The civilizing process in Latin America

Session Submission Type: Workshop

Abstract

Over the past decades (and not without some reason) the dominant paradigm for the study of modern Latin America has been “violence” – if not for all, for a great number of countries, including Colombia, Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and Brazil. The region today has the largest homicide rates in the world. This workshop proposes to examine critically the Latin American dominant historical paradigm “on violence” and to consider an alternative approach to the region’s past, with significant implications for the way the region perceives its current problems, challenges and prospects. The objective is to identify a potential research agenda for the study of what Norbert Elias referred to as the ‘civilizing process’ – a set of transformations in social structures and human behaviour that help to control war and civil conflict. Such a research agenda would have the aim to underscore the forces, practices and dynamics that have countered violence in the past. A second aim of the roundtable/workshop is to identify the main themes for a larger project capable of evaluating the extent to which Elias’s theories may be applied in a non-European context. The call to move the research agenda towards the study of “civility” also has a normative element: in the proper understanding of the conditions for civility may lay the foundations of durable peace and sustainable development.

Sub Track

• Violence and Insecurities

Session Organizer

• Carlos A. Pérez Ricart

Chair

• Eduardo Posada-Carbo, St Antony's College, Oxford University

Discussant

• Herbert Tico Braun, University of Virginia

Presenters

• Victor Uribe, Florida International University

• Nicola A Miller, University College London

• Jorge Giraldo

• Mónica Serrano, El Colegio de México

• Jan Boesten

• Ana María Otero Cleves, Universidad de los Andes

• Lina M Del Castillo, University of Texas/ Austin

• William A Booth, University of Oxford

• Pablo A Piccato Rodriguez, Columbia University

• Jamie L Shenk, University of Oxford

• José Antonio Aguilar Rivera, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas

• Paula Alonso, George Washington University

• Kiran Stallone, University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley)

• Eduardo A Zimmermann, Universidad de San Andrés

• Nathaniel Morris