Neoliberalism and Social Protest Waves in Latin America: The Chilean Case in Comparative Perspective

Date: 

Tuesday, February 25, 2020, 12:00pm

Location: 

CGIS South, Room S-250, 1730 Cambridge Street

Speaker: Kenneth Roberts, Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government, Cornell University
Moderator: Frances Hagopian, Jorge Paulo Lemann Senior Lecturer on Government

Waves of social protest have increasingly challenged Chile's neoliberal economic model and the constitutional order that sustains it. Chile's most recent protest cycle belongs to a broader pattern of resistance to neoliberalism in Latin America, but it has a number of distinctive characteristics that reflect the singular breadth, depth, and duration of market liberalization in the country, as well as its authoritarian political origins.

Kenneth M. Roberts is the Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government and Binenkorb Director of Latin American Studies at Cornell University. His research and teaching interests focus on party systems, populism, social movements, and the politics of inequality in Latin America and beyond. He is the author of Changing Course in Latin America: Party Systems in the Neoliberal Era (Cambridge University Press) and Deepening Democracy? The Modern Left and Social Movements in Chile and Peru (Stanford University Press). He is also the co-editor of The Diffusion of Social Movements(Cambridge University Press), Beyond Neoliberalism? Patterns, Responses, and New Directions in Latin America and the Caribbean (Palgrave-MacMillan), and, with Steve Levitsky, The Resurgence of the Latin American Left (Johns Hopkins University Press).

The Tuesday Seminar Series is a bring your own brown bag lunch series. Please feel free to enjoy your lunch at the lecture, drinks will be provided.