From the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO): Two books dedicated to thinking about the current state of democracies in the region
The Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) publishes and makes available to readers two works that analyze the present and future of democracies in our region: Democracy as a grievance, by the prominent thinker and politician Álvaro García Linera, and The crisis of democracy in Latin America, by Andrés Tzeiman and Danilo Martuscelli (comps.). Both books can be downloaded for free through the CLACSO website and are also found in bookstores.
Democracy as a grievance, Álvaro García Linera.
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In this work, Álvaro García Linera, one of the most prominent thinkers in the Latin American and Caribbean critical field, addresses the “infertile” times for democracy in its liberal meaning, that is, the dominant form in which democratization processes were institutionalized. in most of the world.
It postulates that the weakening of attachment to liberal representative democracy has a structural character, a product of the crisis of the historical cycle marked by neoliberalism, a process that dismantles the predictive horizon that orders the life and hopes of the population. In a time in which uncertainty reigns, discontent with democracy is expressed in various ways such as loss of legitimacy, growth of authoritarian forms and erosion of the representativeness of traditional parties.
“All the measurements that are periodically made on democratic loyalties on various continents show a growing disaffection among citizens. The number of countries with so-called “undemocratic” or authoritarian governments has increased in the last decade […]. The banners of solid liberal democracy, such as the United States and Europe, are not only besieged by the continuous growth of liberal political forces, but their own institutions, once neat and stable, are now the object of ridicule and violence, as was the case during the assault on the United States Capitol in 2021“.
The crisis of democracy in Latin America, Andrés Tzeiman and Danilo Enrico Martuscelli (comps.).
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From the authors’ point of view, the Latin American situation today is debated between the coordinates established by three phenomena, which are the framework of the ongoing democratic crisis. The first covers the global context: three decades after the emergence of a unipolar world, the international order faces a situation of hegemonic discontinuity. The second is the conservative reaction to the deployment of the progressive governments of the first fifteen years of the 21st century. The third connects directly with the previous two: within the framework of the hegemonic vacancy at a global level and the processes of social revenge, the growing contradiction between neoliberalism and democracy is manifested in our region in all its tension.
In the work, the authors aim to account for the multiple dimensions that are evident in the current Latin American situation: recognizing the centrality of the global context to think about regional reality, think about the historical role of social classes and their traditions. policies, the disputes of the recent past, and the specificity that sociopolitical conflicts assume in these latitudes.
“The institutional ruptures of the 21st century have not assumed the same political forms that they adopted decades ago, when they occurred in the form of civil-military riots. Such a difference between past and present can be easily coded by making a brief account, without pretensions of exhaustiveness, of some of the phenomena that took place after the coup d’état in Honduras.
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