces the numerous challenges Brazil faced in its efforts to provide essential medicines to all of its citizens. Using dependency...

Democratic institutions should promote accountability of government officials to the needs of citizens. Civil society plays a role in exposing corruption as well as in communicating the needs of low-income residents to officials. Neither the institutions of representative democracy nor the presence of civil society, however, appears to automatically guarantee adoption of social benefits for the poor. Can democratic institutions be created to address social challenges?

Scholars, development practitioners, donors, and activists propose participatory governance institutions as...

How do international negotiations affect domestic politics? Starting in the 1990s, countries throughout Latin America embarked on many and simultaneous negotiations. On the shifting ground of widening and deepening trade agendas and diverse arenas, what factors determined trade politics?

This book examines the domestic political dynamics triggered by South-South, North-South and multilateral agendas in Argentina and Chile between 1990 and 2005. Using a much-needed cross-negotiation and cross-country comparative perspectives, and through detailed empirical analyses of several key...

The Politics of Capitalist Transformation is the only book-length study of the highly protectionist Brazilian informatics policy from its origins in the early 1970s to the collapse of the market reserve in the early 1990s and its impact in subsequent decades.

Jeff Seward provides a sophisticated political analysis of how state activists constructed high levels of state autonomy to try to shift Brazil to a new variety of capitalism by eclipsing the multinational companies (especially IBM) that dominated the Brazilian computer sector and replacing them with local companies...

Latin American and Caribbean communities and civil societies are undergoing a rapid process of transformation. Instead of pervasive social atomization, political apathy, and hollowed-out democracies, which have become the norm in some parts of the world, this region is witnessing an emerging collaboration between community, civil society, and government that is revitalizing democracy.

This book argues that a key explanation lies in the powerful and positive relationship between community and civil society that exists in the region. The ideas of community and civil society tend to be...

Leading figures and rising stars in the field present the first contribution explaining the transnational nature of the revolutionary violence of the New Left. Focusing on the processes of dissemination of ideologies and mobilization of ideas and repertoires of action among the revolutionary organizations of the New Left in Latin America, Europe, and the United States, this book contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of the New Left wave and, at the same time, helps explain the "why" of the emergence of very similar armed leftist groups in vastly different geographical and...

Challenging the U.S.-Led War on Drugs explores the cases that have resisted the U.S. pressure to adopt a militarized approach to fight against drug trafficking in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Through a sweeping narrative history from the recovery of democracy in 1983 to the present, Cutrona applies international relations and comparative politics theories to understand Argentina s different trajectory vis-a-vis the rest of the region. The author demonstrates that in broad questions of vulnerability to U.S. pressure, external factors often play a secondary role in...

Insecurity in the Caribbean defines numerous push factors both for its citizens and capital investments; it also diminishes morale among the youth, their education, and their future. This volume fills the gap in criminological and security studies on the Caribbean by drawing attention to the nexus of crime, violence, and in/security that is so overwhelming yet under-studied in the region. M. Raymond Izarali and his team of experts bridge that gap by presenting an interwoven interdisciplinary approach that succinctly addresses the nexus of crime, violence, and in/security, and the ways in...