Suchergebnisse

This article explores the early history of Association Football in South America through the case study of the first translations of the rules of the game from English into Portuguese and Spanish. It demonstrates, by means of a comparison of the different temporalities and contexts of these documents, the connected and transnational nature of the sport. This has often been neglected in national paradigm studies of football pioneers and the first matches, clubs and leagues. The study of the translators suggests new avenues for the study of the interlinked histories of sport, politics and culture.

Cross-national differences in adolescent life satisfaction in Europe and North America are consistent, but remain poorly understood. While previous studies have predominantly focused on the explanatory role of economic factors, such as national wealth and income equality, they revealed weak associations, at most. This study examines whether societal gender equality can explain the observed cross-national variability in adolescent life satisfaction. Based on the assumption that gender equality fosters a supportive social context, for example within families through a more equal involvement of fathers and mothers in child care tasks, adolescent life satisfaction was expected to be higher in more gender-equal countries. To test this hypothesis, national-level data of gender equality (i.e., women's share in political participation, decision making power, economic participation and command over resources) were linked to data from 175,470 adolescents aged 11-16 years old (M (age) = 13.6, SD = 1.64, 52% girls) from 34 European and North American countries involved in the 2009/10 Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study. Results of linear multilevel regression analyses indicate that adolescents in countries with relatively high levels of gender equality report higher life satisfaction than their peers in countries with lower levels of gender equality. The association between gender equality and adolescent life satisfaction remained significant after controlling for national wealth and income equality. It was equally strong for boys and girls. Moreover, the association between gender equality and life satisfaction was explained by social support in the family, peer and school context. This analysis suggests that gender equality fosters social support among members of a society, which in turn contributes to adolescent life satisfaction. Thus, promoting gender equality is likely to benefit all members of a society; not just by giving equal rights to women and girls, but also by fostering a supportive social climate for all.

Within Latin America, about 319 volcanoes have been active in the Holocene, but 202 of these volcanoes have no seismic, deformation or gas monitoring. Following the 2012 Santorini Report on satellite Earth Observation and Geohazards, the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS) developed a 4-year pilot project (2013-2017) to demonstrate how satellite observations can be used to monitor large numbers of volcanoes cost-effectively, particularly in areas with scarce instrumentation and/or difficult access. The pilot aims to improve disaster risk management (DRM) by working directly with the volcano observatories that are governmentally responsible for volcano monitoring as well as with the international space agencies (ESA, CSA, ASI, DLR, JAXA, NASA, CNES). The goal is to make sure that the most useful data are collected at each volcano following the guidelines of the Santorini report that observation frequency is related to volcano activity, and to communicate the results to the local institutions in a timely fashion. Here we highlight how coordinated multi-satellite observations have been used by volcano observatories to monitor volcanoes and respond to crises. Our primary tool is measurements of ground deformation made by Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), which have been used in conjunction with other observations to determine the alert level at these volcanoes, served as an independent check on ground sensors, guided the deployment of ground instruments, and aided situational awareness. During this time period, we find 26 volcanoes deforming, including 18 of the 28 volcanoes that erupted – those eruptions without deformation were less than 2 on the VEI scale. Another 7 volcanoes were restless and the volcano observatories requested satellite observations, but no deformation was detected. We describe the lessons learned about the data products and information that are most needed by the volcano observatories in the different countries using information collected by questionnaires. We ...

'Emancipation' remains marginal as a theme within Latin American studies (LAS) with the focus on questions of institutional politics, democracy, democratization, citizenship and development. Yet for the past two decades social movements have been articulating new imaginaries, ideas and practices beyond traditionally conceived frameworks of social change. They are anticipating alternative arrangements towards a dignified collective life. In these alternative possibilities, emancipation does not allude to a revolutionary process to take the power of the state, but denotes other horizons that in principle transcend the state as the main locus of struggle. These movements pose methodological, theoretical and epistemological challenges to the study of Latin America.

This article explores Latin American genomic studies of mestizaje and the way mestizaje's inherent contradiction between equality and hierarchy—a contradiction typical of liberalism—is managed in genomics. In Latin America, ideologies and practices of mestizaje may be seen as an antidote to hierarchies of race and class, but also as a terrain for the enactment of these hierarchies. Mestizaje mediates this contradiction between equality and hierarchy first by deploying the idea of sexual intimacy and family kinship across racial difference; and second by representing blackness and indigeneity as spatially peripheral and temporally backward-looking, thus naturalizing them as other. Multiculturalism can be seen as a recent variant on these themes, as well as a departure from them. Recent genomics research in Latin America strongly reiterates these ideas, while also adding some new twists. Despite its apparent connection with progressive politics and policies (anti-racism, better health for all, protection of human rights for victims of oppression), genomics here appears as a mainly conservative force.

This article studies how and under what circumstances different socio-political formations are more likely to trigger and shape distinct modes of institutional reform and transform the structures of the state in greater or lesser degree. The focus is on health care reforms in the context of political liberalization: the Sistema Único de Saúde in Brazil and the Seguro Popular de Salud in Mexico. Both are part of the wave of welfare policy expansion observed in Latin America in recent decades and undertaken in the national contexts of transitions towards pluralistic democratic systems, but which at the same time represent opposite reform models: a universalistic model in Brazil and the layering of insurance programs in Mexico. Applying a comparative perspective, we seek to establish similarities and differences in the contexts under which the reform processes were undertaken and in the social and political arrangements that generated and drove them. Differences in the types of democratic transitions, the formation of cross-class coalitions and the institutional legacies from the populist regimes suggest that while in Brazil the process of democratization occurred together with the formation of an "initiative capacity," the absence of this in Mexico resulted in the reproduction of a segmented and unequal system.

Most countries in Latin America have implemented human development conditional income transfer programmes to address intergenerational persistence of poverty. Typically, these programmes provide income transfers to households in poverty, conditional on children attending school and on household members attending health clinics. Evaluations have established programmes reach their explicit short- and medium-term objectives, especially as regards nutrition, children's schooling and improved health care utilisation. It is too early to say whether they will be successful in reducing the intergenerational persistence of poverty. Crucially, this will depend on whether they contribute to the economic and political inclusion of groups in poverty. This article reviews the available literature and finds that participation in human development income transfer programmes leads to improvements in productive capacity but favourable labour market conditions will be needed to guarantee economic inclusion. Improved political participation associated with programme participation raises the prospects for greater political inclusion.

In recent decades, international donors promoted decentralization policies as vehicles to achieve economic growth, state reform and human development. Although these policies improved national and local governments responsiveness, it is not sufficiently clear whether they actually led to poverty reduction, social cohesion and conflict resolution, especially in countries ongoing peace and reconciliation processes. This article analyses decentralization in the context of post-conflict reconstruction in Central America. It argues that the mechanisms that transferred responsibilities and resources to local governments to ensure accountability and transparency generally led to increased local participation in social programmes. However, the weak capacity of the state to reduce social inequalities, as well as the absence of national governments to supervise policy implementation, generated unforeseen consequences. Given the challenges associated with the impacts of severe weather and increased violence, this absence is becoming critical and could lead to further insecurity in the region. © 2012 European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes.

This special section brings together 4 of the 12 studies conducted within a research program analyzing the relationships among social mobilization, governance, and rural development in contemporary Latin America. The introduction gives an overview of the contemporary significance of social movements for rural development dynamics in the region, and of the principal insights of the section papers and the broader research program of which they were a part. This significance varies as an effect of two distinct and uneven geographies: the geography of social movements themselves and the geography of the rural political economy. The effects that movements have on the political economy of rural development also depend significantly on internal characteristics of these movements. The paper identifies several such characteristics. The general pattern is that movements have had far more effect on widening the political inclusiveness of rural development than they have on improving its economic inclusiveness and dynamism. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Maria Sibylla Merian International Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America (Mecila) will study past and present forms of social, political, religious and cultural conviviality, above all in Latin America and the Caribbean while also considering comparisons and interdependencies between this region and other parts of the world. Conviviality, for the purpose of Mecila, is an analytical concept to circumscribe ways of living together in concrete contexts. Therefore, conviviality admits gradations – from more horizontal forms to highly asymmetrical convivial models. […]

There is growing interest within international organizations and governmental institutions in obtaining support from social movements and SSE organizations for new public policies and laws that encourage their engagement and participation from below, and facilitate their access to the new policy schemes (Fonteneau et al. 2010; UNRISD 2010). This underscores the growing importance of civil society actors (including social movements) in rethinking "development" and in devising and effecting development policy, particularly in the current period of global crisis. In this chapter I address another concern emanating from this disposition of international development policy with regards to social movements—namely the process of translation of SSE practices into state policy. By translation I mean the processes, mechanisms and dynamics through which the state incorporates the cooperative and solidarity ethos of the SSE practised by social movements into policy. The problem lies in that, in order to integrate SSE practices into policy, the state tends to demarcate a terrain that, as Vázquez (2011:36) suggests with reference to the epistemic violence of modernity, "renders invisible everything that does not fit in the 'parameters of legibility' of [its] epistemic territory". In this case, translation entails the subjugation of the emancipatory dimension of SSE into the logic of power rather than enabling the transformative aspects of SSE to flourish. Drawing on the example of three well-known Latin American movements, I examine the tension underpinning SSE practices and the state and how the former can be subordinated to the logic of the state with significant implications for emancipatory politics and practice.

Sovereign debt crises have regained attention since the recent crises in several European countries. This paper focuses on a particular aspect of the debt crisis literature: the impact of sovereign default on economic growth. Previous research agrees on the negative impact, but not on size and duration. We are particularly interested in the heterogeneity of crisis impacts: Why are some crises deeper and longer than others? And what is the role of business cycles? We analyze four Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico) for the period 1870-2012, covering 14 sovereign debt defaults. We find that most sovereign defaults start in recessions, and in unfavorable international circumstances. Economic growth is heavily affected in the year of the default and the year after. Then economic growth picks up, but recovery is far from smooth, including periods of recurrent negative growth. We observe strong heterogeneity in the impact, which we attribute to commodity price changes, economic growth and government expenditure in the run-up to the crisis.

As income inequality in the United States has reached an all-time high, commentators from across the political spectrum warn about the social implications of these economic changes. America, they fear, is "coming apart" as the gap between the rich and poor grows into a fault line. This paper provides a comprehensive review of empirical scholarship in sociology, education, demography, and economics in order to address the question: How have five decades of growing economic inequality shaped America's social landscape? We find that growing levels of income inequality have been accompanied by increasing socioeconomic segregation across (1) friendship networks and romantic partners, (2) residential neighborhoods, (3) K-12 and university education, and (4) workplaces and the labor market. The trends documented in this review give substance to commentators' concerns: compared to the 1970s, rich and poor Americans today are less likely to know one another and to share the same social spaces. The United States is a nation divided.

We conceptualize populism and nationalism as vertical and horizontal discursive frames of sovereignty, and we investigate the prevalence of these frames in the speeches of chief executives (presidents and prime ministers) in Europe and North America to assess whether these discourses are on the rise at the highest levels of government. To do so, we compile an original database of leader speeches, measuring both discourses using a technique called holistic grading. We find that neither populism nor nationalism is on the rise across Europe and North America over the past twenty years; instead, the rise is concentrated in sub-regions and specific countries. We also find that populism and nationalism are highly but imperfectly correlated in leaders' speeches in the corpus as a whole, but that populism is far less common in the speeches of western leaders. In the penultimate section, we use a selection of speech vignettes to demonstrate that state leaders employ populism to counter political opponents, nationalism to counter hostile nations, and a combination to mobilize against conjoined threats from above and beyond the people-nation.

Latin America is one of the regions facing many disasters with some of the worse impacts. The current governance model has not proven successful in disaster risk reduction. This article aims to theoretically analyse the relationship between ideal regional disaster risk governance (DRG) and the actual production of disaster risk in Latin America. From the so-called 'vulnerability paradigm' and a regional standpoint, this analysis contributes to the debate with a specific focus on 'neo-extractivism.' Pointing mainly to sociopolitical processes triggered as of the early 2000s in Latin America, 'neo-extractivism' relates to a regional ecological-political pattern of intensive natural resource exploitation. The first part of this article presents a regional overview of DRG and its scope in disaster risk reduction, analysing its ineffectiveness through the lens of the neoliberal governmentality problem. The second part deals with the issue of 'neo-extractivism' to outline the actual links between the political arena, the development discourse, and the creation of vulnerability and new hazards in the region's contemporary social processes. We show a correlation between political arrangements and environmental degradation that brings about both disasters and an increase in disaster risk. 'Neo-extractivism' foregrounds the political conditions for the implementation of regional DRG and reveals how its projections within the development discourse relate incongruously with the essential factors of disaster risk.