Key Issues and Texts: Development and Policy
Seminar 1: Urban Informality, Peripheries and Inequalities in Latin America (Dolores Señorans)
Latin America is today the most urbanised area of the world with 80% of its population living in cities. For decades much of this rapid urbanisation has been fuelled by residents who have constructed their own houses and often entire neighbourhoods. Villas, asentamientos, favelas, comunas, cantegriles, barrios, are some of the many popular ways of naming these urban areas that have long caught the attention of social scientists. This session will focus on the informal city and the urban peripheries in Latin America through an anthropological lens. Firstly, we discuss how urban segregation shapes the everyday experiences of residents considering inequalities in the access to urban infrastructure and public services, violence and environmental suffering. Secondly, we consider the changing nature of state planning – ranging from forced displacement and slum eradication to pacification and securitization – delving into the imaginaries that underpin it, and its consequences. Thirdly, we explore how residents have organised to struggle for citizenship and “the right to the city”. Finally, we reflect on the politics of representation of these spaces as sites of deprivation and their populations as the “urban poor”, and consider the potential contributions that anthropological studies from the south can make to urban theory.
Key issues
- Urban segregation
- Peripheral urbanisation
- Securitization
- The Right to the City
Additional material
Documentary “Ciudad del boom ciudad del bang” (2013).
Key texts
- Auyero, Javier, and Débora Alejandra Swistun. 2009. Flammable Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Introduction (Pp 1-20) and Chapter 4 (Pp 81-108).
- Caldeira, Teresa Pires. 2017. ‘Peripheral urbanization: Autoconstruction, transversal logics, and politics in cities of the global south’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35(1), 3-20.
- Gledhill, John. 2015. The New War on the Poor: the Production of Insecurity in Latin America. London: Zed Books. Chapter 2 (Pp 29-62).
- Perez, Miguel. 2017. ‘Reframing Housing Struggles: Right to the City and Urban Citizenship in Santiago, Chile’. City. Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action 21 (5): 530–49.
Seminar 2: Popular Economies: Life, Labour and Collective Politics (Dolores Señorans)
This session will address urban popular economies in Latin America in the context of contemporary academic and political debates on the precarisation of life and labour. Through the analysis of ethnographic studies, the session explores two main issues. Firstly, we will examine popular ways of making a living focusing on their linkages to social relationships and obligations, public policies, market dynamics and politics. When looked at with an anthropological lens, wageless lives are neither lacking nor detached from capital accumulation. Secondly, we will discuss what kinds of collective politics are emerging from these experiences. While it is often asserted that the precarisation of labour is part of capitalist strategies to fragment, disorganise and limit the possibilities for collective action, current political experimentations show that such a goal is never complete and that workers have developed innovative organisations to claim for their rights. More broadly, the anthropological exploration of popular economies in Latin America will lead to the interrogation of assumed distinctions such as formal/informal, market/non-market, urban poor/working class.
Key issues
- Urban popular economies
- Marginality, informal economy, surplus populations
- Precarity in everyday life
- Emerging forms of collective politics
Additional material
Documentary “Un gigante de cartón” (2020). [Students should watch it before the seminar]
Key texts
- Fernández Álvarez, María Inés. 2019. ‘“Having a Name of One’s Own, Being a Part of History”: Temporalities of Precarity and Political Subjectivities of Popular Economy Workers in Argentina’. Dialectical Anthropology 43 (1): 61–76.
- Munck, Ronaldo. 2013. ‘The Precariat: a view from the South’. Third World Quarterly 34 (5): 747–62.
- Millar, Kathleen M. 2014. ‘The Precarious Present: Wageless Labor and Disrupted Life in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’. Cultural Anthropology 29 (1): 32–53.
- O’Hare, Patrick. 2022. Rubbish Belongs to the Poor: Hygienic Enclosure and the Waste Commons. London: Pluto Press. Chapter 5 "Precarious Labour Organising and Urban Alambramiento". Pp 154-178.
Seminar 3: Economic growth, industrialisation and industrial policy (Jennifer Castañeda-Navarrete)
This session examines the economic growth and industrialisation nexus. It discusses the evolution of industrial policy in Latin America and the schools of economic thought that have influenced it. The session critically reviews the outcomes of industrial policy in the region and how they compare with those achieved by recently industrialised countries in other regions. It evaluates emerging impacts of the global transition towards a low carbon economy and the role of manufacturing in the post-COVID-19 recovery.
Key issues
- Neostructuralism
- Industrialisation
- Export-orientated growth
- Global value chains
- Extractivism
- ‘Green’ transitions
Key texts
- Leiva, F. I. 2008. Toward a Critique of Latin American Neostructuralism. Latin American Politics and Society, 50(4), 1-25.
- Kingsbury, D. V. 2022. Lithium’s buzz: extractivism between booms in Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile. Cultural Studies
- Ocampo, J.A. and Porcile, G. 2020. Latin American Industrial Policies: A Comparative Perspective. In: Oqubay, A., Cramer, C., Chang, H. and Kozul Wright, R. eds. The Oxford Handbook of Industrial Policy.
Seminar 4: Poverty, inequality, and social policy (Jennifer Castañeda-Navarrete)
Latin America is a region of contrasts where extreme wealth coexists with extreme poverty. This session discusses why Latin America remains one of the most unequal regions in the world and how social policy has tackled poverty and inequality since the 1990s. The session examines the evolution and outcomes of social policy in the region, questioning the underlying dominant normative approaches to development and the role of the state. Recent developments of social policy are discussed, including its financialisation and digitalisation, the mainstreaming of alternative development discourses, and the role of social policy in a transformative post-COVID-19 recovery.
Key issues
- Poverty and inequality trends
- Causes of inequality
- Financialisation of social policy
- Good living / Sumak Kawsay / Buen Vivir
- Transformative post-COVID-19 recovery
Key texts
- Beling, A.E., Cubillo-Guevara, A.P., Vanhulst, J. and Hidalgo-Capitán, A.L. 2021. Buen vivir (Good Living): A “Glocal” Genealogy of a Latin American Utopia for the World. Latin American Perspectives. 2021;48(3):17-34.
- Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) 2021. Introduction in Social Panorama of Latin America, 2020, (LC/PUB.2021/2-P/Rev.1), Santiago, pp. 11-44.
- Lavinas, L. 2018. The Collateralization of Social Policy under Financialized Capitalism. Development and Change, 49: 502-517.
- Molyneux, M. 2008. The ‘Neoliberal Turn’ and the New Social Policy in Latin America: How Neoliberal, How New? Development and Change, 39(5), 775-797.
Seminar 5: International Aid and Development in Latin America (Felipe Krause)
This session examines the contemporary politics of aid in Latin America from two distinct but intimately related angles. First, we assess the economic and political interests of three major players: the U.S., China and Brazil. What are the evolving interests of the U.S. as a donor in the region? Has China effectively displaced the U.S. and other traditional development actors such as the EU? How can we understand the rise and decline of Brazilian “South-South Development Cooperation”? Second, we take the perspective of local populations and ask what key “development aid” goals have been reached, if any. Conceiving international assistance as a contested set of transnational flows – of ideas, people and capital – our aim is to understand how it intertwines geopolitical rivalries with everyday lives in the region.
Key issues
- The international politics of development assistance
- South-South Development Cooperation
- Aid and human development
- Civil society organisations
Key texts
- Babb, S. (2013). The Washington Consensus as transnational policy paradigm: Its origins, trajectory and likely successor, Review of International Political Economy, 20:2, 268-297
- Blitzer, J. (2019). How Climate Change Is Fuelling the U.S. Border Crisis, New Yorker, April 3.
- Mawdsley, E. (2019). South–South Cooperation 3.0? Managing the consequences of success in the decade ahead, Oxford Development Studies, 47:3, 259-274
- Stallings, B. (2020). Dependency in the Twenty-First Century?: The Political Economy of China-Latin America Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Chapters 5, 6 and 7).
Seminar 6: (Anti-) Drug Policy and Drug Trafficking Organisations (Felipe Krause)
This session examines the nature of the War on Drugs and its consequences for Latin America and asks whether there are realistic alternatives on the horizon. To do so, we consider the history of the War on Drugs as both a U.S.-led crusade but also as a home-grown effort, linked to racial and gender inequalities, neoliberal economic policies and the very consolidation of the nation-state. We also address the evolution of drug cartels and their violent interaction with the state since the 1970s, interrogating the underlying logics of this history. Finally, we look at recent attempts at drug policy reform and assess their political viability. Examples are taken from the two most prevalent illegal drugs in Latin America: cocaine and cannabis.
Key issues
- The logic of the War on Drugs
- Drug trafficking organisations
- Drug policy reform
Key texts
- Castro, G. (2014). From Punishment to Markets: Social Movements, the State, and Legal Marijuana in Uruguay, Trabajo presentado en el Quinto Congreso Uruguayo de Ciencia Política, Asociación Uruguaya de Ciencia Política, 7-10 de octubre de 2014.
- Lessing, B. (2017). Making Peace in Drug Wars: Crackdowns and Cartels in Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Chapter 11 - Conclusion).
- Gootenberg, P. (2021). Shifting South: Cocaine’s Historical Present and the Changing Politics of Drug War, 1975–2015. In Desmond Arias, E. & Grisaffi, T., Cocaine: From Coca Fields to the Streets. Durham: Duke University Press.
- Rodrigues, T. & Labate, B. (2016). Brazilian Drug Policy: Tension Between Repression and Alternatives. In Labate, B., Cavnar, C., & Rodrigues, T. Drug Policies and the Politics of Drugs in the Americas. Switzerland: Springer.