Institutional Innovation and the Steering of Conflicts in Latin America - Paperback

by Jorge Gordin (Editor), Lucio Renno (Editor)

This book opens the institutional Pandora's box of conflict management, focusing on two central questions: To what degree do Latin American political contexts create spaces for institutional designs that deal with conflicts in a feasible and legitimate way? How can institutional architects exploit such spaces to manage conflict innovatively? The authors' point of departure is that institutions are primarily conflict-solving entities guiding individual and social behaviour, and that they set out to be much more than rules of the game: institutions do (and should) evolve and are eventually redesigned to meet human necessities. In light of the pending socioeconomic challenges in most of Latin America, institutional designers are confronted with the fact that nothing inherent within the institutions guarantees that conflict is processed in ways that tackle distributive and ethnic inequalities.

Author Biography

Jorge P Gordin is Associate Professor of Political Science at Universidad Diego Portales and Executive Editor of the Journal of Politics in Latin America. Lucio R Renno is Associate Professor in the Political Science Institute of the University of Brasília.