Category: Inequality – Book Reviews

Marcos Colón’s book The Amazon in Times of War offers a compelling collection of essays exposing the physical, economic and institutional violence that devastates the Amazon. He argues that much of this destruction stems from deliberate state policies enacted under former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2023). Colón not only documents the struggles of Indigenous and other traditional communities but also critiques the role of profit-driven industries such as logging, mining and cattle ranching in the ongoing exploitation of the Amazon and its peoples.

In 1997, I attended the worldwide Action Research Conference in Cartagena, Colombia. One of the sessions opened a space for action research from industrial settings. I presented a project on learning in a network of small businesses in a region of Norway. A Mexican professor raised his hand after the presentation and said: “Excuse me for being direct, but do we live in the same world?”

The book Liberation Theology and Praxis in Contemporary Latin America assumes great relevance with the shifting landscape of the Catholic Church under Pope Francis, whose papacy has signaled a renewed engagement with many of the themes central to liberation theology. From his emphasis on economic justice and ecological responsibility in Laudato Si’ to his advocacy for oppressed communities, Francis has revived aspects of liberationist discourse that were marginalized under previous pontificates.

Latin America, and the world more broadly, has been mired in crisis throughout the first quarter of the 21st century. From economic downturns to ecological disasters to legacies of racism and enslavement, the neoliberal trends of past decades have permeated our daily lives with instability amid longstanding narratives of constant progress. If, as we are told, our society is constantly progressing, why has precarity abounded? In The Return of the Contemporary: The Latin American Novel in the End Times, Nicolás Campisi explores the ways in which contemporary Latin American authors confront these realities, focusing on the genre of the novel.

A cottage industry of academic research on Bolivia has flourished over the past twenty years. Unleashed by popular mobilizations and political transformation around the turn of the century, social scientists have dissected and debated Bolivia’s “plurinational” state-building project, which came to define President Evo Morales’s regime (2006-2019). Of course, Bolivia had long been the object of scholarly curiosity, thanks to its robust Indigenous movements, neoliberal experiments in multiculturalism, eruption of anti-global uprisings and the postcolonial turn in public discourse.