State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain: The Neoliberal State and Beyond ed. by Miguel Centeno and Augustin Ferraro (review)

Reviewed by: State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain: The Neoliberal State and Beyond ed. by Miguel Centeno and Augustin Ferraro Camila Vidal State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain: The Neoliberal State and Beyond. By Miguel Centeno and Augustin Ferraro (eds. ). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, p. 554, 155. 00. State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain: The Neoliberal State and Beyond edited by Miguel Centeno and Augustin Ferraro is the third book of a chronological sequence on nation building that focuses on Spain and Latin American countries. The first volume encompasses the independence processes in Latin America from 1810 until 1930 and the efforts to build modern state institutions allied to a liberal model. The second volume continues with the era of developmental states model in Latin America that were implemented roughly between 1930 and 1990. As for the third piece, it brings together a collection of outstanding work from different fields, countries, and scholars dealing with the contemporary state model present both in Latin America and in Spain: neoliberalism, that is, an arrangement of public power designed to introduce and implement certain (radical) policy agenda. Organized on four categories of state power—territorial, economic, infrastructural, and symbolic—the essays present compelling information about the neoliberal era, its impulses, constraints, and consequences. From a comparative historical sociology perspective that draws from Charles Tilly as an important structural pilar, this book presents the state building processes in an era of neoliberal diffusion – both in Latin America as well as in Spain. An important emphasis is given on state institutionalization and its relations with neoliberalism. As such, Centeno and Ferraro present us with 16 chapters divided in 5 parts that connect each other on their representation of neoliberalism as a specific state model – its concentration of power and its technocratic emphasis and isolation. Aiming to respond the question of how (and if) a neoliberal state exists, the essays are organized by case studies ranging from northern Mexico to southern Argentina and focusing on a variety of dimensions of state power. As such, the first part of the book deals with the emergence of a neo-liberal wave across Latin America, specifically, the reforms taken by administrations and its consequences in several dimensions, such as trade, privatization, labor legislation, tax reform, among others. It is shown that, from the last part of the 20th Century, Latin America indeed suffered a neoliberal turn, but the depth and the consequences of these reforms are different from country to country – as in the case of Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, for example. The second part of the book focuses on territorial and economic power. Beginning with the experience of the Chicago Boys in Chile – the well-known first neoliberalism experiment that reshaped Chilean society – and passing through a chronological analysis of Mexican's implementation of End Page 309 neoliberal reforms and Spain's neoliberal fiscal reforms and social contestations, this part of the book ends with a case study on Guatemala's state and homicidal ecologies – that is, "… structural conditions that are likely to generate high homicidal rates" (176). Outstanding data is presented with regards to structural violence that Central American countries must deal with when lacking adequate order – as in the case of Guatemala, but also El Salvador and Honduras. As Deborah J. Yashar mentions in this part of the book, Latin American homicidal rates are the highest ones in the world and these three countries are the most emblematic ones. Nevertheless, the research taken shows us how the lack of structural order and, therefore, higher levels of crimes and violence are interconnected with the implementation of neoliberal policies that not only perpetuated inequality in an already unequal region but that also did not address (and in some instances even perpetuated) corruption and incapacity in the police forces and judiciary institutions. The third part of the book deals with infrastructural power. Addressing the implementation and reforms of neoliberal higher education systems, public administration, conditional cash transfer programs, as well as anti-neoliberal movements and agendas around the "pink tide" in Latin America, the essays draw attention to countries' different trajectories and reforms' consequences and responses, such as. . .