Is it still possible to think about innovations within the context of our battered democracies? ‘The Two Faces of Institutional Innovation: Promises and Limits of Democratic Participation in Latin America’ is a book that pursues this issue and reflects the maturity of this field of study on the topic of institutional participation and democratic innovations. Following an initial period of enthusiasm for these means of ‘deepening democracy’, the context of this work is one mistrust in traditional political institutions around […]

In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 04, 1989, which epitomized the end of the Cold War, many countries experienced new forms of democratization with the involvement of non-State actors in politics. It had taken two decades for the democratic transition to spread around the world. Blossoming civil society organizations would need another decade to “democratize democracy” () in these countries. In the meantime, almost every country from Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe […]

Written by one of Brazil’s leading proponents of Ernesto Laclau’s theory of discourse, ‘1961-1964: The Brazilian Dictatorship in Two Coups’ presents an innovative conception of the events that led up to a dictatorship that lasted 21 years. A Laclauean perspective permeates the entire work. One can appreciate the discourse of the main actors involved – political groups, unions, social and military movements – through solid documentary analysis in which special attention is paid to antagonistic debates that reveal the construction […]

Elected by the Oxford Dictionary as the word of the year in 2016, ‘Post-truth’ has become an object of study in several different fields. In his homonymous book, Lee McIntyre defines it as the phenomenon whereby “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (McINTYRE, 2018, p. 05) or as “part of a growing international trend where some feel emboldened to bend reality to fit their opinions, rather than the other way […]

To bring democracy to a city is to move toward the ideal of the inclusive city – a particular challenge in a world where housing costs and demand for housing are both on the rise, and both factors in the problems of housing affordability and displacement. The notion of an inclusive city entails not only housing interventions, but also the inclusion of civil society in official decision-making. ‘Democratizing Urban Development: Community Organizations for Housing across the United States and Brazil’ […]

The book ‘Elecciones y partidos en América Latina en el cambio de ciclo’, edited by Manuel Alcántara, Daniel Buquet and María Laura Tagina, and published in 2018 by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas in Madrid, Spain, is composed of 20 chapters, including the introduction and conclusion. Most of the authors have received their PhDs from the University of Salamanca, and many of the chapters include sources of information produced in that institution. The project Parliamentarian Elites (PELA ) , by […]

‘International Relations and the European Union’, edited by Christopher Hill, Michael Smith and Sophie Vanhoonacker, is the 3rd edition of a book which is part of ‘The New European Union Series’, by the Oxford University Press. The book is a collection of 20 articles by several authors engaged in research on the European Union (EU), and highlights the importance of creating a link between the internal integration and the policymaking process of the EU, and the development of its international […]

What went wrong? The main cause of this failure — or worse: this retrogression, in Lavinas’ view (2017) — is the creeping financialization of social policy, as reflected in the book’s title. By financialization she means “an array of empirical features and processes… of a new accumulation regime in which macroeconomics and economic policies are increasingly dominated by the rationale of financial capital” (LAVINAS, 2017, p. 07). The influence of financialization, she stresses, is not only felt in the market […]

“Cooperation and Protracted Conflict in International Affairs” is a persuasive analysis of the application of the concept of reciprocity to the study of international relations. The interdisciplinarity of this book represents an added value to the literature on conflict resolution. The author, Anat Niv-Solomon, is an Associate Professor in political science at the College of Staten Island, New York, USA. She obtained her PhD degree from the University of Connecticut, completing a dissertation that she reworked to write this book. […]

(Allison, Graham. Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) What is ‘Destined for War’s’ main argument? In sum, the impact of a rising China on the United States and the global order under American hegemony are leading these two nations toward an avoidable violent clash, which neither one wants, because they risk falling into what the author calls ‘Thucydides’s Trap’. […]

Cass Sunstein has had a long and distinguished academic career in the field of behavioral economics, teaching at prestigious universities such as the University of Chicago and Harvard (the latter to this day). Alongside his career as a professor and researcher, it is also worth noting that between 2009 and 2012 Sunstein worked as administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs during the Obama administration. Obama’s first presidential campaign is recognized worldwide as a turning point […]

A few years ago, I was commissioned by a Dutch publisher to compose a short biography of Rubens Ricupero for an editorial project on former secretaries-general of international organizations (). This offered me the chance to interview this scholarly, polite, and sober character with an impressive career within both domestic and global bureaucracies. It is difficult not to be charmed by his personality. Therefore, like Homer’s Ulysses, I confess I had to tie myself to the mast so as not […]