Disillusioned Republics, Can Latin America Escape Its Current Bind? (Repúblicas Defraudadas. ¿Puede América Latina escapar de su atasco?) (2023) offers a deep meditation on Latin America’s failure in its aspiration of building genuine republics. Written with the urgency of a journalist and the judgment of an academic, Alberto Vergara argues the region’s malaise is due to Latin America being prey to multiple stagnations: political, economic, and social. As a consequence, citizens have little influence on the politics of their countries and have unequal access to shares of freedom in practice, resulting in failing republics in Latin American countries.
The Georgetown Americas Institute hosted a discussion with Alberto Vergara, the author, and Diana Kapiszewski, associate professor of government and the director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University.
This event was co-sponsored by Georgetown Americas Institute and the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University.
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Alberto Vergara is a professor at the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the Universidad del Pacífico (Lima, Peru). He received his Ph.D. from University of Montreal and was a Trudeau Foundation doctoral fellow. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, supported by a Banting Fellowship. Vergara has been a lecturer in Latin American politics at Harvard University and Sciences Po, Paris. His research has appeared in the Journal of Democracy, Latin American Research Review, and the Journal of Politics in Latin America, among others. He is the author and editor of numerous academic and non academic essays and books including La Condena de la Libertad (2022) with Paulo Drinot, and Politics After Violence Legacies of the Shining Conflict in Peru (2019) with Hillel Soifer.
Diana Kapiszewski is an associate professor of government at Georgetown University. She received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2007. Her research interests include public law, comparative politics, and research methods. Her current work examines judicial politics in Latin America, in particular the judicialization of electoral governance in Brazil and Mexico. In the area of research methods her foci are strategies for generating qualitative data and making qualitative research more transparent. Her work has appeared in Latin American Politics and Society, Law and Social Inquiry, Law and Society Review, Perspectives on Politics, and PS: Political Science and Politics; she has also published various books with Cambridge University Press.