The Mexican government's full-frontal attack on the powerful drugs cartels has achieved mixed results. This book considers the issue from a variety of viewpoints. The essential argument is that the organized crime is best combated by institutional reforms directed at strengthening the rule of law rather than by a heavy reliance on armed force.

Evaluating a broad selection of Mexican films produced from the early 1990s to the present, this study examines how production methods, audience demographics, and aesthetic approaches have changed throughout the past two decades and how these changes relate to the country's transitions to a democratic political system and a free-market economy.

Citizenship and Political Violence in Peru recounts the hidden history of how local processes of citizen formation in an Andean town were persistently overruled from the nineteenth century on, thereby perpetuating antagonism toward the Peruvian state and p

Using the Peruvian internal armed conflict as a case study, this book examines wartime rape and how it reproduces and reinforces existing hierarchies. Jelke Boesten argues that effective responses to sexual violence in wartime are conditional upon profound changes in legal frameworks and practices, institutions, and society at large.

This timely and interdisciplinary volume analyzes the many impacts of and contrasting responses to the Argentine political, economic, and social crises of 2001-02. Chapters offer original theoretical models and examine the relationship between political, cultural, economic, and societal spheres.

This book offers a comparative analysis of the distinct experiences of the Peruvian and Bolivian cocaleros as political actors. In doing so, it illustrates how coca, an internationally criminalzsed good, affected the path and outcome of cocalero political empowerment in each case.

This book presents one of the first detailed analyses of the first six decades of Bourbon rule in Spanish America (1700-1763). Based on a wealth of archival sources in Spain and Peru and on a body of historical research that has transformed our understandi

Can 'theory' teach us anything about Peru? Can 'Peru' teach us anything about theory? The chapters in this volume explore these questions by establishing a productive dialogue between Peru and theory. Focusing on institutional weakness and economic, social, gendered, racialized, and other forms of exclusion key issues in recent social scientific inquiry in Peru - the contributors to this volume assess the extent to which the analytical frameworks of a number of social and cultural theorists can inform, and, at the same time, be informed by, Peru as a case study.

This book offers a detailed picture of Jamaica before and after independence. A 1961 journal sheds light on the political and social context before independence, while a 1968 journal shows how independence dissolved dissident forces and identifies the origins of Jamaica's current two party politics.

Michele Bachelet, Chile's first female president, was elected in 2006 with an explicit gender agenda, promising to appoint new faces (including women) to her government and implement some positive gender change. After a period as the first head of UN Women, she was subsequently reelected for a second term in 2013 with a decisive majority. This volume focuses on Bachelet's efforts in both her first and second administrations to introduce progressive measures in Chile and the constraints that she has faced in a context where both formal and informal political institutions can act as barriers to...