Indonesian law and judicial institutions raise almost every conceivable theoretical and practical problem. Professor Jaspan certainly conveys admirably the bewildering confusion of diversity of custom, judicial practices, arguments about theory and policy, and political pressures, describing dilemmas which, on sociological first principles, seem in the short (or even middle) run to be insoluble.

Don Anselmo, the protagonist of a story by Mesonero Romanos, was a wealthy established gentleman in one of Andalusia's leading towns. Young, good-looking, affable, and generous, Anselmo held all the virtues and qualities that can make a man happy, except for one weakness: an overbearing ambition for becoming important. First, he did everything possible to attain a position of power in his town. Unsatisfied with merely local power, he decided to leave his house and possessions in the hands of an administrator and emigrate to Madrid, the only place in Spain where one could achieve a brilliant political career. Once in Madrid he spent his time and his money looking for protection and political connections, a process in which he experienced only personal humiliation and frustration. In the end, Don Anselmo, once a wealthy provincial gentleman, became a failed politician who abandoned both his family and his estate. Don Anselmo's sorry destiny illustrates, according to Mesonero, one of the worse diseases of Spanish society: the empleomania of its elites, a terrible misjudgment that provoked the abandon of productive activities and contributed to the country's backwardness.

The rate of modernization in Venezuela over the past forty years has been rapid, even startling, if attention is focussed on the more conspicuous institutions and processes. During this period an agrarian, patrimonially ruled, backward society has been transformed into a highly commercialized urban society governed by a political party system based on widespread popular participation in the electoral process. However—and this is a phenomenon of which social scientists in the United States have become increasingly aware—modernization does not affect people in an evenhanded, uniform manner. While the great transformation in economy and society which we call modernization improves the quality of life for many people, some groups or individuals are bypassed in the process, and some even come to suffer as a consequence of it. Therefore, the level of modernity and personal well-being achieved in the most advanced sectors of a society will often be irrelevant as an indicator of welfare in those pockets of deprivation left behind or created in the general march of progress.

Certain analysts have argued in support of liberal democratic rule that this method of structuring political power through parliaments, mass political parties and specialized interest groups is both responsive to mass needs and imbued with high capabilities for public welfare and resource redistribution. Critics2 of this view contend that liberal democratic government merely provides a facade of mass legitimacy that obscures and masks the control of public policy and decision making by privileged and affluent classes that own or control the means of production. This paper attempts to examine these conflicting views on the policy responsiveness of liberal-democratic rule to mass welfare needs in the context of the mainly capitalist societies of Latin America.

Child soldiers are often viewed as a contemporary, “new war” phenomenon, but international concern about their use first emerged in response to anti-colonial liberation struggles. Youth were important actors in anti-colonial insurgencies, but their involvement has been neglected in existing historiographies of decolonization and counterinsurgency due to the absence and marginalization of youth voices in colonial archives. This article analyses the causes of youth insurgency and colonial counterinsurgency responses to their involvement in conflict between ca. 1945 and 1960, particularly comparing Kenya and Cyprus, but also drawing on evidence from Malaya, Indochina/Vietnam, and Algeria. It employs a generational lens to explore the experiences of “youth insurgents” primarily between the ages of twelve and twenty. Youth insurgents were most common where the legitimate grievances of youth were mobilized by anti-colonial groups who could recruit children through colonial organizations as well as family and social networks. While some teenagers fought due to coercion or necessity, others were politically motivated and willing to risk their lives for independence. Youth soldiers served in multiple capacities in insurgencies, from protestors to couriers to armed fighters, in roles that were shaped by multiple logics: the need for troop fortification and sustained manpower; the tactical exploitation of youth liminality, and the symbolic mobilization of childhood and discourses of childhood innocence. Counterinsurgency responses to youthful insurgents commonly combined violence and development, highlighting tensions within late colonial governance: juveniles were beaten, detained, and flogged, but also constructed as “delinquents” rather than “terrorists” to facilitate their subsequent “rehabilitation.”

This paper analyzes a housing project in Santiago, Chile that now lies in ruins and has become a contested memory site. The project was once an ambitious, modernist project that housed former squatters during Salvador Allende’s socialist presidency (1970–1973) and its demise has subsequently become emblematic of the violent processes of neoliberal urban restructuring that marked the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). Yet efforts to memorialize the site also contain within them certain silences and elisions, gaps which can help to reveal the complex, embedded nature of liberal property relations in Chile. These relations underscore certain dynamics through which squatters have historically been able to gain housing rights and a foothold in the city. They also provide a key location through which to better understand the specific contours of neoliberalism’s trajectory, including its haunted forms of ruination, its points of tension, its limits, and the making of its counterpublics.