Since Evo Morales assumed the presidency there has been a stream of books and articles attempting – albeit preliminary – evaluations of the political changes in Bolivia. Kepa Artaraz's broad-ranging book is a welcome contribution to these efforts. It is based on thorough research and a host of interviews in the country, and covers topics including the political turbulence before Morales’ electoral triumph in December 2005, an exhaustive analysis of the genesis and contents of the country's new Constitution, current changes in politics, citizenship and economy, Bolivia–US relations and the hemisphere's new institutional integration efforts. For a fairly complete and insightful resource on the often confused political developments in Bolivia during the last 20 years, the book really is a must-read. And as if this wasn't already ambition enough, the book additionally attempts to portray and assess the limits and constraints of the Morales administration's political project.

After the introduction, the book presents nine chapters. The first situates Bolivia in the context of developing countries suffering the consequences of neoliberal restructuring and the rejection of those policies in recent years. The second sketches Bolivia's route from the recovery of democracy in the 1980s to the 2005 electoral victory of Morales’ party, the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism, MAS). The third discusses the new Constitution and the ambitions entailed in it in terms of constructing a new, inclusionary democracy. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 address, respectively, the achievements of the new administration in the political, civil society and economic realms. Chapters 7 and 8 go transnational, addressing Bolivia–US relations and Bolivia's role in the subcontinent's integration initiatives respectively. Chapter 9 wraps up and evaluates achievements, flaws and failures.

As stated above, the book has many positive qualities. It explains well the frustrations mounting in the country that led to the MAS turning into a credible electoral alternative and the interesting processes that made the MAS ‘a party of social movements’. The MAS was indeed successful in amalgamating the many discontented sectors of Bolivian society, ranging from peasants, the urban poor and indigenous people to the trade unions and new movements organising cooperative miners, coca farmers, peasant women, street vendors and many more. The book also discusses convincingly the MAS's ambitions in terms of renewing democracy, restructuring the economy, re-arranging the exploitation of natural resources, terminating the persistent tacit exclusion of the indigenous population from higher positions in companies and state institutions, and redistributing the country's wealth. The chapters on the international context are well documented and persuasively explain which shifts in orientations and relations have occurred since the MAS took power.

However, the book also produces some doubts. It feels like there is a bit of ambiguity in the ways in which the ideals and accomplishments of the MAS are assessed. Some formulations are quite euphoric and affirmative of the qualitative leap that the rise to power of Morales and the MAS entails. Mention is made of the current ‘strong link between those who govern and the governed’ (p. 6), of a government beginning to ‘empower a traditionally disempowered majority and to help it take ownership of the major national debates, building democracy through bottom-up participation’ (p. 63). The book also asserts that the new politics incorporate ‘new social rights for citizens, and crucially, these rights operate at both the individual and collective levels’ (p. 108). Additionally, the new role of el pueblo in its shape of ‘organized civil society’ and social movement-based activity (p. 88) is quite uncritically acclaimed (pp. 74, 107, 180), and the practical and more principled questions that this celebration of the new ‘fourth power’ triggers are addressed only patchily. The ambiguity surfaces when such formulations and assessments are nuanced with remarks about the many things the MAS did not achieve, either because of obstacles or because of strategic or opportunistic decisions. This partial revoking of the applauding of the MAS's achievements, however, only starts in earnest in the last, more evaluating chapter. Here, finally, the many frictions amongst social movements supportive of the MAS, the reformist stand that the MAS has assumed in many economic questions, the regional protests against broken promises, the persistent ‘opportunistic wheeling and dealing’ (p. 186) and clientelism, the repression of protests and the inconsistent environmental policies (green towards the outside world and developmentalist internally) are all listed. But in the previous chapters, except for some scattered announcements about problems and challenges that also characterise Bolivia's transformations, there is no systematic incorporation of the many conflicts, at times underhanded political manoeuvring, and frictions between discourses and practices – things that also constitute Bolivia's admittedly intriguing and impressive current ‘refoundation’. The impression that the volume remains a little two-faced in this respect is strengthened by the fact that no stand is taken towards – indeed, no reference is even made to – earlier publications on Bolivia's recent vicissitudes. The tone is as if the appraisal of Bolivia's recent political story started here, within the pages of Artaraz's book.

A minor issue is that the book lacks a bibliography. All references can be traced in the endnotes, but being raised as a social scientist, I found the absence of a bibliography surprising and slightly irritating. Another problem regards the indigenous identity (against mestizo-type democracies) of the MAS (p. 44). Alternative visions on the genesis of the MAS insist that the indigeneity discourse came in only later, and that the MAS, in its initial phases, was rural trade unionist and cocaleros-inspired rather than indigenist.

In brief, this is a very worthwhile contribution to the ongoing efforts to consider and value the achievements of Evo Morales’ MAS government since early 2006, for its broad scope, insightful analyses and wealth of empirical material. But it also erroneously suggests itself as a stand-alone text, and additionally remains unbalanced in its appraisals of achievements and letdowns.