A finales de la década de 1990, México permitió la doble nacionalidad, y en 2005-2006 otorgó derechos políticos limitados para los mexicanos residentes en el exterior. Estos avances “hacia afuera” contrastan con el tratamiento hacia comunidades específicas al interior del país. Por un lado, los extranjeros residentes siguen completamente vedados de participación en la vida pública de México, incluso en el ámbito más básico y local. Ello va en contra de las tendencias mundiales, particularmente las latinoamericanas. Por otro lado, los ciudadanos mexicanos por naturalización, así como los mexicanos con doble nacionalidad, enfrentan una discriminación legalmente sancionada en sus derechos políticos y laborales, lo que ha creado un sistema de ciudadanías desiguales. Para explicar esto, se analiza la influencia del llamado Nacionalismo Revolucionario y su radical desconfianza hacia cualquier otra influencia (política, social y cultural) por parte del exterior, así como su insistencia en la composición de México como una nación ‘mestiza’, en tanto heredera de indígenas y españoles

We translate the structuralist center-periphery approach to international currency relations and analyze the implications for macroeconomic policies of emerging market countries. While the Post Keynesian literature offers a rather clear concept for growthoriented policies, it is necessary to adapt them for peripheral emerging economies. We base our analysis of an appropriate Keynesian policy mix for these countries on the concept of currency hierarchy, where the currencies of peripheral emerging economies have a lower liquidity premium than the currencies of advanced economies. Under these conditions, we argue that domestic economic policy coordination should lay a major focus on a low policy rate and, especially, a competitive exchange rate for obtaining, at least, a balanced current account, in order to prevent boom-bust-cycles in capital flows with subsequent financial crises and their damaging effects on employment and growth. We conclude that it is a rather ambitious and long term goal to climb up the currency hierarchy, especially under the current conditions of financial globalization.

The concept of “enclosures” provides useful perspectives for thinking about social inequalities. In this paper, we overcome the conceptual limits posed by Polanyi’s focus on the particular history of England as the trigger of the global transformation of economy and society. We follow the recent critique made by Nancy Fraser that inner-societal conflicts resulting from enclosures need a more decided and explicit analysis. We argue that these can be best addressed from the perspective of coloniality and territoriality. As examples of this post-Polanyi approach, we present research results on contemporary enclosures represented by exclusive urbanism in Mexico, agricultural plantation expansion in Colombia and seed regulations in Argentina.

This paper explores how inequalities are produced, re-produced and contested through symbolic processes. The symbolic dimension of inequalities has been generally neglected; culture has been often viewed as a category less important than economy in the research on disparities. Sometimes culture is reduced to a legitimizing function of preexistent inequalities that were generated elsewhere (in the markets or as a consequence of public policies). In the standard view, it is as if only economics and politics are truly important for inequality, while culture is assigned only a secondary role. By contrast, I identify five symbolic processes that are key for the generation of inequalities and therefore could be also fundamental in efforts to reduce social asymmetries: (1) classification, categorization and creation of boundaries; (2) valuation, de-valuation and re-valuation; (3) relations between differences and inequalities; (4) production, acquisition and distribution of symbolic capital and (5) struggles over the legitimacy of inequalities.

In line with developments observed in several Latin American countries, inequalities in Brazil have significantly declined since the Workers’ Party, PT, came to power in 2003. During the two administrations of former President Lula da Silva (2003-2006 and 2007- 2010) and the first administration of President Dilma Rousseff (2010-2014), economic growth, improvements in labor market, progress in deprived regions and pro-poor policies interacted positively as drivers of inequality reduction. But due to the recent economic stagnation and political instability, Rousseff, in her new administration (2015- 2018), is facing serious difficulties in sustaining the social gains obtained during the last twelve years. It seems that continuing the progress in inequality reduction in times of low economic growth requires deeper structural changes such as a progressive tax reform in order to effectively redistribute resources from the rich to the underprivileged classes. This paper discusses recent developments in Brazil from the perspective of entangled inequalities, a concept applied here with the objective of enlarging the narrow definition of inequality brought forward by hegemonic scholarship. After a brief introduction into the conceptual framework of entangled inequalities, the paper presents, in its second section, an overview of recent changes in Brazilian social structure. The third section discusses the role of the Brazilian state in reducing inequalities. Finally, recent developments in Brazil with regard to the entangled inequalities framework are assessed.

This paper offers a template for understanding and analyzing racialization as a paradigm. Further, the template is applied to the North American case – an important one because it has endured and spread across the globe despite the enormous weight of scientific evidence against it. The fallacy of race (and in particular the North American origin Anglo variant) endures for two reasons. First, social agents seeking to gain or maintain power and control over paradigm-relevant resources benefit from reinvesting in pseudoscientific racial paradigms. Second, new science proving the fallacy of race is ignored because ignoring new paradigmatic science is in fact the way normal science operates. Thus, a paradigmatic analysis of race may help to explain why current social science approaches to the demise of racial thought may be ineffective.

The paper discusses the relationship between material qualities of nature and the process of capitalist valuation. While valuation can be defined in a broad sense pertaining to how resources are identified, extracted and integrated into the world market, the focus here is narrower, centering on the specific qualities of nature that are important to the creation of value itself and touching on related questions such as how to evaluate tendencies in which nature materialities are increasingly commodified. The first part of the paper briefly reviews the work of scholars approaching nature as a materiality placing certain ‘limits’ on valuation. Most of these scholars tend to view valuation at the level of discrete production processes and while offering many examples of how material nature constraints or enables production, the role of these qualities in value generation is not clear. By contrast, a second part of the paper discusses work that directly addresses valuation, proposing that the specific role of nature lies in the fact that nature materialities are not necessarily commodified, offering a view in which nature is not a ‘limit’ or an ‘outside’ but a materiality that is a constitutive part of valuation, historically integrated through partial commodification. A final section deals with the specificity of the valuation of living nature. Agricultural biotechnologies in Latin America are briefly discussed, raising various issues that should form part of a future research agenda to evaluate how this particular type of nature valuation will reconfigure social inequalities in the area.

Das Ius Constitutionale Commune en América Latina (ICCAL) bezeichnet einen regionalen Ansatz transformatorischer Verfassungsstaatlichkeit. Gespeist aus der konkreten Erfahrung von unhaltbaren Zuständen systemischer Art zielt er auf den Wandel politischer und sozialer Realitäten durch eine konzertierte Stärkung von Menschenrechten, Demokratie und Rechtstaatlichkeit. Im Mittelpunkt stehen gemeinsame Probleme der lateinamerikanischen Länder wie die Exklusion breiter Bevölkerungskreise sowie die oft nur schwache rechtliche Normativität. Statt auf funktionale Integration setzt das ICCAL vor allem auf einen rechtebasierten, überstaatlich abgesicherten und regional radizierten Konstitutionalismus, so dass die Vertreter des ICCAL Staatsrecht, Völkerrecht und Rechtsvergleichung engst verbinden. Von besonderer Bedeutung ist die Öffnung der Verfassungen zahlreicher lateinamerikanischer Staaten gegenüber dem Völkerrecht sowie das interamerikanische System des Menschenrechtsschutzes, das den normativen Kern des ICCAL darstellt. Der vorliegende Beitrag analysiert die Kernelemente dieses Ansatzes und erschließt ihre spezifisch lateinamerikanische Gestalt.

Managing social and political stability is a central preoccupation of neoliberalized Latin American states. Building critically on an emerging literature on the security state, I suggest that this preoccupation increasingly takes the form of a securitization of society through both punitive and preventive means, involving not only the police and penal institutions but also civil society in partnership with an enabling state. In this paper I suggest that we stand to gain analytically from rendering visible the gendered dimension of these management functions of the state. In a context of increasing precariousness of relations of production and reproduction, the contributions of feminists and activists to the shaping of securitization efforts is undeniable. Concretely, women’s invisible and naturalized care work makes a fundamental contribution to the configuration of the Latin American neoliberalized state as a security state.

In the context of an increasing economic integration and the rising importance of the Global South regarding global trade and companies, scholarly debates that try to grasp the shape of this increasingly integrated global economy addressed global production networks. They have mostly focused on manufacturing and agricultural activities and to a lesser extent on services, whereas analysis on traditional extractive activities has been incorporated only recently. In this paper, I focus on the relevance of extractive processes for global production networks in a broader sense. I argue that these matter not only in terms of traditional extractive activities such as mining and hydrocarbons. Extractive processes matter for all production networks, because they all depend upon the extractive capture of nature. This focus points to struggles around nature appropriation, the co-constitution of social relations and the “natural” environment and processes of valuation. I then specifically sketch how inequalities in extractive production networks can be traced in terms of unequal labor division and power relations (specifically the hegemonic stability of production networks). Combining global production network analysis, regulation theory and extractivism analysis can furthermore reveal how these inequalities unfold in specific political economic contexts and across scales

This paper focuses on the way in which socioeconomic, educational and gender inequalities are reproduced in Mexico and how certain mechanisms facilitate or hinder young people’s social mobility. Despite the efforts of various countries to promote schooling and increase spending on education, the structural conditions of social stratification have been reproduced in education, and this type of segmentation has produced a hierarchical fragmentation of higher education institutions. In order to observe the asymmetries in the distribution of resources and in the social positions that young people occupy, as well as the role played by the students’ perceptions of their personal situation compared with that of their parents, in the development of ability to reach the goals they desire and value, this paper will analyze survey data concerning three types of mobility: mobility of economic wellbeing, educational mobility and subjective mobility. This analysis finds that there is a strong relationship between the hierarchical fragmentation of higher education, class inequalities and gender, and that the relationship between gender and class remains an invisible inequality.

Frente a la necesidad de reducir drásticamente la emisión de CO2 debido al cambio climático, está intensificándose el uso de las energías alternativas, así como de autos eléctricos y nuevos sistemas de almacenamiento de energía con baterías de ion de litio de alto rendimiento. El litio se emplea además en otros segmentos de las tecnologías de la comunicación y de las tecnologías del futuro. De esta manera también está creciendo la demanda de la materia prima litio a nivel global. Bolivia dispone de las mayores reservas de litio en salares. Con su programa nacional de litio apunta a la producción de baterías para el mercado internacional. El presente estudio analiza la configuración global del negocio del litio. Esto incluye la producción, las cadenas de valor y el mercado del litio, controlado por empresas mixtas globales; examina también, tomando como ejemplo Alemania, el desarrollo de altas tecnologías y de estrategias para reducir la dependencia de la importación de litio. El análisis pone de manifiesto la configuración de desigualdad global interdependiente, históricamente conformada, en la que se inserta el programa de litio boliviano, y se pregunta por la competitividad de Bolivia en el mercado internacional de litio.

The tax and benefits system has little influence on redistributing income in Chile, making reduction of inequality more difficult due to insufficient tax collection, several exemptions and problems of evasion and avoidance. This work explores some of the main features of the Chilean tax system, particularly tax evasion and tax avoidance among the elite, because they contribute more (at least in absolute terms) with their tax payments, they also have the highest levels of information (or the resources to get it), and a greater interest in and more knowledge regarding the payment of taxes. This motivates for example the use of tax advisory services. In addition, the influence of economic groups permits the reproduction of a tax system with several regressive elements. A broader perspective is suggested, considering the role of institutions, discourses and everyday practices, in order to explore whether the Chilean tax system contributes reproducing a privileged position for the elite, with consequences on progressivity, and legitimizing a reductionist vision of taxes, that avoids considerations about social inequality.

Los estudios reunidos en este volumen fueron elaborados en el marco del seminario de investigación de la Maestría en Estudios Latinoamericanos Interdisciplinarios de la Freie Universität Berlin, titulado “Desigualdades Sociales, Derecho y Política”, dirigido por Sérgio Costa, Manuel Góngora Mera y Guilherme Leite Gonçalves entre abril de 2013 y marzo de 2014. Versiones preliminares de estos textos se presentaron en el taller “Derecho en América Latina: ¿corrector o (re)productor de desigualdades?”, el 14 y 15 de febrero de 2014 en el Lateinamerika-Institut de la Freie Universität Berlin. Los seis casos de estudio seleccionados analizan algunos de los límites del derecho para corregir significativamente ciertas desigualdades sociales en América Latina, pese a su potencial transformador. En particular, los casos ilustran restricciones en la corrección desigualdades étnicas, de género, de clase y por origen nacional.