Rethinking Latin America ― Development, Hegemony, and Social Transformation

Latin America is assuming an increasingly important position on the world stage with its heterodox economic policies and bold political experiments attracting world-wide attention in an era characterized by a general crisis of perspectives. Since European colonization from 1500 onwards, the region has played a key role in the modernization and enrichment of Europe and the West. Today, the West is in crisis and the whole Enlightenment discourse is thrown into question. Is it possible that Latin America now shows the West where it is heading? With complex, dynamic, conflictual, but, above all, original processes of development - and with new visions of social transformation and new constructions of hegemony - the region offers a fascinating laboratory for the rest of the world and, maybe, a mirror of the future.

Ronaldo Munck is Head of Civic and Global Engagement at Dublin City University, Ireland, and holds visiting chairs in Development Studies at the University of Liverpool, UK, St Mary's University in Nova Scotia, Canada, and the University of Norkoping, Sweden. The author of over 20 books and 100 peer-reviewed articles, he has researched and published widely on development - and especially labor - from Latin American and Sub-Saharan African posts, as well as from an Irish development perspective. His recent two-volume encyclopedia Globalization and Security (with Honor Fagan) won the US Choice prize in 2011. Other recent work includes a special issue of Third World Quarterly on globalization and migration and Contemporary Latin America (third edition, 2012).