The Social Turn and Contentious Politics in Latin American Post-Neoliberal Regionalism

Abstract

The reconfiguration of Latin American regional governance is one of the major features that have characterized the region’s political economy over the last decade. Since the early 2000s, changes in the political economy of Latin America have led to shifts towards new forms of democratic arrangements and state-society relationships. Economically, adjustments to what was essentially unreformed open market governance in the 1990s have consisted primarily of the introduction of policies that address a legacy of poverty and the challenges of inclusive growth (Grugel and Riggirozzi 2012). This process has also seen a genuine search for alternative rationales of region building, beyond trade or rhetorical opposition to US hegemony. As a consequence, the last decade has seen political integration projects that reclaim principles of cooperation and solidarity in an unprecedented way, while redefining the terms of postliberal, post-commercial and post-hegemonic regionalism (Riggirozzi and Tussie 2012: 11–12; Sanahuja 2012).