History of Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean

history of democracy

‘The History of Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1800s-1870s’, is the title of a new ‘Dossier’, edited by Eduardo Posada-Carbó, just published in the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies (volume 26:2, 2020).  Its various articles examine a topic that until hitherto has received very little attention by modern scholarship, with few notable exceptions.  Such neglect is particularly notable when it comes to Latin America and the Caribbean, a region that during the nineteenth century tends to be identified almost exclusively with either dictatorship or anarchy.  By looking at the trajectories of the word ‘democracy’, the struggles against slavery, the impact of key texts in shaping our understandings of democracy, and the relationship between constitutionalism and democracy, the articles included in this collection offer an invitation to revise a subject that is as wide embracing as complex.  Following the ‘Introduction’ by the editor, the ‘dossier’ includes contributions from Javier Fernández Sebastián, Carrie Gibson, Gabe Paquette, Jesús Sanjurjo, José Antonio Aguilar, Eduardo Zimmermann, and Marcelo Casals, Andrés Estefane and Juan Luis Ossa.  The ‘dossier’ is based on some of the papers presented at a conference organised at the LAC in May 2017, with the support of the John Fell Fund and the Sanderson Fund in the Oxford History Faculty.  It is part of the Oxford based project ‘Re-imagining Democracy’ https://re-imaginingdemocracy.com/

For further details of the dossier, please visit:

https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjil20/26/2