From Revolution to Reform: Latin America's Transitions, Discontents, and Challenges in the 20th century

Abstract

Throughout its New Era, the Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales has addressed, from different disciplinary and thematic perspectives , the transformations of politics at national , regional and global levels. Following this broad line of interest , this issue brings together diverse approaches to the new dynamics , expressions and spaces that make up and arise from the transitions and challenges in the region, as well as from the discontents.  Our attention to the changes in politics has been directed towards a very varied range of processes and configurations associated with the challenges of and by democratization, concerns about the construction of a new political order, the uncertainty arising from exhausted models at the national and international level , the process of the European Union and the collapse of the Berlin Wall , the emergence of different and renewed interests that include the crisis of the parties, the limits of representation and disaffection , the decentralization of politics and the State , social movements , productive restructuring, decentralization , privatization , economic and financial deregulation, the trans nationalization of public policies and globalization, together with the emergence of new sociocultural identities , in which hybridization and diversity show their lights . In turn, marked by the directions of the first decades of this century, issues such as inequality, poverty, exclusion and vulnerability were combined with processes of growing social conflict and institutional crises that gave rise to new forms of collective action by social movements and other forms of organization , as well as social struggles in the region , while the emergence of large Global problems have exceeded the limits and capacity of the state. Migratory avalanches, terrorism, organized crime , the economic and financial crisis have been structuring the transformations of the political world in the new century , which have inaugurated expressions, spaces and dynamics hitherto unknown.