Key Issues and Texts: Development and Policy in Latin America

Key Issues and Texts: Development and Policy in Latin America  

Seminar 1: Industrial policy and catching-up in Latin America (PML)

This session examines recent development strategies in Latin America, interrogating their views regarding what economic policies should be adopted to reach fast and sustained growth. The session discusses how different strategies see the role of manufacturing versus resource-based development; advocate for export-orientated versus domestic-focused growth; analyse global value chains and how climb to their higher links; and integrate growth into a larger policy and development framework. The focus, throughout, is specifically on the role that industrial policy has played, historically, and that it could play, normatively. 

Key issues 

• New/neo-developmentalism & neostructuralism 
• Export-orientated growth 
• Resource-based development 
• Global value chains 
• Industrial policy 

Required readings 

• Kay, C 2002. Why East Asia overtook Latin America: Agrarian reform, industrialisation and development. Third World Quarterly, 23(6), 1073-1102. 
• Leiva, F. I. 2008. Toward a Critique of Latin American Neostructuralism. Latin American Politics and Society, 50(4), 1-25. 
• Ocampo, JA and Porcile, G, 2020. Latin American Industrial Policies: A Comparative Perspective. In: Oqubay, A ed. The Oxford Handbook of Industrial Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 811-841. 
• Perez, C. 2016. Could Technology Make Natural Resources a Platform for Industrialization? Identifying a New Opportunity for Latin America (and Other Resource-Rich Countries). In: Noman, A. and Stiglitz, J. E. eds. Efficiency, Finance, and Varieties of Industrial Policy: Guiding Resources, Learning, and Technology for Sustained Growth. Columbia University Press, 353-389. 

Bibliography

Seminar 2: Resource-led Development and the Commodity Consensus in Latin America (KG)

Since the turn of the millennium, with the soaring price of hydrocarbons and minerals across the globe, states within Latin America have enacted sweeping commitments to extractive-led development strategies. Such policies have sought to harness the wealth of marketable commodities for social investment and economic growth. Yet, resources are not simply objects with bio- or geo-physical properties and international prices for exploitation. They are trod upon and seen, used or ignored, experienced and interpreted in a variety of ways by the communities which rest upon and around them. In short, they are embedded within larger fields of historical and social significance. As methods of extraction work to pull them from the earth and sea, relations between peoples and resources became refracted and complicated further. This module explores the diverse entanglements that extractive-led development has created for peoples across Latin America – from moral claims, to labour regimes and environmental transformations - investigating the ways in which commodities are created, understood, and contested by populations ear-marked for progress.

Seminar 3: Social policy under the (Post-) Washington Consensus (PML) 

This session examines the main changes to social policy frameworks in Latin America since the 1990s. It explores how income-supporting policies and the provision of key goods and services have been envisioned, following the main policy frameworks since the transition to neoliberalism and from the 2000s onwards. Policies are investigated not only in terms of their expected and actual results, but also placed in the theoretical and normative underpinnings that are used to justify them and their future potential. Some of the key processes this session discusses are the rise of conditional cash transfer (CCT) schemes, the muted rise of universal social protection networks, the ‘financialisation’ of social policy, and the rationales and visions that underpin these different frameworks and their dynamics. 

Key issues 

• Social protection, social policy, and the welfare state 
• Conditional cash transfers 
• Universal and targeted social protection networks 
• ‘Financialisation’ of social policy 
• (Post-)Washington Consensus 

Required readings 

• Filgueira, F., 2015. Models of development, the welfare state matrix and Latin American social policy tools. In: Cecchini, S., Filgueira, F., Martínez, R. and Rossel, C. eds. Towards universal social protection: Latin American pathways and policy tools. Santiago: ECLAC, 47-80. 
• Franzoni, J. M. and Sánchez-Ancochea, D., 2018. Why and How to Build Universal Social Policy in the South. In: Paus, E. ed. Confronting Dystopia: The New Technological Revolution and the Future of Work. Cornell University Press, 230-250. 
• Lavinas, L. 2018. The Collateralization of Social Policy under Financialized Capitalism. Development and Change, 49(2), 502-517. 
• Roberts, KM, 2021. The Inclusionary Turn and Its Political Limitations. In: Kapiszewski, D, et al. eds. The Inclusionary Turn in Latin American Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 518-538. 

Bibliography
 

Seminar 4: Gender and Criminal Justice in Latin America (BA)

This session examines the current state of criminal justice in Latin America, taking gender as a category of analysis.  The relationship between women and the criminal justice system has been the subject of academic observation and public policy in Latin America, especially since the 1980s. On the one hand, high rates of domestic and gender-based violence in the region, as well as impunity for perpetrators of violence and the unpreparedness of institutions, began to be denounced. Since then, there has been state investment in legislation—with the criminalisation of femicide, for example, in 18 countries in the region—the creation of institutions such as police stations specialising in assisting women, and numerous cases involving women as victims brought before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. On the other hand, the specificities of female crime and imprisonment also began to attract the attention of states and researchers, especially since the 1990s. Women as perpetrators of crimes, not just as victims, also began to be observed with the increase in incarceration in the region in the context of the war on drugs. The objective of this seminar is to look at this dual role of women in the criminal justice system, as victims and as perpetrators of crimes, in order to analyse what looking at the criminal justice system from a gender perspective enables in analytical and practical terms.

Key issues

• Criminal justice system in Latin America
• Female incarceration in Latin America
• Gender violence in Latin America
• Femicide in Latin America

Required Readings: 

• Bergman M, Fondevila G. Female Imprisonment and Violence in Latin America. In: Prisons and Crime in Latin America. Cambridge University Press; 2021:106-120.
   
• Cynthia L. Bejarano, & Rosa-Linda Fregoso. (2010). Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas. Duke University Press. Introduction: A Cartography of Feminicide in the Americas. (p. 1-42).
   
• Srinivasan, A. (2021). Sex, Carceralism, Capitalism. In The Right to Sex. United Kingdom: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. (p. 149-179).

Bibliography

Seminar 5: Mass Incarceration in Latin America (BA) 

 This session examines the reality and context of prisons in Latin America, especially the current scenario of mass incarceration and prison failure. There is an investment in prison as the main response to crime in the region, leading to distinctive traits of overcrowded prisons, human rights violations, and lack of access to justice. The ‘war on drugs’ justifies and stimulates actions that have led to this state of increasing incarceration. The Latin American prison reality will be analysed considering the causes and consequences of mass incarceration, taking into account social markers such as class, race and gender.

Key issues 

• Mass incarceration in Latin America
• criminalization in Latin America
• war on drugs in Latin America
• gender, race, class and prison

Required readings 

• Sozzo, M.  (2018). Beyond the ‘Neo-liberal Penality Thesis’? Punitive Turn and Political Change in South America. In: Carrington, K. et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan. 659-685. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65021-0_32
• Bergman, M. Fondevila, G. (2021). Prisons and Crime in Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1-86. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108768238
• Telles, V., Godoi, R., Brito, J.G.M., Mallart, F. (2020). Fighting Mass Incarceration, Fighting for Life: Elements for a History of the Present in Brazil. Champ Penal.  21. 1-16 https://doi.org/10.4000/champpenal.12143

Bibliography
 

Seminar 6: Social conflict and illegal economies (PML)

Whilst Latin America has not experienced ‘classic’ forms of inter-state war as much as other regions, domestic forms of conflict abound. This session deals with how social conflict and its dynamics – from punishment to the inequalities that surround it – permeate the reproduction of capitalism in Latin America, drawing on the previous discussion about mass incarceration. It focusses on how different forms of conflict are integral aspects of the reproduction of capitalism in and through the region, interrogating the boundaries between legal and illegal economies and questioning the alleged marginality of the latter. In doing so, it also discusses the normative regimes that surround social conflict and (il)legal economies, seeking to legitimate, disrupt or reproduce these categories. 

Key issues 

• Forms and dimensions of social conflict 
• The imbrication of legal and illegal economies 
• Normative readings of conflict and (il)legality 

Required readings 

• Feltran, G., ed., 2022. Stolen Cars: A Journey Through São Paulo’s Urban Conflict. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons. (available in the library). There are long descriptive sections. Don’t get fixated on the detail, but look for the bigger picture. 

Bibliography