Neoliberalism, Interrupted ― Social Change and Contested Governance in Contemporary Latin America

In the 1980s and 1990s, neoliberal forms of governance largely dominated Latin American political and social life. Neoliberalism, Interrupted examines the recent and diverse proliferation of responses to neoliberalism's hegemony. In so doing, this vanguard collection of case studies undermines the conventional dichotomies used to understand transformation in this region, such as neoliberalism vs. socialism, right vs. left, indigenous vs. mestizo, and national vs. transnational.

Deploying both ethnographic research and more synthetic reflections on meaning, consequence, and possibility, the essays focus on the ways in which a range of unresolved contradictions interconnect various projects for change and resistance to change in Latin America. Useful to students and scholars across disciplines, this groundbreaking volume reorients how sociopolitical change has been understood and practiced in Latin America. It also carries important lessons for other parts of the world with similar histories and structural conditions.

Mark Goodale is Associate Professor of Conflict Analysis and Anthropology at George Mason University and Series Editor of Stanford Studies in Human Rights. He is the author of Surrendering to Utopia: An Anthropology of Human Rights (Stanford, 2009) and Dilemmas of Modernity: Bolivian Encounters with Law and Liberalism (Stanford, 2008). Nancy Postero is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, and author of Now We Are Citizens: Indigenous Politics in Post-Multicultural Bolivia (Stanford, 2006), and co-author, with Leon Zamosc, of The Struggle for Indigenous Rights in Latin America (2003).