Program Tracks and Committee Members

Roberto Gargarella, CONICET
Catalina Pérez Correa, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE)
Verónica Undurraga, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez

The idea that republics might be founded on basic rules written down in constitutional documents that would give shape to popular sovereignty is among the most important legacies of the Atlantic revolutions. The liberal constitution of Cádiz ignited Latin America’s anti-colonial struggles. Although constitutional change can create opportunities for popular participation and citizen engagement—with Indigenous, Afro-descendent peoples and women incorporated at different moments, some only temporarily enfranchised-–it can also corrupt public institutions when used to promote a government program, turn a temporary partisan advantage into a permanent incumbency advantage, or over-concentrate executive power. As popular sovereignty supplanted scriptural authority, constitutions became aspirational vehicles for “imagined nations.” Constitutions also determine the authority and jurisdiction of governmental roles, offices, and agencies. What Roberto Gargarella calls the “engine room” of the constitution both restrains the state and generates the capacity to provide such public goods as popular representation. 
 
In recent decades, constitutional reform projects have been used in efforts to overcome protracted crises and to reinforce hegemonic projects. In some cases, constitutional reforms with deep consequences on the judiciary have been undertaken by mobilizing congressional power at the margins of the constitution. In other contexts, the defence of constituted powers has blocked constitutional reform. We invite papers that ask: 

• How might constitutional change rebalance republican, democratic, and liberal features of political systems?
• How much can we learn about today’s challenges from the history of the constitutions written in the region over the past two centuries?
• How, in the spirit of Simon Rodríguez, can we harness innovations in social media to create civic bonds of solidarity and egalitarian citizenship?

Juan Albarracín, University ofIllinois-Chicago
Agustín Goenaga, Lund University 
Alejandra Luneke, Instituto Milenio Investigación en Violencia y Democracia

We generally associate republican ideals and democracy with the ability to peacefully resolve social conflicts. The democratic ideal, especially in highly unequal societies, is also associated with the expectation of progressive “equalization” of opportunities and citizenship rights. This, in turn, should contribute to strengthen democratic processes and embed the republican ideal more deeply in society. However, nearly half a century after Latin America's transitions to democracy, our societies continue to be marked by pervasive structural, political, and criminal violence. Mexico is perhaps the most illustrative example: following its late democratization in 2000, the country has experienced an unprecedented escalation of violence, with over 100,000 people officially recognized by the state as missing (including young people, women, journalists, and indigenous people). According to political science standards, Latin America has experienced the most democratic period over the last few decades. However, it remains the most unequal region in the world, and its democracies have the highest murder rates of political candidates, environmental activists, and investigative journalists. In short, our democracies have proven durable, but they are also deeply violent. This track seeks to examine the mechanisms that reproduce violent democracies, as well as the multiple social, political, economic, and normative implications of the interaction between electoral regimes that function amid persistent high levels of structural, political, and criminal violence.

Alberto Vergara, Universidad del Pacífico 
Federico M. Rossi, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia-Spain
Jan Boesten, Freie Universität Berlin

A republic cannot be sustained without good citizens and egalitarian societies. Latin American republics “are not very republican,” writes Alberto Vergara in Republicas Defraudadas, because citizens are subject to discrimination, geographical segregation, and lack of access to public goods. Many of these “bads” result from low state capacity and extreme inequality. One of the most important egalitarian “goods” that high state capacity can generate is representation. Representative democracy requires a combination of democracy and a legal-rational state. By disaggregating the state and the regime (see table), we can identify the three alternatives to representative democracy. The state of exception occurs when democracy is suspended in a legal-rational state. In patrimonial states, the crisis of representation—typically caused by a lack of programmatic parties, the weakness of legislatures, and the absence of the rule of law—can produce competitive oligarchies in which oligarchic modes of rule and populist mobilization oscillate. Erosion of both the state and regime dimensions creates the possibility of fascism.

We invite a discussion of how the promise of the republic can be achieved through transformative changes that strengthen both democratic institutions and the construction of lawful states. 
Thus, we ask:

• Can popular republicanism restore the public sphere and strengthen a commitment to the common good without weakening guarantees of citizenship rights?
• What new syntheses of democratic, republican, and liberal traditions might revitalize the quality of democracy?
• What habits and practices cultivate the character and judgment required for democratic citizenship? 

Roosbelinda Cárdenas, New York University
Pavel Andrade, Texas Tech University
Ana Sabau, University of Michigan

As a means of seizing state power, revolutions seem to have reached a dead-end. Many consider the current neoliberal era of consumerism and the flexible flow of digital communication to be non-revolutionary. Yet, the legacies of twentieth-century revolutions transcend their connection to the institutionality of the state. As grassroots processes of social struggle against the uneven development of world capitalism, Latin American and Caribbean revolutions remain a reference for contemporary Global South imaginaries.

Charged with emancipatory potential, revolutionaries advocated communal land rights and self-government, triggering defiance and exposing the shortcomings of capitalist development. Revolutions allowed the forging of vernacular forms of Marxism, but also liberal reformism, popular republicanism, anti-colonialism, and Third-Worldism. They contributed to the collapse of the division between elite and popular cultures, and revolutionized culture itself, creating the conditions for critical reflection on art and politics in society. Modern media not only contributed to the institutionalization of revolutionary states, but also to the democratization of public opinion.

Contemporary protest movements provide a different lens to assess our sociocultural and political landscape. Struggles over race, ethnicity, gender, the environment, and human rights, point toward buen vivir rather than socialism, to “changing the world without taking power,” in the words of John Holloway, rather than seizing power to change the world. The subjectivities modulating such movements in the digital era resist and confront neoliberal governability without expecting to transcend it.

This track explores the reach and scope of such movements in connection to their global significance and alignment to similar phenomena, such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. It welcomes a focus on culture and art. It inquires whether such movements can mobilize and create enduring bonds of solidarity in the era of diasporic and virtual geographies, and advance new understandings of popular sovereignty, revolutionary purpose, and communal organization.