Bolivia

To understand the agents involved in the production of the Camata-Carijana landscape, from the Inka period (circa 1450 to 1550 A.D.) into the modern era, the configuration of three landscape features (community settlements, road network, and agrarian terracing) are compared to a…

This thesis traces the experiences of urban working-class groups in the cities of El Alto and Santa Cruz during the government of Evo Morales through the dynamics of state formation, class formation and the production of space. Using material gather in over 100 semi-structured i…

Following a series of profound conflicts in the early 21st century, Bolivia became the world’s first pluri-national state in 2009. The idea of the pluri-national state goes beyond the (uni-)national state; imagining a state that allows peoples’ coexistence on an equal footing in…

The thesis is a study of a Guaraní community (comunidad) situated in the Department of Santa Cruz in the southeastern lowlands of Bolivia. The thesis uses the concept of ‘comunidad’ as a focus of investigation. While this concept is one that is familiar and firmly embedded in co…

This thesis concerns a postpartum condition known as sobreparto among female Andean migrants in the lowland city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. While sobreparto is a traditionally Andean illness, its occurrence in the lowland city of Santa Cruz opens up new dimensions of a…

Over the last 15 years, the MAS (Movement Towards Socialism) party, fronted by Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, has pushed to create a unified Bolivian indigenous identity around the symbol of the coca leaf. Amid the political transitions of the last year and a…

This dissertation explores health and nutrition in the developing world as both a determinant of economic outcomes and the result of economic realities. Health and nutrition are critical components of economic and social well being and are therefore important factors of developm…

This dissertation asks why authoritarian regimes are institutionalized in different ways and why they experience different outcomes. I have developed an elite conflict theory of authoritarianism and argue that how the distribution of power is institutionalized within a ruling co…

Global climate change is one of the defining issues of the 21st century. The phenomenon of natural climate variation being pushed beyond normal ranges has been fueled largely by industrial activities and those which support them (i.e. land-use change and the over-exploitation of…

The aim of this thesis is to show that poverty alleviation strategies need to be implemented more efficiently and urgently, despite the ongoing work of individual governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), private foundations, and public-private partnerships, because th…

The shift from a domestic currency (peso) to dollar denominated deposits (deposit dollarization) in Argentina and Bolivia is explained with a nonlinear model that incorporates ratcheting effects, hysteresis and network externalities. There are two principal factors behind these …

This study examines the causes and consequences of repression and accommodation in post-internal war states. Elites' perceptions of their own vulnerability and subsequent war involvement in the aftermath of an internal war affect the choice between and among repressive and accom…

This dissertation analyzes the construction of the subaltern subject as an agent of cultural, social and political change based on the testimonies of Saturnino Huillca (Peru), Domitila Barrios de Chungara (Bolivia), and Rigoberta Menchu (Guatemala). Testimonial literature is pro…

The government often calls for an orthodox or an unorthodox monetary reform to stabilize the rate of inflation and real exchange rate. Since the second World War, economies of many countries in the world have experienced persistently high rates of inflation and decline in the va…

The United States has engaged in widespread, varied, and comprehensive training of members of foreign militaries for more than half a century, but as the only remaining superpower, its increasing contact with foreign militaries is potentially more influential. Through a combinat…

Inclusion in the broad sense of access to, and participation in, public policy and services has been lacking in the majority of developing countries---whether authoritarian or democratic---due to highly skewed political, social and economic power structures. To understand why th…