Book Review: Dependency, Neoliberalism and Globalization in Latin America

MERINO, GABRIEL ESTEBAN

Critical Sociology

SAGE Journals

Año: 2021 vol. 47 p. 833 - 835

0896-9205

The word crisis is used more and more frequently to describe situations that integrally compose our contemporary reality. We speak of a crisis of the world order, a crisis of the West, a crisis of the primacy of the United States, an economic crisis, a financial crisis, an ecological crisis, a crisis of meaning, an institutional crisis, a political crisis, a civilizational crisis, and so on. Many times the word crisis is likewise associated with uncertainty, expressing not only a lack of certainty about where humanity is headed but suggestive of contested terrain about a direction seemingly rife with bifurcations. In this sense, the central value of Carlos Eduardo Martins? Globalization, Dependency and Neoliberalism in Latin America is that it provides fundamental tools for thinking about the constitutive elements that explain these crises and uncertainty. With a deep theoretical and conceptual richness that articulates and renews the theory of dependency along with theorizing about the world system, this work situates us in the current historical-spatial transition where key concepts such as neoliberalism and globalization are clarified together with dependency. From there, it situates Latin America in the world system, in a process of peripheralization that has affected the region since the imposition of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s, opening strategic perspectives on the organic crisis that we are currently experiencing.