Luis Roniger

This chapter addresses exile as a form of forced territorial displacement with constitutive consequences on the reconfiguration of political domains, public spheres and culture, of both national and transnational significance. It analyzes it as a mechanism of institutional exclusion that became one of the most usual forms of ‘doing politics’ in many modern societies, used not just by authoritarian regimes but also by states exhibiting the formal traits of a democracy. The text reviews exile's distinctiveness, addresses its impact on diaspora politics and nation-state markers of certainty, analyzes exilic politics in the framework of the Cold War when exile turned massive, and indicates its importance for cultural transformations, singling out, for reasons of space, its impact on gender roles and perspectives.

In the context of territorial displacement and following a long-termperspective, this article examines political exile in Latin America, with itsaccumulation of pressures, socio-political and cultural impacts. It analyzesits importance in shaping collective identities, its systemic impact on thestyle of doing politics in the region, and the contribution of exiles andreturnees to numerous facets of culture and politics. The text highlights theinstitutional logic of exile as a mechanism of political exclusion and controlthat, although it shares characteristics with other forms of human mobility,displays a particular physiognomy that has impacted all Latin Americancountries for a long time and is still projected in recent history.

This article aims to contribute to a growing domain of research linking domestic and international aspects of populism. Stressing leadership performance and communicative style as key to defining populism, it discusses several aspects that turn populist leaderships into riskier for the international global order, among them populism’s antagonistic character, emotional tonality and personalistic concentration of decision-making. The article analyzes the international impact of full-blown populist leaders, that is those populists who, once in power, have altered the constitutional and unwritten rules of the game and have dominated foreign policy in a personalistic way. It looks at the constellation of factors that allowed or precluded leaders such as Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Israel’s PM Benjamin Netanyahu, India’s PM Narendra Modi, and Donald Trump in his second presidency to engage in international confrontations and wars. The text claims that, unless there are mitigating institutional, sociocultural or geopolitical factors, full-blown populists in power may turn confrontational not just at the nation-state level but also in their foreign policy praxis. Analysis leads to identifying in a preliminary way factors increasing the likelihood of conflictive international outcomes.

The center–periphery paradigm has impacted on multiple disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. While criticized and revised for its duality, this paradigm has been most instrumental in tracing shifts in the dynamic positioning of world ‘players’, be they states, societies, or sectors thereof. This article follows it in highlighting the historical development of Chile, a society whose inception, in one of the most remote regions of the world, seemed to determine its path toward remaining a place at the ‘end of the world’. Still, by the late twentieth century, Chile attracted global attention, concern, and debate. Understanding this shift from the world’s periphery to the core of Cold War confrontation and of the neoliberal macroeconomic turn followed by the third wave of democratization enables us to trace how the global system evolved in the course of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and how that Latin American country has been paradigmatic of those momentous changes.

Este dossier refleja al menos parcialmente la ampliación del uso de perspectivas transnacionales en los estudios sobre América Latina. Mientras por largo tiempo, quienes estudiaban redes de intelectuales latinoamericanos, movimientos sociales o bien el exilio político y la migración interregional, no pudieron ignorar el impacto transfronterizo de estos fenómenos, la adopción explícita de perspectivas transnacionales es más reciente, habiendo cobrado impulso en las últimas dos décadas.

This article highlights the importance of integrating transnational approaches into research on Latin American studies. It proposes to recognize the impact of forces and processes that transcend borders, which have historically shaped societies in the region beyond their local contexts. This transnational approach not only enables the analysis of the various state realities from a country-by-country perspective or through comparative and international relations approaches but also raises the need to examine Latin America as an interconnected space. Adding this perspective allows to comprehensively understand how local and national dynamics are articulated with global processes. Additionally, the text reviews key theoretical contributions that have driven this line of research and exemplifies its usefulness by delimiting specific areas—studied in depth and from a long temporality—where transnational analysis emerges as a central tool. These contributions reinforce the idea that this approach enriches both the methodology and the interpretative frameworks in the social sciences.

This article aims to assess the impact of the 1976–83 dictatorship on the lifeworld of Argentine citizens, as reflected in testimonies and allegations during the oral phase of the 1985 trial of the military commanders responsible for masterminding policies of massive detention, torture and loss of life of thousands in Argentina. The text addresses the sequence of democratic breakdown, military rule, regime collapse and the transition to democracy, with a focus on one of the initial policies of post-transitional justice reported in El Diario del Juicio , a publication selling 250,000 weekly copies between May 1985 and January 1986. After years in which the public order imposed by the military government had been welcomed, tolerated, or ignored by majoritarian sectors, the testimonies and statements at the trial of the armed forces commanders certified the extent of abusive repression and allowed assessing the shifts many citizens experienced in their lifeworld and belated awakening from the narrative of the military government. In spite of the early closure of that initial stage of post-dictatorial justice, the trial managed to project the discourse of human rights onto the center of the public agenda in the transition to democracy.

This article analyzes the experience of mass exile during the last wave of dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay and, in particular, the process of partial return to the countries of origin. In the face of the dramatic institutional breakdown that affected each of these societies under dictatorships in different ways and to varying degrees, the text addresses the limits, difficulties, and shortcomings that ex-exiles encountered upon their return, the impact of the returnees on their respective national scenarios, and how the transnational experience of those who suffered such territorial displacement shaped their impact on the institutions of origin, politics, and national culture upon their return to their home countries. Finally, the article shows how the countries of origin have approached and interacted with the ongoing diasporas of nationals abroad, particularly with the diaspora of academics and professionals.