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"This book is for audiences interested in Latin America and the long-term legacies of civil war more generally. Using archives and in-depth interviews, it provides a captivating narrative of how counterinsurgency in Central America distorted government functioning, breeding long-term patterns of corruption and criminality that burden the region today"--

Political science has seen a welcome increase in guidance on conducting field research, which recognizes the need for adaptability. But while disciplinary conversations on "iterating" in the field have advanced, strategies for adapting to the breakdown of one's case selection—an all-too-frequent problem faced by field researchers—remain underspecified. I synthesize the sources of case selection collapse and puts forward four strategies to help scholars iterate when things fall apart: 1) rethinking what constitutes a "case" when fieldwork upends one's understanding of the population to which the original case(s) belong; 2) reorienting the object of analysis from outcomes to processes when new insights question the values of the outcome variable within one's original case(s); 3) returning to dominant theoretical models as a source of comparison when unanticipated changes cut off data or field site access; and 4) dropping case(s) that become extraneous amid fieldwork-induced changes in the project's comparative logic. By embracing these moments of seeming crisis, we can more productively train field researchers to make the most of the inductive discoveries and new theoretical insights that often emerge when one's original plans fall apart.

ABSTRACTThe coexistence of predatory informal rules alongside formal democratic institutions is a defining, if pernicious, feature of Latin America's political landscape. How do such rules remain so resilient in the face of bureaucratic reforms? This article explicates the mechanisms underlying the persistence of such rules and challenges conventional explanations through process-tracing analysis in one arena: Guatemala's customs administration. During Guatemala's period of armed conflict and military rule, military intelligence officers introduced a powerful customs fraud scheme that endured for more than 20 years, despite state reforms. Its survival is best attributed to the ability of the distributional coalition underwriting the predatory rules to capture new political and economic spaces facilitated by political party and market reforms. This illustrates that distributional approaches to institutional change must attend to how those with a stake in the status quo may continue to uphold perverse institutional arrangements on the margins of state power.

AbstractA central challenge of post-conflict recovery is the reconstruction of state institutions, which often emerge from war destroyed or otherwise unable to carry out core administrative activities. But scholarship on international peacebuilding and post-conflict politics tends to focus narrowly on the functional aspects of the state, the state-system, to the neglect of another critical dimension: the state-idea, or its symbolic and normative authority. How do internationally backed institution-building efforts shape the ideational foundations of the state following conflict? Drawing on original interviews and archival research from postwar Guatemala, this article illustrates how, paradoxically, postwar peacebuilding and rule of law initiatives that sought to strengthen the capacity of state institutions simultaneously contributed to the discursive construction of the state as a criminal organization. Specifically, the United Nations' International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), in seeking to combat state-based criminal structures and bolster institutions, transformed long-held conceptions of Guatemala's "weak" or "failed" state into an alternative vision of the state as a powerful complex of clandestine, predatory networks, and practices. In conjuring the state as a criminal organization that appropriates the formal organs of political power for illicit ends, this international statebuilding initiative generated a coherent and durable state-idea that belies key advances in institutional capacity and the rule of law. Overall, this article contributes to growing debates about the unintended, deleterious effects of international statebuilding efforts by demonstrating how distinct ideas of state power come to fill the void between state capacity and legitimacy.

Following larger developments within professional education, schools of social work have increasingly adopted technical standards as non-academic criteria for program admission and continuation. This paper examines the emergence of technical standards within schools of social work, articulates the distinction from and overlap with other forms of non-academic admissions and retention criteria, and considers their use in relation to the larger literature on gatekeeping in social work. Drawing on select legal cases, this review paper contemplates possible challenges associated with the implementation of technical standards, including issues related to disability law and due process. We argue that the development and implementation of technical standards in social work education raises complex questions related to inclusion and equity and poses unique challenges and opportunities for a relational and behavioral profession grounded in interpersonal skill development. Despite challenges, development of technical standards in schools of social work is worthwhile and can help manage the delicate and often difficult balance between serving as student-focused educators and professional gatekeepers.