Social and Political Transitions in Latin America: From the Left Turn’s Rise to its Decline Daniel S. Leon Orcid.org/0000-0003-0637-9480 Carolina Rozo-Higuera Orcid.org/0000-0003-1948-2241 Karen Silva Torres Orcid.org/0000-0002-1889-0932 Abstract Multiple social and political processes of reconfiguration have taken place across Latin America in the period known as the Left Turn, from the early 2000s to the mid-2010s. Regardless of whether they experienced left-of-center governments or not, the Left Turn impacted the region’s countries, and thus one can understand this period as a regional order. This introductory chapter presents the book’s overarching research question: how do states and societal (national and transnational) actors trigger and shape processes of political and socio-economic transitions in Latin America from the rise to the decline of the Left Turn. The chapter also presents the social and political transitions tackled by the book’s contributing authors. This chapter discusses the two cross-cutting concepts of this volume: The actors and the liminal character of transitional processes. This discussion also explores the methodological challenges and the need for a multidisciplinary and multidimensional approach to understanding social and political transitions in the region. Introduction Latin America had experienced recurrent waves of social and political changes since the return—or emergence—of democratic governance since the 1980s when many Latin American countries entered what Samuel Huntington (1993) called the “third wave of democratization.” From the end of the 70s until the 90s, countries in Central America, the Andes (Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia), and the Southern Cone (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay) saw their military dictatorships crumbled and their citizens’ right to choose their government through competitive elections re-established.  A slew of neo-liberal economic reforms based on the Washington Consensus followed the Turn to democracy in many Latin American countries, although the neoliberal reforms’ intensity and their depth varied considerably between countries (Ocampo 2011; Weyland 2009). Nevertheless, the “shock therapy” or rapid withdrawal of the state from economic management led to various adverse socio-economic outcomes in most of the region, such as an increase in poverty and inequality rates in many countries (DiJohn 2005; Martinez and Soto 2012). Popular discontent at unfavorable socio-economic conditions and increased intolerance of corrupt leaders translated into a crisis of legitimacy of the party systems in many Latin American countries, which formed the basis of the region’s “Left Turn.” The Left Turn was a seemingly regional shift to left-of-center governments since the early 2000s. The region’s Left Turn aimed to increase the state’s role in their countries’ economic management and counter the adverse economic effects of unfettered market forces (Levitski and Roberts 2011; Stoessel 2014). It was a transnational shift on the back of a reaction to neoliberal reforms during the previous decade, which signaled a new regional order. The shift to left-of-center governments started with the election in December 1998 of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. It continued through the 2000s as left-of-center governments came to power via the ballot box, such as Lula da Silva in Brazil (2002), Nestor Kirchner in Argentina (2003), Michelle Bachelet in Chile (2006), and many others (Levitski and Roberts 2011). By the end of the 2000s, 11 out of 19 Latin American governments were left-of-center. Some of these governments carried out far-reaching political, economic, and social transformations, while others were considered more moderate, regardless of their positive or negative consequences. For example, Chávez’s policy reforms in Venezuela were far more transformative than those of Lula da Silva in Brazil, even though both governments identify themselves as left-of-center. This book aims to understand the social and political transitions, which took place during the Left Turn in Latin America. We propose to use the concept of “transitions” as a category of analysis and not an object of study. Our goal is to create a framework to grasp the processes of change that sociopolitical events bring about in the region. Hence, we use transitions to refer to different processes and moments of perceived change, including the various elements of continuity underlying them. In this sense, this book does not search for a definition of a new social or political regime or order created during or after the region’s Left Turn. We aim to analyze spaces in between the rise and decline of different social and political regimes and orders during this historical period, in which actors drive or resist change. In the case of Latin America’s Left Turn, multiple social and political processes of reconfiguration and transformation have taken place across the region’s countries, regardless of whether they experienced left-of-center governments or not. All countries in the region were subject to the same historical trajectory, advanced by many actors, many of whom communicated and acted across national borders. A slew of transnational social and political movements took hold in most of the region, such as the spread of Christian Evangelical congregations and women’s rights movements (Cabezas 2014; Pew Research Center 2014). These social movements are transnational in character, as they do not require the agency of national governments to spread and interact across borders, which shows that the Left Turn, understood as a regional order, had effects in countries beyond those with left-of-center political regimes. The above examples of transnationalism during the region’s Left Turn appeared to forge a social and political transition to a more integrated Latin America. However, events since the mid-2010s appear to show a decline of Latin America’s Left Turn and the shattering of the idea of an integrated Latin America. From the Venezuelan politico-economic crisis to the election of the far-right Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, a political turn took place in almost every country of the region. In some countries, like Chile or Argentina, electorates voted out of office left-of-center governments in favor of right-of-center ones. In Bolivia and Ecuador, a similar transition occurred but because of the fragmentation and sudden change of direction of the ruling party in Ecuador and after a constitutional crisis in Bolivia. The examples of Venezuela and Brazil show that social and political transitions take place alongside historical continuities, such as the military’s involvement in politics. Venezuela is an extreme yet telling case of the decline of the leftist boom in the region. The fall of global oil prices after 2014 no longer allowed the Chavista government headed by Nicolas Maduro to sustain the policies that allowed Chavismo to be electorally competitive from the 2000s until the mid-2010, such as lowering poverty and inequality rates (Corrales 2014; Mazzuca 2013; Leon 2020). Resulting from changing economic conditions was a descent into militaristic authoritarianism, which plagued Latin American politics for most of the 20th century, and a migration exodus of mostly working-class Venezuelans escaping hyperinflation and severe food and medical shortages. Similarly, the election of Jair Bolsonaro signals not only a governmental transition, from left- to right-of-center but the apparent marriage of militarism and Christian Evangelicalism (Diamint 2015; Pérez Guadalupe 2019).  These examples are extreme and not exhaustive of what a possible epilogue to Latin America’s Left Turn might entail. However, they show how social and political transitions are an uncertain and complex processes, as change comes about through reinforcing both pre-existing and emerging socio-political phenomena. The contributions presented in this book aim to tackle the following overarching research question: how do state and social, societal, and institutional actors trigger and shape processes of political and socio-economic transitions in Latin America from the rise to the decline of the Left Turn? This volume’s contributions tackle the above research question by analyzing topics ranging from differences in left-of-center political regimes, the role of affection in populist politics, the origins and consequences of changes in labor, educational, security, and refugee policies. They also ask how social actors and organizations, such as migrant communities and evangelical congregations, attempt to produce socio-political changes. Notably, the contributions presented in this volume provide analyses of social and political transition in Latin America during the historical trajectory of the region’s Left Turn. Ontology matters significantly in the analysis of social and political transition processes. Transnational actors and elements, shaped by the historical trajectory of the Latin American Left Turn, influence each country’s reconfiguration processes. The studied cases included in this edited volume present socio-political changes under the Left Turn’s rise and decline. These contributions focus their analyses of Latin American transitions on two empirical clusters: Transitions driven by governmental actors and transitions driven by actors outside governmental organizations. The first empirical cluster is a top-down perspective, which centers on how public policies prompt transitions or emerge because of them. The second cluster provides analyses for transitions on the ground: those promoted and resisted by social organizations, societal movements (Tapia 2008). This division highlights an analytical clue proposed by our text: to understand transformation through an integral view of the state in Gramscian terms. Hence, we analyze the political society and the civil society as two historically interconnected but interdependent realms. The organization of our empirical contributions also emphasizes our multidisciplinary and multidimensional approach, which seeks to analyze transitions in Latin America from different levels of analysis and academic disciplines, which include anthropology, economics, history, sociology, library and information science, and political science. Hence, this volume brings together multiple methodological approaches to better understand social and political change processes in the region. This introductory chapter continues with a discussion of the two cross-cutting concepts of this volume: The actors and the liminality of transitional processes. This discussion also shows the necessity to adopt a multidisciplinary approach to understanding social and political transitions in Latin America. Thereafter, we discuss two methodological challenges, namely delimiting Latin America, and the approach of actor-centered and multiple case studies to understand social and political transitions. The last section elaborates on the book’s organization and presents the main arguments of each contribution in this volume. Actors and Liminal Processes: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Understanding Social and Political Transitions We use the category of transitions to analyze liminal processes of reconfigurations at the governmental and societal levels. The concept of liminality allows us to focus solely on how different actors’ collective activities drive and shape processes of social and political change (Howard-Grenville, Golden-Biddle, Irwin, and Mao 2011). By defining transitions as liminal processes, the contributions presented in this volume focus on the dynamics of socio-political change at different places and at different times (Söderlund and Borg 2017). Therefore, our approach to analyzing socio-political transitions in Latin America places the focus squarely on the processes of such transformations and not on their outcomes, since “in liminality[,] there is no certainty concerning the outcome” (Thomassen 2009, 5). We aim to focus on the relationships between agency and structural conditions, which drive continuity and change of social and political phenomena in Latin America. We center on social and political transitions to observe actor-driven change processes that may occur in contexts of macro-level historical continuities. Hence, we do not equate the concept of transitions with historical ruptures. For example, Latin American states’ constitution has not changed much geographically in the last two centuries, thanks in part to the comparatively exceptionally low incidences of inter-state conflicts (Martin 2006). Another example of historical continuities in the social structures of Latin America is the persistently high inequality rates within countries. The gap between low- and high-income sectors in the Latin America of the 21st-century mirrors that of the semi-feudal economies at the time of independence (Kaltmeier 2019). Nevertheless, the region’s historical continuities have not led to socio-political stagnation. Multiple transformations and processes of reconfigurations, such as transnational migration movements or the rise and fall of neoliberal and anti-neoliberal politics, have taken place under such stable state structures and constitutional frameworks (Brinks et al. 2019). The purpose of the above examples is to demonstrate the empirical significance of analyzing different types of Latin American transitions. Latin America intertwines macro-level continuities with varying transformations and changes between and within its countries, which is precisely the advantage of focusing on the concept of transitions: understanding liminal processes where continuity and change occur simultaneously. Importantly, the literature shows that social and political transitions do not occur at only one level of analysis, such as the nation-state level. Although transitions by state actors are crucially significant, other political, social, economic, and cultural transitions do not take place because of a “trickle-down” effect from above. For example, the case of Latin America’s secular problem of economic inequality: It is entirely insufficient and often counterproductive for policymakers to merely deregulate labor laws (Stiglitz and Greenwald 2015; Piketty 2000). The state’s intervention in the labor market through heterodox policies and negotiating with crucial labor organizations is more likely to create junctures leading to the reduction of economic inequality (Card, Lemieux, and Riddell 2004; Cahuc, Postel-Vinay, and Robin 2006). The educational sector also experienced important transformations that needed the state’s intervention after the failure of neoliberal policies. Those new state policies envisioned a social approach in which society and higher education institutions had common objectives (Guijarro 2016). Hence, the new university reforms moved from the idea of professionalization and opened the way for self-defined objectives (Carvajal 1990). Such changes proved to be more aligned with societal expectations than the previous approach in which education was conceived as a “transactional service.” Other types of social and political transitions take place parallel to socio-political transitions at the nation-state level and, often, beyond the state, reinforcing the liminal character of socio-political transformations. For example, citizens are not passive agents when facing poor performances of state institutions or economic crises. Political economist Albert Hirschman (1970; 1993) explains that, when institutional performance is poor, no matter the cause, groups of people can organize and protest the relevant authorities. They can also choose to stick with them or withdraw their support by either voting against the governmental authorities at the ballot box. Alternatively, they can “vote with their feet” through migration. Migration has been a crucial response by social actors to poor performance by state authorities in Latin America, as exemplified by Venezuelans’ exodus to Colombia and other countries of the region. In Turn, migration patterns are not just effects, but they become triggers of socio-political change in the host countries (Faist et al. 2018). One example of this is immigrants’ political activism to be integrated and recognized in countries that have served as “corridors” of migration, such as Mexico. In the Northern Triangle of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras), several political and social crises and even natural disasters have forced its inhabitants to leave their home countries (Asakura 2014; Pederzini et al. 2015). Those migrants represent important “political agents” even if national structures seem to act against political participation from non-nationals (Cordero 2019). Similarly, social movements are clear examples of the impact citizens can make in influencing political or legal changes in regimes and triggering the redefinition of political or social concepts (Almeida and Cordero 2015). Such movements are closely related to the concept of transitions because they are “permanent attempts” with a direct impact on social transitions by using different ways of discontent, for example, through protests (Dieter Rucht 1994). Another essential aspect of transitions taking place at the level of citizens’ relations with political regimes is the attachment to political ideologies, which go beyond the mere political support but involve personal and affective dimensions. A solid affective political identification may occur as social and political changes occur over time. Ideologies, understood as signification processes, more specifically processes of the signification of values (Williams 1977), are relevant to enduring socio-political experiences. Such ideological experiences embrace material symbols, practices, feelings, and emotions (Latour 2005). Furthermore, other forms of transitions at the social and societal levels can influence the nation-state’s transformation. One example is the rise of violent, organized crime in many Latin American countries, exemplified by drug trafficking urban gangs and cartels. The increased size and lethality of criminal organizations in many countries of the region have shaped policy changes in some countries and even shaped political transitions in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico (Lessing 2018; Bagley 2015). As Charles Tilly (1992) demonstrates, governmental policies to monopolize violence or deal with violent aggressions are a prime driver of changes at the state level. Latin American states’ response to organized crime and internal conflicts, such as in Peru and Venezuela, has been a heavy-handed one, was largely ineffective and over-proportionally affected marginalized communities (Ávila 2017; Theidon 2013).  The case of archival and memory policies regarding the safeguard of human rights is another example of political transitions influencing policymaking. Unfortunately, such endeavors are sometimes thwarted by governmental negationist discourses about violence against civil society during different historical periods. Archival memory policies seek to preserve victims’ memories and defend the right to truth and the right to tell. Archives promote those rights by making information in transitional periods accessible (Joinet 1997) and enabling cooperation with other criminal justice organizations (Orentlicher 2005). However, Latin America still lacks national public policies promoting victims’ memory in periods of violence and persecution, although other human rights archives and memory institutions have come into existence (e.g., Memoria Abierta in Argentina and the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Chile and Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional in Guatemala) Within the social sciences, the perspective of transitions to approach social change seems to experience a high momentum. A systematic search in the Web of Science (WoS) database of the keyword “Transition” precisely shows the relevance of the idea of transition in the field of knowledge production. We searched for this keyword in publication titles and abstracts published between 2001 and 2019. We retrieved 17,500 publications in the social sciences and humanities. Our bibliographic search results showed that publications categorized as multidisciplinary were the ones employing the concept of transitions with higher frequency. More specifically, 23.3 percent of the documents employed the idea of transitions from an interdisciplinary perspective. The other top 8 fields of knowledge or disciplines in the WoS database employing the notion of transitions were economics (18.1 percent), environmental sciences (12.7 percent), political science (8.8 percent), education (8.6 percent), sociology (6,9 percent), history (6.9 percent) and area studies (5,8 percent). The results show that the social sciences and humanities have widely used “transition” as a keyword in the last two decades as a synonym of change, shift, crossover, or changeover. The high relevance of the term requires its analysis, unpacking, and theoretical discussion. A multidisciplinary approach becomes crucial to understand how actors drive and shape social and political processes of transformation at different levels of analysis and in different places considering the complexity of social and political transitions. The fact that multidisciplinary approaches employ the concept of transitions more often than traditional academic fields is no coincidence, as analyzing social and political transformations or processes of reconfigurations involves tackling transnational or global processes. Transnational processes refer to analyzing issues transcending the nation-state, even when exploring a case within a single country, which often requires multidisciplinary approaches to understand such processes (Juergensmeyer 2014; Steger and Wahlrab 2016). The analysis of transnational processes often requires going beyond the conceptual boundaries of a single established discipline and drawing from other fields of knowledge such as anthropology, political science, economics, international relations, geography, history, and sociology. Hence, the topic of transitions, which speaks of “going across,” is intrinsically related to transnational, border-crossing processes. A multidisciplinary approach has the advantage of integrating studies from different levels of analyses and through different methodologies, which provides a more nuanced understanding of the liminality inherent to the social and political transitions that are within the scope of this book. However, such an analytical advantage creates the methodological challenge of combining studies of different regions, topics, and paradigmatic approaches under the same tent, even if they address the same broad research question. Therefore, the next section explains how the multiple-case-study approach addresses this book’s methodological challenges by providing contributions focusing on the actors, individual or collective, which drive or respond to social and political transitions in the region. The phenomenon at the center of this book is a broad one that yields varying processes and outcomes. In this regard, multiple case studies, following the Area Studies approach, allows us to throw multiple “fishing nets,” to use Karl Popper’s (1934) analogy, in Latin America to approach an understanding of liminal transformations in the region. Methodological Challenges and the Area Studies Approach Methodologically, the present book tackles two challenges. First, how to delimit Latin America, and second, how to combine multiple case studies to understand different types of social and political transitions from different levels of analyses and academic disciplines. The first challenge is unavoidable, and we do not argue that this book presents a holistic view of the region. We understand Latin America as a spatial imagination. However, we decided to use Latin America instead of other terms such as The Americas because we focus on a historical moment when the idea of Latin American as an integrated region appeared to gain strength. During the Left Turn, the idea of a politically and culturally united Latin America took shape. Therefore, the imagination of a transnational process connecting the countries from Mexico to Argentina seemed palpable. The second methodological challenge is daunting, as case studies are not generalizable, and findings from academic disciplines that have mutually exclusive paradigmatic foundations (for example, anthropology and economics) are not comparable. However, we consider this variety of disciplinary approaches as an advantage. Multiple perspectives allow us to identify different kinds of transitions and to observe, analyze, and question their impacts at different levels, from the micro relationships between social actors to the macro-economic trends. This book provides analyses placing the actors at the center of each social and political transition process. Centering the analyses on actors, whether individual or collective actors, helps us critically analyze the processes behind different transitions in the region (Alva Rivera 2019; Calvin 2005; Karl 1987; Middell and Naumann 2010). However, how different actors shape and trigger transition processes dramatically depends on the region’s specific historical context. Hence, the Area Studies approach provides a suitable methodological framework to understand how actors trigger and shape these transition processes in Latin America during the region’s Left Turn. A critique of the Area Studies approach is that it clings to colonialist and Eurocentric assumptions, which led to a self-reflective process and redefinition of the field after the Cold War (Antweiler 2017, 72). Consequently, Area Studies became “not about knowledge of culture and space for its own sake, but rather about knowledge of “context”–the set of circumstances or facts that surround a particular situation” (Beissinger 2020, 134). However, such a broader context is re-constructed in localities in which the direct or indirect effects of a historical trajectory, such as Latin America’s Left Turn, expose its various influences. Indeed, phenomena such as globalization challenge “conventional conceptions of ‘areas’ upon which the area studies project has been based” (Wesley-Smith and Goss 2010, x). However, as the same authors mention subsequently, such global approaches need “understanding the specificity of the local.” Therefore, Area Studies becomes an appropriate methodological framework to understanding socio-political transitions in Latin America. The various case studies presented in the book place actors and processes in specific historical and socio-political contexts, which are influenced directly or indirectly by the historical trajectory of Latin America’s Left Turn. Conducting multiple case studies to analyze social and political transitions analyzing an area during a specific historical period invariably leads to a multidisciplinary approach (Briceño-Leon 2015). Each case study brings a unique theoretical and methodological framework to analyze specific social or political transitions. A multiple case study and multidisciplinary approach allow us to deploy multiple fishing nets into Latin American waters, as Karl Popper (1934) explained regarding theory’s value in scientific research. This approach helps us to catch many understandings and explanations of social and political transitions from the rise to the decline of the region’s Left Turn. Contributions to the understanding of social and political transitions in Latin America This book provides an in-depth analysis of different social and political transition processes that have occurred in Latin America from the late 1990s to the late 2010s; in the context of the rise and decline of the region’s Left Turn. Twelve contributions examine these transitions in diverse national contexts and from different disciplinary perspectives. These contributions pose a wide range of questions, such as how to characterize the Venezuelan political regime and the consequences of the severe socio-economic crisis, the ideological foundations of Peronismo, Argentina’s long-lasting political movement, how public policies shape social transitions, how non-state actors negotiate and shape socio-political transitions in Evo Morales’ Bolivia, post-conflict Colombia and Peru, and the political agency of Central American migrants in Mexico. Following this introduction, the volume continues with a conceptual discussion by comparatively analyzing political transition processes in the countries that effectively turned to the left. Radek Buben and Jan Němec’s chapter entitled, “Radical left-wing political regimes in the context of the Latin American ‘Left Turn,’” complements this introductory section by allowing us to understand better the political transitions that occurred at the political regime level. Buben and Němec revisit the debate on the typologies of political regimes during the region’s “Left Turn” started by Jorge Castañeda (2006), who differentiates between the “moderate” left-wing regimes such as Lula da Silva in Brazil and the “radical” regimes such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. The Venezuelan case may be the most extreme or “radical” case of Latin America’s “Left-Turn” in many ways, yet the impact of political transitions in this country has created significant ripples around the region. Buben and Němec’s typology helps differentiate the “radical” left-wing regimes beyond their common anti-neoliberal discourse and examines whether these regimes, such as Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, drove political regime transitions. This typology helps us better identify “radical” about Left Turn cases such as Chavismo. The authors argue that amending the rules of the game to tilt the balance of power in favor of the incumbent president is the element separating the “radical” cases of the region’s Left Turn from others. After the conceptual discussion, we clustered the case studies on social and political transition in Latin America into two parts based on the actors that they analyze. The first part of the book brings together contributions from sociology and the political, library, and economic sciences to understand how governmental actors and organizations have driven and shaped socio-political transition processes. The second part groups contributions from sociology, anthropology, and political science, which analyze how social organizations advance, negotiate, and shape socio-political transitions. Transitions driven by governmental actors The analysis of transnational transformation processes does not exclude examining organizations at the level of the nation-state. These organizations have the resources to enact collective actions like no other and are often the main actors behind social and political transitions. Looking at the Venezuelan case, Daniel Leon’s chapter entitled, “The Return of Mano Dura in Venezuela: The political economy of transitions in urban security policies since 1950,” contextualizes the political economy of increased use of heavy-handed, deadly, and indiscriminate use of force by the Venezuelan security apparatus. Leon investigates continuities within the transition in security policies. He finds that mano dura or heavy-handed security policies were not a new phenomenon emerging during the Left Turn by looking at their evolution from the 1950s until the mid-2010s. These policies result from the embeddedness of militarist institutional path dependence and rent-seeking logic. Mano dura returns with increased intensity after 2012 due to the authoritarian creep of the Chávez regime and that of his successor, along with collapsing state revenues. Under such conditions, violent repression by security forces substituted clientelist rent deployment to achieve the quiescence of working-class urban spaces. Analyzing the Andean country of Ecuador reveals a remarkable socio-political transition advanced by governmental organizations. The election of Rafael Correa in 2007, with the backing of a broad base of social movements, ushered a left-of-center political regime change in Ecuador that was later reversed after 2017 by his former vice president and successor, Lenin Moreno. Reconfigurations in this country have produced many outcomes deserving close examination, such as public interventions to reduce social inequality. In his contribution entitled, “Education, Labor and Social Convergence in Ecuador, 2006-2016,” Ernesto Nieto-Carrillo provides a thorough econometric analysis showing how labor regulation and education spending policies were crucial to reduce social inequality in Ecuador. Nieto’s work contributes to our understanding of how inequality—one of Latin America’s secular problems—is a human-made phenomenon and not a historical inevitability. Ecuador’s neighbor, Colombia, did not experience the Left Turn through a left-of-center government, but transnational elements shaped by the region’s Left Turn have certainly shaped many of its transition processes. The peace agreement reached by the Colombian government with the country’s largest Marxist insurgent organization, the FARC, opened the possibility for Colombia to tackle its past. Carolina Rozo-Higuera explores a vital aspect of the Colombian transition to peace: memory. Rozo-Higuera looks at archival memory policies within the context of the peace agreement in her chapter, “Archives of memory and human rights: Policies in transitional contexts and the Colombian case.” In the context of a region with governments that seemed to favor the peace process, the author observes how state policies go from the promotion of the “right to know” to the furthering of the “right to tell.” Examining Colombia further, Maria Gabriela Trompetero’s chapter, “Transformations in the Colombian Migration Regime amidst the Venezuelan Migration Crisis,” analyzes how the Colombian authorities have transformed its refugee policies a response to the Venezuelan migration crisis. She argues that Colombian governmental organizations have negotiated national and international legal frameworks such as the Cartagena Declaration on Refugees from 1984 to provide humanitarian protection to most Venezuelan migrants under the contentious Colombian political arena. Going back to Ecuador, Rina Pazos and Jorge Fabara present in their work, “Transitions of University Autonomy in Ecuador: From Market Heteronomy to Responsible Autonomy,” a historical analysis of the multiple perspectives in which different institutional actors have conceived higher education in the Andean country’s regions. By analyzing government statements, policies, and regulations, the authors described the impact of recent changes in Ecuadorean legislation, which aimed to reconfigure the notion of university autonomy. The authors show how changes in the legal framework promoted a transition in public policies from a liberal perspective into a responsible practice. This transition in public policies thus transformed the way universities relate to society. Transitions by societal actors The driving force of societal actors, such as social organizations, plays a critical role during transition processes. Individual and collective agents either kick-start such processes or often negotiate social and political reconfigurations happening around them. As social actors negotiate transition processes occurring around them, they shape and reshape such processes in return. Starting in Argentina, this country shows that continuities can occur under the framework of multiple political transitions, as exemplified by Peronismo. Julia Fiermann’s contribution, “The Sentiment of Peronism: Affect and Ideology in Argentine Populism,” provides an ethnographic analysis of how base supporters interpret what it means to be a peronista shapes the social life of this political and social movement. The affective relationship between the ideology of Peronismo and its adherents gives it coherence and meaning throughout time. Fiermann’s detailed ethnography of Peronism during the Left Turn explores how sentiment is an inherent part of the ideology sustaining Peronism. Affect is a crucial aspect to understand the durability of political identification, surviving contradictory and stark political transitions in Argentina. Within the vast diversity of social actors, social movements, or what Tapia (2008) calls societal movements, represent a substantial change agent in the region. The primary purpose of non-governmental actors is to influence political decisions and provoke change. This is the case addressed by Maximilian Görgens in his chapter titled “The Nexus between Social Movements and Transition: Insights from the Bolivian TIPNIS Conflict.” In his study, the author shows how, despite transformative policies and significant socio-political changes in Bolivia during the Left Turn, extractivist economic models and authoritarian understandings of development continued and led to struggles and demands for change. Focusing on the conflict over the Indigenous Territory and National Park Isiboro Sécure (TIPNIS), threatened by a state-driven road construction project, the chapter shows that different ideas and concepts of reconfigurations can be disputed in conflict situations by distinct social actors. Analyzing local actors’ framings, Görgens highlights that such disputes can intensify internal divisions and organizational crises of social movements and decrease constructive conflict resolution possibilities. Like Colombia, Peru has experienced a transition from a conflict to a post-conflict society. Peru’s struggle with the Maoist guerilla Sendero Luminoso from 1980 to 2000 was less durable than the internal armed conflict in Colombia, but it nonetheless produced visible cracks and scars in its society. Ariane Kovac analyzes in her contribution, “Political Violence and Religious Change in Ayacucho, Peru: Reconciliation and Forgiveness as Local Mechanisms among Evangelical Conflict Survivors,” how evangelical churches, as religious and social organizations of growing importance in Latin America, acted as an alternative agent of transitional justice. Evangelical churches and doctrine allowed victims and perpetrators in the Ayacucho region to “forgive” and leave the trauma of the conflict behind. Hence, Kovac shows how evangelical churches became an alternative and not supplementary institution of transitional justice to formal institutions such as the Peruvian truth and reconciliation commission of the year 2000. Political participation is another way in which social actors interact with formal and informal institutions. Driven by the questions of how and why Central American immigrants decide to be politically active in Mexico, Indi-Carolina Kryg shows in a case study how a small number of immigrants use unconventional forms of political participation to promote changes in Mexican society and politics. Their main objective is to combat existing stereotypes of migrants as victims and source of social problems and claim their rights. Thus, the research focuses on the circumstances that influence immigrants to engage politically. In her chapter, Kryg illustrates how the interaction of social identities, perceived injustice, politicization, and perceived personal and political effectiveness are related to the immigrant’s decision to become politically active or not. In addition to these main conditions, the author also points out how the consideration of their migration status, (in)security, social embedding, and temporal and financial aspects helps understand immigrant political participation in Mexico. Returning once more to Venezuela, Stiven Tremaria analyzes the Venezuelan population’s responses after the socio-economic collapse under Chavismo since the mid-2010s in his contribution entitled, “Hirschman Revisited: Exit, Voice and Loyalty in the Venezuelan Crisis.” Tremaria comprehensively revisits and applies Albert Hirschman’s (1970) famous model on how social actors respond to ill-functioning governance and services. He finds an intricate relationship between the options of “exit,” such as migration or no longer supporting the ruling Chavista party, “voice,” such as protesting or voting for opposition parties, and “loyalty,” such as continuing support for the ruling party. The book finalizes with two chapters that provide a concluding discussion. The first chapter by Olaf Kaltmeier entitled “Seven Theses on the Refeudalization of Latin America” provides a conceptual framework to understand some of the socio-political factors behind the Left Turn’s decline. Kaltmeier does not argue that the region is returning to historical feudalism but that its embeddedness in the capitalist world system and the region’s historical context produces the return of discourses and positions with a high correspondence to feudal elements. Kaltmeier’s text shows historical continuities underlying socio-political transitions in the region. By way of conclusion, the last chapter by Carolina Rozo-Higuera, Daniel Leon, and Karen Silva Torres entitled, “Liminal Moments of Transition Processes in Latin America,” examines how the transition processes analyzed by the various contributors produce not outcomes but “sediments.” By understanding socio-political transitions as liminal processes, this volume does not point to the Left Turn’s specific consequences. However, these moments of transition processes leave socio-political sediments that can trigger and shape other transition processes and, of course, outcomes. 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