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The Internationalization of Palace Wars

Lawyers, Economists, and the Contest to Transform Latin American States

How does globalization work? Focusing on Latin America, Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth show that exports of expertise and ideals from the United States to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico have played a crucial role in transforming their state forms and economies since World War II.

Based on more than 300 extensive interviews with major players in governments, foundations, law firms, universities, and think tanks, Dezalay and Garth examine both the production of northern exports such as neoliberal economics and international human rights law and the ways they are received south of the United States. They find that the content of what is exported and how it fares are profoundly shaped by domestic struggles for power and influence—"palace wars"—in the nations involved. For instance, challenges to the eastern intellectual establishment influenced the Reagan-era export of University of Chicago-style neoliberal economics to Chile, where it enjoyed a warm reception from Pinochet and his allies because they could use it to discredit the previous regime.

Innovative and sophisticated, The Internationalization of Palace Wars offers much needed concrete information about the transnational processes that shape our world.

352 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2002

Chicago Series in Law and Society

Law and Legal Studies: Law and Society

Sociology: Individual, State and Society

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Chronologies
Terminology and Abbreviations

PART ONE
Imperial and Professional Strategies within the Field of State Power

1.Introduction
2.Retooling Statesmen to Restructure the State: From Héritiers
of European Legal Culture to the Technopols Made in the
USA
3.The Internationalization of Palace Wars

PART TWO
Hegemony Challenged: Making Friends, the Cold War Roots of a
Reformist Strategy
4.The Archeology of the New Universals: The Cold War
Construction of Human Rights and Its Later Avatars
5.The Chicago Boys as Outsiders: Constructinf and
Exporting Counterrevolution
6.Fostering Pluralism and Reformism
7.The Paradox of Symbolic Imperialism: The Southern
Cone as an Explosive Laboratory of Modernity

PART THREE
Competing Universals: The Parallel Construction of Neoliberalism
in the North and the South
8.The Reformist Establishment out of Power: Investing in
Human Rights as an Alternative Political Strategy
9.From Confrontation to Concertación: The National
Production and International Recognition of the New
Universals

PART FOUR
Reshaping Global Institutions and Exporting Law
10.Fragmented Governance: A Washington Agenda for
Reshaping Global Institutions and National Expertises
11.Top-Down Participatory Development: Putting a Human
Face on Market Hegemony and Trying to Stem the Social
Violence of Globalization
12.Lawyer Compradors as Opportunistic Instituation
Builders
13.Reformist Strategies around the Courts
14.The Logic of Half-Failed Transplants

Notes
References
Index

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