State Development in Latin America: Explaining Unity and Variation

• In Event: Comparative Historical Perspectives on the State and Policy Reform

Abstract

The study of state building and capacity in Latin America has witnessed a revolution in the last ten years. A variety of seminal works have explored the origins, consolidation, and trajectories of state domination in the region. This new research is immensely rich in its theoretical, conceptual and empirical aim. Theoretically, it represents a major departure from canonical views of state-making in Western Europe. Trade, labor market conditions, and state builders’ institutional incentives, rather than the imperatives of war that dominated the European field in the 20th century, emerge as the primary drivers of state development. Conceptually, it combines and differentiates notions such as state formation, state building and state capacity that tended to be conflated in the classical literature. However, they play out in very different ways in the Latin American context. Empirically, this new corpus seeks to explain both the specificity of Latin America on the world stage, and variations in the national paths of state development and capacity. This paper reviews the new approaches from a theoretical and methodological perspective. It traces agreements and conflicts among the major works, and tries to distill the main pillars that have built a new consensus to launch the subfield forward.

Author

• Sebastian Etchemendy, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella