Since the re-democratization of much of Latin America in the 1980s and a regional wave of anti-austerity protests in the 1990s, social movement studies has become an important part of sociological, political, and anthropological scholarship on the region. The subdiscipline has framed debates about formal and informal politics, spatial and relational processes, as well as economic changes in Latin America. While there is an abundant literature on particular movements in different countries across the region, there is limited coverage of the approaches, debates, and theoretical understandings of social movement studies applied to Latin America.

In The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Social Movements, Federico M. Rossi presents a survey of the broad range of theoretical perspectives on social movements in Latin America. Bringing together a wide variety of viewpoints, the Handbook includes five sections: theoretical approaches to social movements, as applied to Latin America; processes and dynamics of social movements; major social movements in the region; ideational and strategic dimensions of social movements; and the relationship between political institutions and social movements. Covering key social movements and social dynamics in Latin America from the late nineteenth century to the twenty-first century, The Oxford Handbook of Latin American Social Movements is an indispensable reference for any scholar interested in social movements, protest, contentious politics, and Latin American studies.

About the Author:
Federico M. Rossi (PhD, European University Institute, Florence) is a Profesor-Investigador of the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín in Buenos Aires, and a Senior Fellow of the Humboldt Stiftung at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) in Hamburg. He has published The Poor's Struggle for Political Incorporation: The Piquetero Movement in Argentina (Cambridge University Press), Reshaping the Political Arena in Latin America: From Resisting Neoliberalism to the Second Incorporation (University of Pittsburgh Press), Social Movement Dynamics: New Perspectives on Theory and Research from Latin America (Routledge), and La participación de las juventudes hoy: la condición juvenil y la redefinición del involucramiento político y social (Prometeo).