Social Struggles in Present Day Argentina

Since the mid 1970s, Argentine society has gone through a period characterised as counterrevolutionary. The conservative social forces, led by the financial oligarchy, seized power and government by means of the coup d'état of 1976, and imposed an economic and social policy towards the working class, based on wage cuts and a lengthening of the working day. When the military governments were replaced by civilian ones, physical coercion was replaced by economic coercion, through market laws with unemployment and wage cuts reaching unprecedented levels. Although the popular forces were weakened by the unfavourable development of social struggles since the mid–1970s, during the 1990s government policies were confronted by the people through different forms of struggle.
This article presents the results of research on the different forms of social struggle carried out by the working class and other popular classes since the end of the 1980s until today. It aims to conceptualise the forms of rebellion (foot riot, riot, strikes and roadblocks), to determine the different moments of social struggle and the likely trends of its development.     

The Attachment of Demonstrators to Institutional Politics: Comparing LGBTIQ Pride Marches in Argentina and Chile

Focusing on LGBTIQ demonstrations in Argentina and Chile, we study protesters' attachment to institutional politics, defined as their emotional and attitudinal connection with the political system. We show that Argentine LGBTIQ demonstrators are on average more attached to institutional politics than Chilean ones. This can be explained neither by differences between Argentines and Chileans in general, nor by demonstrators' individual characteristics. Instead, expanding the political process model, we argue that achieving a substantial part of the LGBTIQ agenda in Argentina, and limited success in Chile, contributed to build a stronger attachment to the political system among Argentine LGBTIQ demonstrators than their Chilean counterparts.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this article:
Robert Barros, Constitutionalism and Dictatorship: Pinochet, the Junta and the 1980 Constitution
Barry Ames, The Deadlock of Democracy in Brazil
Christina Biebesheimer and Francisco Mejia (eds), Justice beyond our borders: judicial reforms for Latin America and the Caribbean
Jacobo Timerman, Prisoner without a Name, Cell without a Number
Rafael Hernández and John H. Coatsworth, Culturas Encontradas: Cuba y los Estados Unidos
Terence N. D'Altroy, The Incas
Anibal González, Killer Books: Writing, Violence and Ethics in Modern Spanish American Narrative
Efrain Kristal, Invisible Work: Borges and Translation
Beatriz Sarlo, Scenes from Postmodern Life     

Social Class in Contemporary Japan: Structures,Sorting and Strategy

This article accounts for why and how democratisation in Korea, although facilitated by social forces from below, has contributed to deepening social polarisation by accelerating economic liberalisation. In assessing this seemingly paradoxical dynamic of democratisation in Korea, this article offers an analysis of contemporary Korean politics and political economy alternative to currently prevailing approaches. Prevailing approaches tend to frame recent socio-economic and political changes in Korea brought about by democratisation and the financial crisis of 1997-98 as the encroachment of the market over the state, and of the external (the global) over the internal (the national), as if these bipolarised categories assume zero-sum relations. This article posits democratisation processes as class and social struggles and such factors as the global economy, the positioning of Korea in the world-system and the history of US intervention, that are typically perceived as external constituents, as active social and class forces. Informed by this framework, this article explores contemporary Korean politics and political economy as a set of contradictory processes of political and economic liberalisation, democratisation and “de-democratisation.”     

COVID-19 Pandemic and Social Unrest: The Social Protest by Other Means. Reflections on the Argentinian Case

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments around the world have implemented exceptional measures aimed at restricting people's mobility or banning public spaces used, among other things, for protest, thus causing the expected regressive effects in the socioeconomic sphere. What happens with social protest when the public space is banned? Does it stop, is it displaced, does it occur in any other form? In this article we present a map of protest in Argentina since the beginning of the pandemic. We conclude that the levels of participation remain high and that, given the features of the protest itself, its claims may be channelled into the institutions.     

Reviews

Books reviewed:
Hassig Time, History and Belief in Aztec and Colonial Mexico
Baskes Indians, Merchants, and Markets: A Reinterpretation of the Repartimiento and Spanish-Indian Economic Relations in Colonial Oaxaca, 1750–1821
Caldeira City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo
Caulfield In Defense of Honor: Sexual Morality, Modernity, and Nation in Early-Twentieth-Century Brazil
Earle Rumours of Wars: Civil Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Latin America
Clarke Class, Ethnicity, and Community in Southern Mexico: Oaxaca's Peasantries
Jones and Munck, (eds) Cultural Politics in Latin America
CEDLA FRONTERAS: Towards A Borderless Latin America
Tulchin and Garland Social Development in Latin America. The Politics of Reform
Paley Marketing Democracy: Power and Social Movements in Post-Dictatorship Chile
Crabtree and Whitehead (eds) Towards Democratic Viability: The Bolivian Experience
Bailey and Godson (eds) Organized Crime and Democratic Governability: Mexico and the U.S.–Mexican Borderlands
Adams Dollar Diplomacy: United States Economic Assistance to Latin America
Smith (ed.) Democracy and International Relations: Critical Theories/Problematic Practices
Angell, Lowden Thorpe Decentralizing Development: The Political Economy of Institutional Change in Colombia and Chile
Itzigsohn Developing Poverty: The State, Labor Market Deregulation, and the Informal Economy in Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic
Nencel Ethnography and Prostitution in Peru
Potter Deeper than Debt: Economic globalisation and the poor     

Book Reviews

Inspired by the ecological model of human development and inter-subjectivist perspective of identity formation, the article addresses the complexity of professional interactions and highlights the spectrum of possible reactions of Russian-speaking teachers in Estonia to changes in the domain of language-in-education. The qualitative research demonstrates different models of the teachers’ self-views that are constructed and practiced in the interaction within significant layers identified by the ecological approach and reveals the diversity of the dilemmas teachers as professionals face in their everyday working lives.     

Book Reviews

The increase of multiculturalism in European societies poses challenges to citizenship education, which, in formal education, relies on national values and neglects the emergence of cosmopolitanism. This article compares the patriotic and cosmopolitan values of Russian-speaking students in Estonia, Latvia and the Russian Federation using the data of two large surveys. The analysis revealed that Russian-speaking adolescents in Estonia and Latvia demonstrate higher support of cosmopolitan values than the Estonians, Latvians, and students in the Russian Federation. A worrisome finding is that students in the cosmopolitan cluster do not firmly favor democratic values and are not interested in improving their civic knowledge.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this article:
Stuart F. Voss, Latin America in the Middle Period 1750–1929
Norman Long, Development Sociology: Actors Perspectives
Elizabeth J. Friedman, Unfinished Transitions. Women and the Gendered Development of Democracy in Venezuela, 1936–1996
Roberto González Echevarría, The Pride of Havana. A History of Cuban Baseball
Christopher Dunn, Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this article:
Peter F. Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico's National State: Guerrero 1800–1857
Astvaldur Astvaldsson, Las voces de los wak'a
Katherine Isbester, Still Fighting: The Nicaraguan Women's Movement, 1977–2000
Marta R. Zabaleta, Feminine Stereotypes and Roles in Theory and Practice in Argentina Before and After the First Lady Eva Peron
Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity
Antoni Kapcia, Cuba: Island of Dreams
Damián Fernández, Cuba and the Politics of Passion     

Book Reviews

This article examines East European migrants’ relationships with other communities in the context of waged work through in-depth interviews with recent Polish and Lithuanian migrants to London. These migrants found themselves newly surrounded by greater racial and ethnic diversity. By distinguishing themselves from other workers on the basis of skin color and legal status, they present themselves as members of the host country's ‘white’ majority, which places them in a position of power in relation to other migrant groups in London.     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:
Lockhart, Of Things of the Indies: Essays Old and New in Early Latin American History
Barman, Citizen Emperor: Pedro II and the Making of Brazil, 1825–91
Harding, A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of Blackness in Brazil
Buffington, Criminal and Citizen in Modern Mexico
Ochoa, Feeding Mexico: The Political Uses of Food since 1910
Clarke, Class, Ethnicity, and Community in Southern Mexico: Oaxaca's Peasantries
Rovira, Women of Maize: Indigenous Women and the Zapatista Rebellion
Assies, The Challenge of Diversity: Indigenous peoples and reform of the state in Latin America
Tulchin and Garland, Social Development in Latin America. The Politics of Reform
Gelles, Water and Power in Highland Peru: the Cultural Politics of Irrigation and Development
Starn, Nightwatch: the Politics of Protest in the Andes
Payne, Uncivil Movements: The Armed Right Wing and Democracy in Latin America
Silva, The Soldier and the State in South America: Essays in Civil-Military Relations
Roniger and Sznajder, The Legacy of Human Rights Violations in the Southern Cone, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay
Smith, Inevitable Partnership: Understanding Mexico-US Relations
Roniger and Sznajder, (eds.) Constructing Collective Identities and Shaping Public Spheres: Latin American Paths
Larraín, Identity and Modernity in Latin America
Caister, Mexico City: A Cultural and Literary Companion     

Book Reviews

Books reviewed:
Naro, A Slave's Place, a Master's World: Fashioning Dependency in Rural Brazil
Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries
Campbell, Mexican Memoir: A Personal Account of Anthropology and Radical Politics in Oaxaca
Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile, 1920–1950
Montgomery, Peacemaking and Democratization in the Western Hemisphere
Walker and Armony (eds), Repression, Resistance, and Democratic Transition in Central America
Fiddian, Postcolonial Perspectives: On the Cultures of Latin America and Lusophone Africa
Mendoza, Shaping Society Through Dance: Mestizo Rital Performance in the Peruvian Andes     

Monotowns and the political economy of industrial restructuring in Russia

During the 2008–2009 economic crisis, Russia's monotowns – one-industry towns left from the Soviet era – gained widespread attention as potential sources of social protest and unrest. Will such worries resurface under current economic conditions? While fears about monotowns were exaggerated during the last economic crisis, Russia's leadership has reason to remain concerned. Despite the dramatic transformations of the last two decades, Russia's post-Soviet industrial landscape has largely survived intact, leaving a significant number of monotowns with unprofitable enterprises in a precarious position. Yet given its emphasis on social stability, we can expect the government to continue subsidies, both explicit and hidden, that seek to maintain employment and avoid social conflict, but that preserve the country's inefficient industrial geography.     

From Utopia to Pragmatism: the Heritage of Basismo in Local Government in the Greater Buenos Aires Region1

Abstract – Contemporary municipal politics and administration in the poor outer suburbs of Buenos Aires is heavily influenced on one hand by the heritage of grassroots Peronist activism of the 1970s and on the other by the exigencies of contemporary neo-liberalism. The paper explores the tensions between these pressures.     

Critical social media information flows: political trust and protest behaviour among Kazakhstani college students

ABSTRACT

In political regimes where traditional mass media are under state control, social networking sites may be the only place where citizens are exposed to and exchange dissident information. Despite all the attempts, complete control of social media seems to be implausible. We argue that the critical information that people see, read and share online undermines their trust in political institutions. This diminishing trust may threaten the legitimacy of the ruling regime and stimulate protest behaviour. We rely on original survey data of Kazakhstani college students to confirm these expectations. The data are unique in that they directly measure exposure to critical/dissident information, as opposed to simply assuming it. The analysis leverages Coarsened Exact Matching to simulate experimental conditions. This allows us to better identify the consequential mechanism and the attitudinal precursor by which social media influence protest in an authoritarian context.     

Working Overtime in East Asia: Convergence or Divergence?

Working long hours has become a routinised part of life in East Asia. The different patterns of overtime across this region are understudied, however. This study represents a first systematic attempt to analyse overtime and its determinants in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China by testing hypotheses that specify the distinctive influences of employment status and job contracts on work hours. Class exploitation, post-industrialism and flexibility theories are mobilised to identify distinctive but supplementary factors in long working hours. Using data from a recent four-country survey, a Tobit regression analysis of full-time workers’ hours reveals that employers and self-employed people work longer hours than hired workers across this region. Despite this convergence, there is a contrast across occupations. In Japan, overtime is positively associated with occupational prestige, while a reverse pattern operates in China, where low-skilled workers work more overtime. Contract workers in the private sector in South Korea and China also have longer overtime when compared to public sector employees. In sum, this study highlights more divergence than convergence of working conditions within East Asia.     

Class or Citizenship? Debating Workplace Conflict in China

While a new working class is in the process of remaking itself in China, the latest trend in labour studies has rejected the Marxist tradition which sees the social relations of production as the point of departure for analysing workplace conflict. According to the new current, influenced by post-structuralism, class is only one of the identities articulated by workers, and it can be understood only with reference to their discourses. By critically evaluating an important book by Ching Kwan Lee (Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt), this article suggests that her approach generalising workers' protests with the notion of citizenship cannot satisfactorily explain the changing pattern of labour protests in China since 2004. By using fieldwork data and connecting the analysis of the social relations of production with the changing patterns of workers' struggle, this paper argues that migrant workers protests are a significant part of the emerging class conflict in China.     

Considering the Orange legacy: patterns of political participation in the Euromaidan Revolution

The proximity of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004) andEuromaidan Revolution (2014) provides an opportunity to considerwhy some individuals remain active across protest cycles whileothers defect. Many social movement scholars explain differentialparticipation in terms of micro-structural, biographical, or cognitivefactors. Others rely on rational choice theories of collective actionbased on coordination. Testing competing explanations arecomplicated because the variables included in structural andagency-based models are often the same, although the underlyingcausal mechanisms are different. In this article, I argue that thekey to understanding the role of agency and structure in protestparticipation is to relax strong assumptions about the unified natureof society and consider the multiple paths to participation. Thisapproach suggests that both structural and agency-based causalmechanisms can influence political engagement depending onindividual experiences, identities, and perceptions of events.     

In Search of Alternatives: The Making of Grassroots Politics and Power in Argentina

This article analyses ethnographically the reconfigurations of the state and relations of power through their dynamic interactions with subaltern alternatives that emerged in the 2001 uprising in Argentina. In this regard, it counters influential interpretations of these events articulated within John Holloway’s framework of ‘anti‐power’, which ignores the reconstruction of the state, and rank and file trade unionism. The article concludes that intensified class and political struggles in the region offer new spaces for contesting hegemonic reinventions of populism and ‘top‐down’ socialism in Latin America.