Global & International Studies

Thirty years after pro-market policies were first adopted, how best to organize Chile’s scientific enterprise remains as elusive as when universities were state-run and funded. This paper explores scientific research at a for-profit university, University Andres Bello, to ask if a new mode of knowledge production is in the making and with what impacts for Chilean universities. In contrast to trends described in the North American and European university literatures, the Chilean experience to date indicates that market competition reinforces existing scientific practice, including evaluation mechanisms. Its largest impact may instead lie in challenging cultural notions of a university’s rights and responsibilities, with potentially negative consequences for existing state-run and non-profit universities. These findings are important for developing countries seeking to expand research without expanding public universities or expenditures, and raise important questions regarding the specific mechanisms that mediate between a university’s forprofit business model and its research agenda.

Job-market discrimination research in the United States and Europe measures discrimination by a majority against racial minorities, discrimination that stems from historical patterns of inequality and privilege. Chilean researchers have applied these models to study class-based discrimination, finding some evidence to support its exis- tence. Their innovative methods make race as well as class visible, and contradictions in their work show racial differences among Chileans. This research note highlights the interesting research from a new generation of labor economists who have simultaneously pushed the sanctioned limits of social debate and reaffirmed dominant explanations of inequality. Critical race theory is useful for making sense of the contradictions in their work and, it is argued, can improve the quality of Chilean social science research so as to reach a more accurate and self-reflective understanding of the sources and effects of inequality in Chile.

In 1990, Chile transitioned to democracy after 17 years of military rule. The new democracy built the country’s first environmental institutions and began efforts to revitalize science, among them attempts to connect scientific expertise to public decision-making. Just over a decade into these efforts, conflicts over the environmental impacts of large industrial projects began to multiply. These environmental conflicts were often also credibility contests, where the authority of science to speak to public issues was contested. Two such conflicts, a gold mine called Pascua Lama and a hydroelectric project called HidroAyse ́n, enrolled several scientific teams, yet in each case the state made its final decision on each project autonomously from science. Though some scientists became central participants in each conflict, carving out for themselves access to needed resources that they used to practice ever-narrower forms of science, their credibility was called into question by many of their scientific colleagues. Chile’s scientific community fractured over how to define credible science. Divisive and decisive issues included the source of funding, ethics, access to resources, and being local. Although some scientists and non-scientists used boundary work to try to affirm the authority of science, no stable map of scientific credibility resulted from these efforts. Chile’s new democracy is more plural than its recent military dictatorship but still lacks adequate spaces in which to negotiate what counts as credible science. These experiences highlight the need to better understand how science fares through regime transitions and what it contributes to emerging democracies.

In 2010 Chilean legislators replaced a small environmental coordinating agency with an Environment Ministry, an autonomous Environmental Impact Assessment Agency, an enforcement agency, and specialized tribunals. Though ambitious, the reform failed to meet the stated objective of depoliticizing environmental decision-making. Instead, the reforms strengthened the authority of the central state, justified on the premise that decisions would now be based on ‘technical criteria’, meaning rules rather than politics. Comparing the creation (1990–1994) and reform (2009–2010) of Chile’s environmental institutions, it is demonstrated that a defining feature of Chilean political culture involves treating rules as if these were independent of the state. Chilean lawmakers use rules as science is used elsewhere: as an ‘objective’ voice separate from politics, that helps legitimate decisions. Appeals to the rules were used to increase the central state’s authority and exclude local representatives, concerned communities, and scientists from environmental decision-making.

The world’s largest deposits of lithium lie in brines found underneath salt flats in the desert between Chile, Argentina and Bolivia. Globally, lithium may reduce fossil fuel use by making batteries for cars and renewable energy storage more affordable. This article analyzes ongoing debates about lithium in these three countries to identify what hopes, fears and expectations different stakeholders are bringing to debates about lithium. My approach builds on the idea of resource imaginaries, particularly the con- cept of sociotechnical imaginaries that highlights the importance of science and technology to projections of desirable futures. I analyze the tensions, visions and metaphors used by different stakeholders, includ- ing activists, the media, and state and industry officials, to imagine and thus legitimate lithium extrac- tion. This study finds three co-existing positions in these debates: lithium as a commodity, as a strategic resource or as the subject of a sociotechnical imaginary. Chile, Argentina and Bolivia are con- verging on the last of these, best described as a reimagining of the relationship between mining and development in which lithium, through innovation and industry, will redefine the relationship between Latin American economies and global markets. This imaginary projects a binary between raw and indus- trial materials and deterministically assumes that science and technology will transform the former into the latter. Disagreements and challenges notwithstanding, the article argues that this imaginary is evi- dence of a crisis of confidence in development that is creating space for a more dynamic debate about the social value of mining and the proper role of the state in development. This convergence will have also implications for how sustainable, equitable and reliable lithium production will be.

Worldwide, governments use environmental impact assessments (EIAs) to manage the environmental impacts of industrial activity. EIAs contain baselines that describe the specific environment where the project would go, and impact evaluations that identify ways to eliminate, reduce, or compensate the environmental harms the project would have. Although EIA baselines promised to democratize and improve decision-making, in practice, many affected communities, environmental activists, and scholars of EIAs find that baselines often obscure certain ecological impacts. Drawing on science and technology studies and environmental history, I reflect on why this happens and propose that it results from the ways in which EIA baselines reproduce modernist views of economic growth and progress. I analyze EIA baselines as a ''memory practice'' which meet the needs of the present by projecting a timeless, static past to be preserved. This naturalization of modernism can be challenged through two correctives: to compare projects rather than natures in EIA baselines, and to document existing and potential forms of ''rubble'' resulting from industrial activity. I illustrate these arguments with the case of glaciers and efforts to protect them from the impacts of the Pascua Lama gold mine located in the high-altitude Andes.

The Zika virus outbreak erupted in Brazil in 2015 and spread to dozens of countries in just a few months. There is no vaccine, treatment or cure for this virus that is now a sexually transmitted disease and causes microcephaly in babies. While scientists work to develop the vaccine, 500,000 tourists get ready to travel to Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Olympic Games. Brazil has struggled to eliminate Aedes Aegypti, the mosquito vector of Zika and several others viruses, for the last 30 years. As the outbreak erupted on the eve of the Olympics, it globally exposed Brazil's deficient healthcare and sanitation systems and lasting poverty and inequality gaps. It also happened in the wake of a severe political and economic crisis, which determined the state's response to fight the virus. This paper examines the role of military forces as Brazil's response to contain the Zika virus through three perspectives: 1) Brazil's ambition to strengthen its role as a humanitarian superpower; 2) Brazil's shift from a socially conscious approach to a global health issue (the case of HIV) to a forceful response (Zika); and 3) Brazil's attempt to recover leadership, both internally and globally, threatened by the current crisis.

The colonized sector, or at least the 'native' quarters, the shanty town, the medina, the reservation, is a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people. You are born anywhere, anyhow. You die anywhere from anything."-FRAN Tz FAN oN , The Wretched of the Earth S ince the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global health emergency in January 2020, the coronavirus has impacted people across the globe, at once decimating both lives and livelihoods. In addition, it has increased the number of forcibly displaced and stateless people: in 2020, this demographic surpassed 80 million persons. 1 Certainly, the pandemic-its socioeconomic impact along with its resultant amplification of policies of confinement and segregation-has had a much greater effect on communities of color across vulnerable groups, in both the Global South and North. 2 This article reflects on the experiences of the marginalized in Brazil and Kenya, in particular those who are living in historically poor and intentionally neglected urban spaces, migrants, deportees, and the internally displaced. In the first months of 2020, as COVID-19 crossed international borders, transcended class divides, and became a pandemic, its lethal capacity was touted as the equalizer of social and racial inequalities. It is not. In Brazil, aggressive transmission has killed, principally, poor Black and Brown people long imperiled by systemic social and racial inequities. In Kenya, as in Brazil, the virus has made violently clear domestic socioeconomic asymmetries, and the global disparities in access to the vaccine have demonstrated the ongoing colonial relations between countries in the "North" and "South." 3

Author(s): Pinheiro de Oliveira, Amanda | Abstract: The Zika virus outbreak erupted in Brazil in 2015 and spread to dozens of countries in just a few months. There is no vaccine, treatment or cure for this virus that is now a sexually transmitted disease and causes microcephaly in babies. While scientists work to develop the vaccine, 500,000 tourists get ready to travel to Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Olympic Games. Brazil has struggled to eliminate Aedes Aegypti, the mosquito vector of Zika and several others viruses, for the last 30 years. As the outbreak erupted on the eve of the Olympics, it globally exposed Brazil’s deficient healthcare and sanitation systems and lasting poverty and inequality gaps. It also happened in the wake of a severe political and economic crisis, which determined the state’s response to fight the virus. This paper examines the role of military forces as Brazil’s response to contain the Zika virus through three perspectives: 1) Brazil’s ambition to strengt...

In “Reconstructing the Race-Sex Analogy”, Serena Mayeri questioned how does that emerging sex equality jurisprudence could and should be a template for the constitutional treatment of race-based affirmative action, in order to illuminate an underappreciated aspect of feminist lawyers, including Justice Ginsburg, that could expand contemporary equality doctrine. It has been almost 10 years since Mayeri published her article, and after going through her reconstruction of the race-sex analogy history, many questions are still pending. A revision of this literature will be in place, first, to dialogue with Mayeri’s conclusions and comment, later, on how sex stereotypes and a binary identity still mould sex equality jurisprudence because of structural constraints.

In July 2022, the World Health Organization declared the monkeypox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. Using a variety of data sources, this brief examines the impact of monkeypox on LGBT people in different countries.

The global coronavirus pandemic has challenged health rights worldwide, directly and indirectly. We must better recognize the gendered impact of this global crisis on reproductive and sexual health rights, especially as these recently recognized international human rights are vulnerable to patriarchal regression and nationalist securitization.