Latin America since the Left Turn is an evaluation of the democratic, citizenship and constitutional changes in the region since the political reorientation at the turn of the twenty-first century known as the ‘Pink Tide’. Over the course of 15 chapters, split across four sections, the editors have sought to guide the contributors to deal with a series of questions in an interdisciplinary manner.
The guiding research agenda consists of a mix of old questions revisited – was the Pink Tide a throw-back to a pre-neoliberal era? – through to some new and interesting avenues of enquiry – what are the social, political and economic consequences of the partial unmaking of the neoliberal consensus in Latin America? Why did some countries stay on the neoliberal course? Have ideas of race and decolonisation changed in the region? The editors do not provide a theoretical anchor for dealing with these questions, no doubt due to a desire to foster an interdisciplinary approach, and consequently contribute to a richer understanding of the ‘tensions and contradictions that are the current signature of Latin American societies and politics’ (p. 10). This ambition towards an interdisciplinary study is very much enhanced with a focus on some excellent Latin American scholarship (cf. in particular the chapter by Maristella Svampa), although curiously integrated with exclusively US academia, which, whilst having produced undoubtedly outstanding scholarship (cf. especially the chapter by David Smilde), is dominated by epistemological positivism, with an attendant foundationalist ontology. This renders much of the analysis monochromatic in its approach to the more interesting questions posed by the editors in their introduction.
The first section deals with the alternative models of development presented by the Pink Tide regimes in Latin America. The first contribution, by Svampa, is the pick of the chapters for this section, suggesting that there was a shift from the Washington Consensus to what she terms the ‘Commodity Consensus’ (p. 15). This resulted in the ‘reprimarisation’ of Latin American political economy, with trade dependency shifting from the United States to China. This represents an interesting contribution to a literature that has tended to characterise the Pink Tide as either a continuation of old neoliberal policies, or as a radical departure. Given her emphasis on ‘reprimarisation’ in tandem with a shift towards China as the primary Latin American market, Svampa locates herself within a third school of thought that focuses on both continuity and change. Further analysis of the themes she highlights within the post-neoliberal literature would no doubt be of further value to these debates.
The second section is concerned more with analysis of political regimes, dealing with processes of (de)democratisation. Two chapters on Venezuela and one on Mexico render the analysis somewhat short of a comprehensive overview of Latin American dynamics, particularly when contrasted with the previous section. However, the Smilde chapter is an outstanding contribution that offers a path towards dealing comprehensively with questions concerning underlying tensions and power networks within all Latin American Pink Tide projects. Empirically Smilde's chapter turns this analysis to Maduro's Venezuela, yet he simultaneously outlines a model for understanding transitions in all twenty-first-century Latin American political economy.
The third section deals with political institutions and their transformations, most notably in terms of constitutional change (Roberto Gargarella), judicial activism (Sandra Botero), participation (Thamy Pogrebinschi), and the organisation of popular classes (Gisela Zaremberg et al.). The chapters represent collectively the broader tension in the wider literature: that the Pink Tide regimes in Latin America from the election of Chávez in 1998 onwards represent both continuity and change. In terms of continuity, Gargarella's emphasis on the continuing role of hyper-presidentialism in the region in spite of drives towards greater participatory forms of democracy is a welcome tonic to some literature in the discipline that overemphasises change. Alternatively, Botero's analysis of the rise of judicial activism in courts and concomitant impacts on reproductive rights and LGBT rights in particular shows that there are real empirical differences of outcomes of political processes that need to be accounted for.
The fourth, and final, section concerns itself with issues of security: race, decolonisation and violence in the Latin American context. A thoughtful contribution from Juliet Hooker examines the ontology of the concept of mestizaje, suggesting that the seminal work of Vasconcelos represents only a partial rejection of US imperialism and white supremacy in that it did not fundamentally challenge the reification of racial hierarchies in Latin America (p. 9) due to a lack of critique of what the author terms a ‘coloniality of power’ (p. 304). A further interesting intervention from Oscar Vega Camacho analyses how Buen Vivir represents continuing processes of decolonisation, understood as ‘the struggle against and resistance to colonial power relations on multiple scales in a historical process for emancipation and liberation’ (p. 9).
This edited volume begins a series of important dialogues between different disciplines and literatures that seek to answer important questions over the nature of the Latin American Left turn and its continuing impact on Latin American political economy of development. However, it leaves much work to be done. Interestingly, whilst many of the chapters contain references to the concept of post-neoliberalism, neither the authors nor the editors seek to analyse this concept in light of its research agenda, nor even to define it and use it as an analytical launching pad to something else. This is a curious omission given the influence of post-neoliberalism within these debates. Such a concept could be leveraged analytically to provide a robust yet sufficiently diverse set of concepts to characterise empirical trends in contemporary Latin America as analysed by myriad (sub)disciplines. In other words, it could be used to interrogate a diverse and rich empirical dataset, offering greater analytical leverage in generating coherence and insightfulness to questions that demand answers.
