Introduction

FERNÁNDEZ, VÍCTOR RAMIRO; BRONDINO, GABRIEL

Development in Latin America. Critical Discussions from the Periphery

Palgrave Macmillan

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2018; p. 1 - 11

This book is part of an ambitious project that attempts to cross the borders of the Spanish and Portuguese speaking worlds and take to the Anglo-Saxon world a proposal oriented at recovering in a creative, non-dogmatic, and critical way the contributions of Latin American structuralism. From this, we expect to promote a novel lecture about the transformations that are taking place in the global economy and, especially, in its periphery. The origins of the project can be traced back to a workshop held in March 2015 at the Institute of Economic Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) with financial assistance from the Antipode Foundation. The workshop was coordinated by theGlobalization, Knowledge, and Development Program (PROGLOCLODE) of UNAM, the Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences of the NationalUniversity of Litoral and  CONICET (Argentina), and the Institute of Urban and Regional Research and Planning of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and a large group of researchers from different parts of Latin America participated.One of the main conclusions in several discussions and debates of the workshop?especially but not exclusively about the fate of national political projects of the governments that were part of the ?Pink Tide??was about the necessity to strategically recover the contributions that Latin American structuralism made to development theory during the first decades after World War II. Such recovery ought to be dynamic, in the sense of recovering the most original elements of this school and interpellate them to the new global context.This inspired the editors to organize and promote a new round of debates in another workshop with scholars belonging to different Latin American academic centers that eventually contributed to this volume. This time the workshop was held at Santa Fe, Argentina, in July 2017. There, the idea of revising central aspects of the evolution of structuralist thought was strengthened. Specifically, the need to recover the notion of power and domination as crucial categories of the analysis of development. Also, to critically revise other elements of the analysis as well as introduce absent ones. All these tasks were (and still are) in order to make structuralism fruitful again for analyzing peripheral development from the periphery.This revision and update distance us from that followed by neo-structuralism in the early nineties. Neo-structuralism revision downplays precisely those elements we highlight: the conflict dimension of the analysis.Such dilution, in our opinion, has limited this school to understand, precisely, the structural factors that explain why the periphery, although it hasbeen transformed into a dynamic space of accumulation, has generated inside its space new asymmetries and new forms of subalternity, and what measures should be taken to reverse them.Alternatively, by following a different path, this book intends to recover Latin America?s critical thinking tradition and contribute to think novel strategies of development. Although each chapter of this book has a different disciplinary background, it pursues a constructive dialogue among several disciplines belonging to the Social Sciences and tries to offer aholistic view of development.We hope with this book to have advanced one step forward (as little as it may be) in recovering Latin America?s capacity to think for itself, developing its own tools, and implementing its own policy. Even more, in building consciousness of the acritical and colonial assimilation of theories from the North in Latin American academic centers, particularly since the advent of the Washington Consensus.