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State, Social Citizenship, and Political Mobilization in Brazil and Argentina

Thu, May 28, 12:00 to 1:45pm, TBA

Abstract

In Latin American context, contemporary popular mobilization is driven by claims for social justice and inclusion. New discourse of social citizenship has been nourished by neoliberalism that realigned socio-political space and allowed social energies to bubble up and find channels of representation. Polanyi summarized the challenge that unregulated markets posed for society in the early twentieth century in a way that seems almost prophetic for Latin America in the 1990s. Polanyi's 'great transformation'(1944) argument referring to the severity of the socioeconomic dislocations caused by the rapid enactment of market forces. That is, “attempts to subordinate social relations and state functions to market principles trigger a ‘double movement’ of social actors seeking redress from market insecurities like under- or unemployment, lost access to land or credit, and cutbacks in state subsidies or support services.”

The paper examines how social movements shape political alignments and interact with normal political institutions. First, it examines how the Worker’s Party (PT) in Brazil, which born out of the struggle of both labor unions and urban social movements against austerity policies, drew together diverse popular sectors, and succeeded in bringing social movements into the political arena and shaping the profile of political party opposition to the regime itself. Second, the paper investigates how the piquetero movement, which emerged during the peak of the economic crisis in 2001 in Argentina, has become partly incorporated within the structures of governmental administration, wielding political power in social policy decisions and influencing the outlook of politics at the local level.

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