The following working paper (the English translation of “Soziale Ungleichheiten und globale Interdependenzen in Lateinamerika: eine Zwischenbilanz” desiguALdades.net Working Paper Series 4, 2013) lays out the baseline from which the research approach of the research network desiguALdades.net was developed. Starting from diverse social inequality phenomena in Latin America, the network seeks to underline the multidimensionality of inequalities and their transregional interdependencies, taking a synchronic as well as a diachronic perspective into account. It thereby draws, first, on the discourse on global approaches to the study of inequalities, particularly world system approaches and transnationalism. Secondly, it is based on a critical examination of key concepts (like figuration and regime). Lastly, it seeks to link these to subjects and areas, especially the environmental dimension, that until now have received little consideration in research on inequalities.

The present paper draws on works that combine Marxist and Weberian traditions of social structure analysis to interpret the contemporary Brazilian political crisis as a distributive conflict involving four classes or strata (precariat, outsiders, established, millionaires), defined using five determinant vectors of social inequality: wealth, position, knowledge, selective association and existential rights. The four classes or strata considered saw their wealth, their existential rights, and their knowledge grow in the period between 2003 and 2013. However, in this period, the precariat and the outsiders ascended significantly in their social position, while the established lost social position to the extent that their power to exclude outsiders from social spaces formerly reserved for their own usage diminished. The same logic applies to selective associations with regard to gender and race, since during the Workers’ Party (PT) administrations there was a decrease in the power of men and whites to discriminate against women and blacks. This loss of position in the hierarchies of class, gender and race fed the resentment of the established against the PT government even in times when, in terms of wealth, they experienced an ascendant trajectory. Starting in 2014, the picture changed. The exacerbation of the economic crisis caused all of the strata, especially the outsiders, to lose wealth. The established, though less threatened by the outsiders (the most affected by the crisis), also experienced social decline as the recession advanced. Finally, the millionaires who had until then been gaining at all of the levels of inequality with the PT governments, lost at least part of their selective associations as the investigations into corruption advanced. It is precisely when the millionaires began to lose that effective changes in favor of the removal of the president began to occur.

The 2000s have brought a renewed debate on strategies of ‘developmentalism’ in emerging market economies, especially in Latin America. We consider new concepts of developmentalism to be strategies in which the state deliberately pushes the process of development, in terms of structural change, and aims at income redistribution. In our paper, we seek to systematize this debate, comparing the concepts of new developmentalism and social developmentalism. We argue that of particular relevance for this discussion are the policy space constraints for emerging market economies imposed by international monetary and financial asymmetries. We conclude that the latter of the two approaches does not consider appropriately the policy constraints related to these asymmetries, which reduce the space for the implementation of developmentalist policies, while the former sees redistribution as a mere result of export-led industrialization.

For many years social studies classified the mobilization of the unemployed as a highly unlikely phenomenon; it was argued that the loss of jobs generates individual apathy, resignation and impotence. In the last twenty years, this conclusion has been the object of substantial revision. The reason is well known: the rebellion of the unemployed has become a reality in many countries, as it was the case in Argentina in recent years. This unexpected development had roots in the specific development of the country’s economy and society in the post-World War Two era. In the context of the neoliberal reforms in the 1990s, and their aftermath, the emergence of this movement had tremendous consequences for social equality, even today. This paper presents the specific factors which gave rise to this movement, its peak, and subsequent decline. Throughout, the focus is on the consequence for inequality among workers and in society.

Este estudio analiza un caso de interseccionalidad de identificaciones de clase, étnicas y raciales, en base al momento de origen del peronismo. El 17 de octubre de 1945 los trabajadores de los suburbios ingresaron a la ciudad de Buenos Aires y marcharon a Plaza de Mayo a reclamar la libertad del coronel Perón. Con aquel episodio estalló el sistema de clasificaciones sociales de la Argentina. Surgieron una serie de nuevas categorías (descamisado, cabecita negra) así como se resignificaron otras (criollo, argentino). El estudio aporta a los debates de la teoría cultural a partir este caso histórico. Contribuye a comprender desde otra perspectiva los orígenes del peronismo y del antiperonismo, y permite analizar las complejidades de los imaginarios nacionales argentinos. Por ello postula que la sociedad argentina está constituida sobre las jerarquizaciones de un racismo que no se estudia, salvo en las nuevas generaciones.

How Social Developmentalism Reframed Social Policy in Brazil Lena Lavinas Abstract This paper proposes to critically situate the social-developmentalist current of the last decade within the broader moment of finance-dominated accumulation regime, wherein, crucially, credit and access to financial markets have become the core motifs for the new mass-consumption market society. This structural move is, from our point of view, radically distinct from the very framework which inspired the tenets of early structuralist thought and which prevailed during the Keynesian post-war period. Today, highly segmented credit loans, private insurance, and other new financial products such as payment protection insurance have synthesized into indispensable elements for growth. In this new financialized framework, social policy has been used to underwrite a financial inclusion model that sowed the seeds of its own demise—while it enabled Brazil’s transition into a society of mass consumption, it also deepened the indebtedness of households, partially transforming social insurance and welfare benefits into financial rents.

Social science research on social inequality in Latin America emphasizes the role that residential distribution of social groups in urban space plays in the production and/or reproduction of asymmetries of social positioning there in conjunction with the acceleration of economic globalization in the 1990s. Meanwhile, spaces absolutely receptive to social diversity, such as public streets and squares in Latin American historical centers during the shop opening hours, are less studied. This paper presents the analysis of a Brazilian case, São Paulo’s cathedral square, where I gathered ethnographic data on 39 occasions (Monday and Friday afternoons) in 2013. Applying particular dialectical and phenomenological perspectives, a Lefebvrean and Goffmanian one, I aim to answer how and why the bodily use pedestrians made of this place may interfere in the (re)production of social equality in São Paulo at this point in time. From this research, secular body-behavioral and moral inequalities emerge as important issues.

In this paper I offer an analysis of the critical place that “informality” occupies in the urbanistic reordering of the “Cidade Olimpica” Rio de Janeiro. Contextualizing it in Brazil’s claim to an emergent geopolitical position as a BRICS country, I explore how this reordering intersects with spatial confinement of the urban poor. I draw from examples of real estate entrepreneurialism, resettlements and territorial conflicts in Barra da Tijuca and Jacarepaguá, two of Rio de Janeiro’s rapidly transforming areas. Drawing from Judith Butler´s concept of performativity (1993), I introduce informality as a performed role and volatile ascription allowing us to understand how urban actors bargain their influence vis-à-vis unstable urban planning processes. In the making of the Olympic City, informality functions (1) as a signifier of what is perceived to be a threat to justify the stigmatization and subsequent confinement of marginalized communities as a result of local infrastructure projects related to mega-events; (2) as a signifier to justify defensive interventions against the municipal government and real estate developers by an organized upper middle-class; and (3) as a signifier around which resistances and alliances form between activist groups, researchers and NGOs on the edges of the urban fabric. Correlating urban informality and spatial confinement allows for an understanding of a spatialized, contested and performed stateness underlying city branding and also of the political mobilization of the urban poor despite of hegemonic marginalization in cities of the Global South.

This paper presents the transformations of Latin American-European relations over time as an interdependent unequal relationship. These relations have been shaped by exports of commodities, including the enrichment of European foodways with indigenous Latin American crops and the environmentally destructive extraction of natural resources and commercial export agriculture. The transformation under colonialism led not only to the settlement of Europeans in Latin America but also to the Atlantic slave trade. The consequence of these relations of domination even today is a limited acknowledgement of Latin America as being more than an extension of Europe. With the end of European immigration to and from Latin America, the role of the United States has grown instead, and increasingly developments in Latin America have also taken on their own dynamics, decoupled from Europe. In the coming decades, relations with China which have grown rapidly in commerce and commodity exports are likely to transform the role of Europe in the region yet again.

Subnational politics and federal relations are an increasingly studied aspect of Latin American federation. However, much of the literature neglects the importance of external economic conditions for the study of these phenomena and tends to reinforce the bias towards methodological nationalism implicit in most of the studies. This paper provides a first approximation to the analysis of the interdependence of global processes with subnational politics, while avoiding “non-institutional” as well as “non-spatial” thinking at the same time. It proposes the concept of subnational fiscal autonomy, defined as the discretionary amount of subnational revenue, in order to observe and analyze the multi-dimensional effect of external economic conditions on subnational politics in particular and federal relations in general. Using panel data for the period from 1990 to 2012, the paper offers a quantitative analysis of the causes of the variation in subnational fiscal autonomy in Mexico. The results show that one can expect significant effects of changing external economic conditions on subnational fiscal autonomy during this period. The paper proposes a framework to interpret these effects. The results of this study provide insights for further studies of subnational politics, federal relations and the potential of subnational governments to pursue policies to reduce inequality.