I barely made the deadline to be included in the CD, but I’ve sent out the paper I’m presenting next month at the Montréal LASA conference. It’s not nearly as “finished” as I’d have liked, but there’ll be plenty of time to revise it later. Here’s the (overly ambitious, not fully realized) abstract:
Democratization, Social Crisis, and National Reinvention: Reflections from the Bolivian Case The democratization of Bolivia presented an interesting paradox in the 1990s. As the state continued to promote a liberal-pluralist orientation in public civic life, various social movements presented alternate modes of understanding “citizenship” in the new state. The result has been a series of political and social conflicts that can be understood as disagreements over the national question. In short, this paper explores the relationship between democratization and the process by which national (and subnational) communities are reinvented in the public sphere.
You can download it if you’d like; comments are always welcome.