Latin American countries were among the earliest adopters of neoliberal economic policies. The debt crisis of the 1970s put Latin American countries, unable to make debt payments, into the hands of international development organisations and lenders who had broadly adopted the tenets of neoliberalism. Neoliberal prescriptions like shrinking the public sector, privatisation and economic liberalisation helped many countries take control of rampant inflation and made creditors happy, but also increased inequality, which hit already marginalised populations hard.
Roberta Rice's The New Politics of Protest is an ambitious project using four case studies to understand the patterns of anti-neoliberal protest by indigenous peoples. Neoliberalism changed the relationship between state and citizen. Rice extends the neoliberal citizenship analysis to social movements in general and indigenous movements in particular.
Rice questions why we see indigenous peoples engaged in anti-neoliberal protest in some cases, but not in others. She is also interested in understanding why some movements use institutional, and others extra-institutional, means of protest. Rice uses a historical institutionalist lens to engage these questions in four cases: Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru and Chile. Rice argues that whether indigenous people mobilise to protest neoliberal policies depends on the degree to which political parties are institutionalised – that is, strong – and how or by whom indigenous people were politicised historically.
The book is divided into three sections. The first part explains why people protest, the second part examines protest activity and historical patterns of inclusion/exclusion of indigenous people by political parties in the four cases, and the third section discusses the political effects of protests. In the first part of the book, Rice provides a solid background on the various theories of social mobilisation (chapter 2), from classical models strongly influenced by psychology to resource mobilisation, political process and new social movement theories. Her argument synthesises the political process and the new social movement models. Rice suggests that the degree of institutionalisation of the party system structures political opportunities for protest. Strongly institutionalised party systems are more likely to channel grievances, so we are less likely to see much anti-neoliberal (or other) protest in such systems. Rice uses new social movement theory and its focus on identity movements to understand ‘the indigenous-rights master frame’ and what she argues is the novelty of today's indigenous movements (p. 27).
In the second section, Rice provides succinct summaries for each of her case studies (chapters 4–7). She masterfully weaves together recent history with the literatures on social movements, political parties and institutional analysis. Given the scope of her case studies, Rice consults the secondary literature for much of her background, but complements it with primary research in each of her four case studies. Her empirical chapters include data from her interviews with movement activists, party leaders and academics, as well as archival research.
Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru have weakly institutionalised party systems. Viewing the cases solely on that variable of Rice's argument, one would expect to find high degrees of protest in those cases. The argument holds for Ecuador, which had large-scale indigenous activism throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s, including the formation of an indigenous political party, and Bolivia, where anti-neoliberal protests in the early 2000s ended two presidencies and brought Evo Morales, an indigenous man who headed the coca-growers' union, to power. In the chapters on Ecuador and Bolivia, Rice demonstrates that because of the weakness of the Left in organising indigenous populations historically, indigenous groups were able to construct an indigenous collective identity without having to compete with meaningful class identities. Weakly institutionalised political parties in Peru have not led to indigenous protest against neoliberal policies, due in large part to the strength of class identity as a powerful collective identity. In contrast, Chile has a strongly institutionalised party system, but one that does not channel the interests of its relatively small indigenous population (Rice focuses on the Mapuche), leading to an active, though not broad-based, indigenous movement there.
Rice covers a lot of ground in this book, providing an argument that holds together across her cases. There are two areas, however, that need deeper examination. First, many Latin American countries had volatile political histories over the course of the twentieth century, where in Bolivia, for example, the model of political incorporation varied over time. Rice notes that there was a multi-class party – the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (National Revolutionary Movement, MNR) – that incorporated peasant protest while in power for 12 years after the Bolivian Revolution in 1952. The Bolivian Revolution was followed by 15 years of military governments that repressed groups organised outside the government's control. Which historical institution structures current mobilisation? Rice's rich historical detail and explanation of indigenous mobilisation in Bolivia is convincing, but I am left wondering why one historical moment of political incorporation structures protest more than earlier or later forms of incorporation.
Second, Rice's theory chapter explains the historical institutional foundation of her argument very well, but does not delve deeply into the framing literature. The discussion of framing in each of her cases is reduced to the historical pattern of peasant organising along a Marxist/non-Marxist divide. Where the Left was successful, class identity is more salient and ethnic identities cannot compete. Where the Left was unsuccessful, indigenous collective identity takes root. There is no space in this account for the agency of activists to construct convincing, ethnic, collective identities, or for potential movement members to reject the ethnic frame, perhaps not solely because of the Left's past success.
Rice's work will be of great interest to those interested in ethnic/indigenous movements, Andean politics and social movements. The clarity of Rice's argument, the breadth of history covered and the accessible tone and language also make this a good choice for undergraduate courses on Latin America and social movements.
