State–Society Relations in Guatemala

Theory and Practice

Author: Omar Sanchez-Sibony, Jorge Vargas Cullell, Juan Alberto Fuentes Knight, Fabrice Lehoucq, Rafael Martinez, Oriana Nino, Kevin Pallister, Renzo Rosal and Esteban Durán Monge

This volume adopts a comparative politics model in order to analyze and evaluate pressing issues in Guatemala, including a floundering economy, backsliding in the military's civilianization, retreats in state power and peacemaking commitments, autocratization, and the repression of social movements.

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Summary

Description

By embedding Guatemala in recent conceptual and theoretical work in comparative politics and political economy, this volume advances knowledge about country’s politics, economy, and state-society interactions. The contributors examine the stubborn realities and challenges afflicting Guatemala during the post-Peace-Accords-era across the following subjects: the state, subnational governance, state-building, peacebuilding, economic structure and dynamics, social movements, civil-military relations, military coup dynamics, varieties of capitalism, corruption, and the level of democracy. The book deliberately avoids the perils of parochialism by placing the country within larger scholarly debates and paradigms.

Critic Reviews

This wide-ranging new assessment of Guatemala’s troubled political scene draws on the expertise of ten prominent social scientists. Each contributor examines an aspect of the national predicament through a suitably selected analytical lens. The results are illuminating in two respects—they deepen our understanding of Guatemalan contemporary realities while also testing, and, where relevant, modifying comparative schemas in the light of evidence from this intractable case.

-- Laurence Whitehead, Nuffield College, University of Oxford

This fascinating collection of essays deserves a wide readership among students and scholars of comparative politics and policy practitioners struggling to address autocratization in Guatemala. Harnessing the expertise of a stellar set of Central Americanist scholars and analysts and grounded in core theoretical debates about the causes and impacts of state (in)capacity, rigged peacebuilding, stunted development, and constrained mobilization, the chapters offer a sobering assessment of why democracy was never really meant to be in Guatemala.

-- Anita Isaacs, Haverford College