Date:
For a recording of this event, click here.
Speakers: Gonzalo Banda, Chevening Scholar, London School of Economics and Political Science; Rodrigo Barrenechea, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Universidad Católica del Uruguay; Zarai Toledo, Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Inter-American Policy and Research , Tulane University
Moderated by: Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University; Director, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies
Gonzalo Banda is a political scientist, focused on subnational governments, mainly in southern Peru. He studied law and has a master’s degree in Political Science and Government from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. He also studied at the School of Literature and Linguistics at the Universidad Nacional de San Agustín. He is Associate Professor in Political Science at the Universidad Católica de Santa María. Banda is a columnist for "El Comercio" and for "El País", as well as a podcaster for El Comité de Lectura, where he created the podcast called "El Sur Antisistema". He is currently studying at the London School of Economics and Political Science for the Master of Public Policy, as a Chevening Scholar. He is a fan of FBC Melgar and picanterías.
Rodrigo Barrenechea is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Departamento de Ciencias Sociales of the Universidad Católica del Uruguay. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University and a BA in Sociology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. In the 2019-2020 academic year, he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Weatherhead Center Research Cluster on Challenges to Democracy, at Harvard University. His research focuses on populism, political parties, and political representation in Latin America, particularly in the Andean subregion.
Zaraí Toledo is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR) at Tulane University. She received a PhD in Political Science from the University of British Columbia (UBC). She studies how excluded groups participate in politics in highly unequal societies, from indigenous and campesino communities to informal traders and small-scale miners. She is interested in their capacity to influence policy outcomes in resource governance and more generally, their impact on state development in Latin America. Her book project, “Under(mining) State Authority: The Politics of Informal Gold Mining in Bolivia and Peru”, looks at the expansion of informal governance systems around gold mining in marginalized areas and the new political enforcement dynamics that emerge from the empowerment of the informal extractive sector. Her current projects turn the attention to subnational officials and how they resolve governance dilemmas posed by the divergent interests of the central state and those of their local constituents. She is also coordinating the Mobilization, Extractivism, and Government Action (MEGA) research group. Outside of academia, Toledo worked with policy makers and communities in program monitoring in the areas of resource governance and sustainability. She managed projects in Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador with supply-chain studies and assessments of training programs for the formalization of small-scale gold mining. She also designed models for coexistence between large and small-scale mining. She holds a BA (licenciatura) in Sociology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and an MA in Political Science from Carleton University.
Steven Levitsky is the Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. As the David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government, his research focuses on democratization, authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions. He is author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die (Crown, 2018), a New York Times Best-Seller that has been published in 25 languages, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge, 2010), and Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, 2003), and co-editor of Informal Institutions and Democracy in Latin America (with Gretchen Helmke) and The Resurgence of the Latin American Left (with Kenneth Roberts). He has written frequently for the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Vox, The New Republic, The Monkey Cage, La República (Peru) and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil). He is currently writing a book (with Lucan Way) on the durability of revolutionary regimes. Levitsky received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
Presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs