G Otero
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 21109 |
|---|---|
| NOME | G Otero |
| PRENOMES | G |
| SOBRENOME | Otero |
| ASSINATURA | OTERO G |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Simon Fraser University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2338-3000 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 52 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 429 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 52 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1987 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
Peasant Movements and the Fourth Transformation in Mexico
This article examines peasant and Indigenous movements in Mexico since Morena's rise to power in 2018 through the lens of collective empowerment theory, a theory of political‐cultural formation. Beyond offering an empirical assessment, the theory is refined and formalized through an analysis of these movements and their relationship to progressive state intervention. Starting from the recognition of empirically verifiable advances in income distr…
Multipolarity in theory
Multipolarity has become a defining feature of international politics since the 2000s, yet scholarship remains fragmented with limited cross-perspective dialogue. This study offers an interpretive conceptual analysis that maps and connects key debates, advancing an integrated understanding of multipolarity. We iteratively identify three analytical orientations: integrationist, stressing interdependence and systemic cohesion amid shifting power ba…
Philosophical and practical dimensions of Gramsci’s conjunctural analysis
Purpose This article employs interpretive conceptual analysis to provide a coherent research philosophy and practical insights for conjunctural analysis as a Marxist alternative to traditional case study methods. How can Gramsci’s writings inform our understanding of research philosophy? How does this philosophy shape his own method as applied to the case of the French Revolution? Design/methodology/approach Gramsci’s methodology is based on a dy…
Articulating Indigeneity and Class
Sociological Imagination
Blaming the victim or structural conditioning? Covid‐19, obesity and the neoliberal diet
The energy‐dense part of the neoliberal diet and obesity made for an explosive combination upon the arrival of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Energy‐dense foods lie at the root of comorbidities associated with complications of the COVID‐19 pandemic: overweight, obesity, diabetes, hypertension and so forth. Multiple medical studies have demonstrated the causal impact of overweight and obesity on more severe or lethal infections. Focusing on the case of Me…
Mirages or miracles? Lithium extraction and the just energy transition
Achieving a 1.5 °C global temperature limit by 2050 has heightened the need for lithium extraction for energy storage. This is touted by governments and industry as essential to a clean, just energy transition. However, critiques reveal tensions between this ideal and the realities of lithium extraction, questioning whether it represents a continuation of extractive capitalism or a pathway to sustainable development grounded in social and environ…
Food sovereignty in the interregnum to a new regime
Collective Empowerment in Latin America
This book develops a theory of collective empowerment that looks for change both from the bottom up, in civil society, and from the top down, from state interventions responding to such pressure. Reflecting on the advancement of Indigenous and peasant movements in Latin America since the neoliberal reformation of capitalism in the 1980s, the book outlines a path for progressive social action in which bottom-up pressure by social movements can hel…
Was There a Left Turn in Latin America? Building a Social Democracy Index
A social democracy index designed to adjudicate among positions in the debate on the extent to which the political left in Latin America has been leftist shows empirically that both the maximalist Marxist and the liberal institutionalist perspectives are inaccurate. Most countries belonging to the so-called radical-left camp have undergone substantial social democratic achievements since their electoral victories. Moreover, the uneven distributio…
Dieta neoliberal
En este capítulo se considera si el paquete alimentario que predomina en México es algo determinado por la cultura o más bien por factores económicos. El argumento principal es que, si bien el país disfrutó de las posibilidades de tener su propia dieta tradicional hasta los 1980, la apertura comercial y la desigualdad económica han causado una modificación sustancial de la dieta a favor de alimentos densos en contenido energético y con menor valo…
Social movements and the state in the post-neoliberal era
The purpose of this chapter is to critically engage the Latin American social movements literature regarding two main strands of political practice since the neoliberal turn in the 1980s. These two main strands are the autonomists or the ‘social left’ that has taken form primarily as a complex of NGOs that make up ‘civil society’, and a ‘political left’ fundamentally concerned with electoral politics. The central focus of the chapter is on the ca…
Eating Nafta
Migration or immigration? Commentary on Leigh Binford’s article
Power and dispossession in the neoliberal food regime
Guatemala's palm oil production has surged in line with the global demand for biodiesel and vegetable oil production. While corporate land grabs have been a popular concept in agrarian studies, we emphasize the integral roles of the state and racially-charged political power relations, enhanced by the neoliberal food regime. These power relations, with racism at their core, foster land control grabs occurring alongside the rise of the palm oil in…
The Neoliberal Diet
Why are people getting fatter in the United States and beyond? Mainstream explanations argue that people simply eat too much "energy-dense" food while exercising too little. By swapping the chips and sodas for fruits and vegetables and exercising more, the problem would be solved. By contrast, The Neoliberal Diet argues that increased obesity does not result merely from individual food and lifestyle choices. Since the 1980s, the neoliberal turn i…
Food security, obesity, and inequality
In reviewing the so-called obesity "epidemic", we critique the individual-focused explanations that also lead to interventions at this level. Instead, we suggest a different possibility: that food choices are structurally conditioned by income inequality, first; and, second, that we eat what huge oligopolistic food producers and distributors have on offer, which is in turn shaped or facilitated by neoliberal state intervention. To highlight the r…
In Pursuit of Real Utopias
Contesting neoliberal globalism
Rock Stars and Bad Apples
Alternative food networks face both challenges and opportunities in rethinking the role of precarious employment in food system transformation. We explore how alternative food networks in British Columbia, Canada have engaged with flexible and precarious work regimes for farmworkers, including both temporary migrant workers and un(der)paid agricultural interns. Based on in-depth interviews, participant observation and document analysis, we find t…
Transgenic Crops in Latin America
This paper introduces a symposium on transgenic crops and neoliberalism in Latin America. We address the question: What is the relationship between the neoliberal food regime and transgenic crops in Latin American agriculture? Our goals are, first, to provide the main conceptual definitions and analytical parameters to contextualize the case studies that follow; and, second, using the findings of our contributors as our empirical stepping stone, …
Bootstrapping Democracy
The neoliberal diet and inequality in the United States
Does Citizenship Status Matter in Canadian Agriculture? Workplace Health and Safety for Migrant and Immigrant Laborers
This article explores how precarious legal status circumscribes differential inclusion in the agricultural labor market and affects workers' lives through a comparative study of workplace health and safety among temporary migrant guest workers and immigrants in Canada. Original, multimethod research with South Asian immigrant and Mexican migrant farmworkers examines employment practices, working conditions, and health-care access. We find that bo…
El régimen alimentario neoliberal y su crisis
Biotechnology has become the central technological form in agriculture since the neoliberal reformation of capitalism in the 1980s. The food-regime perspective introduced by Friedmann and McMichael (1989) anticipated a transition to a third regime from the second, nation-centred regime of the post-World War II years. This paper proposes a characterization of what is called the neoliberal food regime to capture its central dynamic components: the …
The Neoliberal Food Regime
We undertake a comparative investigation of how neoliberal restructuring characterizes the third food regime in the three North American countries. By contrasting the experience of the two developed countries of the United States and Canada with that of the developing country of Mexico, we shine some empirical light on the differential impact of neoliberal regulatory restructuring on the division of labor in agriculture within the North American …
The neoliberal food regime in Latin America
Biotechnology has become the central technological form in agriculture since the neoliberal reformation of capitalism in the 1980s. The food-regime perspective introduced by Friedmann and McMichael (1989) anticipated a transition to a third regime from the second, nation-centered regime of the post-World War II years. This paper proposes and develops the concept of 'neoliberal' food regime which captures the regime's central dynamic components: t…
Does Citizenship Status Matter in Canadian Agriculture? Workplace Health and Safety for Migrant and Immigrant Laborers
This article explores how precarious legal status circumscribes differential inclusion in the agricultural labor market and affects workers' lives through a comparative study of workplace health and safety among temporary migrant guest workers and immigrants in Canada. Original, multimethod research with South Asian immigrant and Mexican migrant farmworkers examines employment practices, working conditions, and health-care access. We find that bo…
The Political Economy of 'Food Security' and Trade
This article critiques the notion of food security through trade promoted by suprastate organizations like theUnitedNationsFood andAgricultureOrganization, theWorldBank, and theWorldTradeOrganization. We use and refine the food-regime perspective to contest this unwritten rule of the neoliberal food regime. Rather than 'mutual dependency' in food between 'North' and 'South,' as argued byPhilipMcMichael, however, we show that food dependency has b…
The Third Food Regime
The agricultural sector is currently being shaped by two powerful dynamics as many nations reorganise their national agriculture according to free trade and other supranational agreements while new agricultural biotechnologies are increasingly adopted. This interrelationship between regulatory change and genetic engineering appears set to form the basis of a new food regime. In this article, we compare the role of national and international regul…
Global Economy, Local Politics
In this article I critically assess the globalist position which claims that the forces of globalization have fundamentally debilitated nation–states, and that the fate of progressive politics and social movements now depends on the degree and extent of international solidarity and the shaping of a transnational civil society (for example, Beck, 2000; Bronner, 1999; Brysk, 2000; Strange, 1996). Against this globalist, internationalist or cosmopol…
The neoliberal diet and inequality in the United States
Agrarian crisis and social differentiation in Mexico
This article explores the double crisis of Mexican agriculture: one relating to the capitalist sector, the other to the peasant economy. An analysis of cash crops in contrast with subsistence crops is provided, using production and prices data for the 940-83 period. Then, based on the 1970 census, we present a spectrum of social differentiation of agrarian producers in Mexico which reflects the extent to which the peasant economy had been eroded …
Neoliberal Globalization, Nafta, and Migration
This article explores the way in which Mexico's countryside was affected by the country's economic integration to its northern neighbors since the start of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Mexico's political technocracy placed its bet for economic growth on the comparative advantage of cheap labor, a losing bet: Mexico's asymmetrical integration into the North American economy, combined with neoliberalism, had a detrimental impact…
Power and dispossession in the neoliberal food regime
Guatemala's palm oil production has surged in line with the global demand for biodiesel and vegetable oil production. While corporate land grabs have been a popular concept in agrarian studies, we emphasize the integral roles of the state and racially-charged political power relations, enhanced by the neoliberal food regime. These power relations, with racism at their core, foster land control grabs occurring alongside the rise of the palm oil in…
Rock Stars and Bad Apples
Alternative food networks face both challenges and opportunities in rethinking the role of precarious employment in food system transformation. We explore how alternative food networks in British Columbia, Canada have engaged with flexible and precarious work regimes for farmworkers, including both temporary migrant workers and un(der)paid agricultural interns. Based on in-depth interviews, participant observation and document analysis, we find t…
Transgenic Crops in Latin America
This paper introduces a symposium on transgenic crops and neoliberalism in Latin America. We address the question: What is the relationship between the neoliberal food regime and transgenic crops in Latin American agriculture? Our goals are, first, to provide the main conceptual definitions and analytical parameters to contextualize the case studies that follow; and, second, using the findings of our contributors as our empirical stepping stone, …
Food security, obesity, and inequality
In reviewing the so-called obesity "epidemic", we critique the individual-focused explanations that also lead to interventions at this level. Instead, we suggest a different possibility: that food choices are structurally conditioned by income inequality, first; and, second, that we eat what huge oligopolistic food producers and distributors have on offer, which is in turn shaped or facilitated by neoliberal state intervention. To highlight the r…
Democratization in Mexico
The New Agrarian Movement
One of the most heated debates in Mexico during the 1970s was over its agrarian structure, peasant differentiation, and the character of struggles in the countryside. This issue has been in the forefront of Latin American discussions of the agrarian question. Scholars from other countries have frequently turned to the Mexican case for theoretical inspiration in pursuing analyses of agrarian classes and political processes in their respective home…
Challenging National Borders from Within
Nous explorons la récente mobilisation des paysans autochtones en Amérique latine et soutenons qu'elle recherche une reconnaissance des différences culturelles et ainsi remet en question les définitions hégémoniques du statut de nation et de l'internationalisme néolibéral. Les luttes autochtones incluent l'autodétermination et l'usage collectif du territoire pour la reproduction de l'identité indigène, et ébranlent directement les élans néolibéra…
Mirages or miracles? Lithium extraction and the just energy transition
Achieving a 1.5 °C global temperature limit by 2050 has heightened the need for lithium extraction for energy storage. This is touted by governments and industry as essential to a clean, just energy transition. However, critiques reveal tensions between this ideal and the realities of lithium extraction, questioning whether it represents a continuation of extractive capitalism or a pathway to sustainable development grounded in social and environ…
El régimen alimentario neoliberal y su crisis
Biotechnology has become the central technological form in agriculture since the neoliberal reformation of capitalism in the 1980s. The food-regime perspective introduced by Friedmann and McMichael (1989) anticipated a transition to a third regime from the second, nation-centred regime of the post-World War II years. This paper proposes a characterization of what is called the neoliberal food regime to capture its central dynamic components: the …
Cuba in Transition? The Civil Sphere's Challenge to the Castro Regime
This article assesses how much the emergence of civil society and private market activities are challenging Cuba's ruling communist regime. The assessment is based on a conceptualization of a "civil sphere," constituted by civil society and private market activities (or the "second economy"), and how this affects democratic transitions from state-socialist societies, using Cuba as a case study. Examining the multiple sectors at play reveals an in…
Atencingo Revisited
Sugarcane growers have had a close relationship to the state since the 1940s when a series of decrees established a heavy state intervention in the sugar industry, which then became highly regulated. Growers became loyal to the state in exchange for low but secure incomes and other social guarantees. After the introduction of economic liberalism in Mexico during the mid-1980s (called 'neoliberalism' in Mexico), the sugar industry became largely d…
Eating Nafta
Migration or immigration? Commentary on Leigh Binford’s article
The coming revolution of biotechnology
Was There a Left Turn in Latin America? Building a Social Democracy Index
A social democracy index designed to adjudicate among positions in the debate on the extent to which the political left in Latin America has been leftist shows empirically that both the maximalist Marxist and the liberal institutionalist perspectives are inaccurate. Most countries belonging to the so-called radical-left camp have undergone substantial social democratic achievements since their electoral victories. Moreover, the uneven distributio…
William I. Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism
The Contemporary Peasantry in Mexico
Agrarian crisis and social differentiation in Mexico
This article explores the double crisis of Mexican agriculture: one relating to the capitalist sector, the other to the peasant economy. An analysis of cash crops in contrast with subsistence crops is provided, using production and prices data for the 940-83 period. Then, based on the 1970 census, we present a spectrum of social differentiation of agrarian producers in Mexico which reflects the extent to which the peasant economy had been eroded …
Crisis agraria y diferenciación social en México
La biotecnología en Estados Unidos y el Tercer Mundo
The New Agrarian Movement
One of the most heated debates in Mexico during the 1970s was over its agrarian structure, peasant differentiation, and the character of struggles in the countryside. This issue has been in the forefront of Latin American discussions of the agrarian question. Scholars from other countries have frequently turned to the Mexican case for theoretical inspiration in pursuing analyses of agrarian classes and political processes in their respective home…
El nuevo movimiento agrario
Si en ciertas regiones de Mexico los trabajadores rurales se comportaban como campesinos, mientras que en otras se comportaban como obreros, fue el punto de partida de una polemica que domino en America Latina durante la decada de los setenta y que tenia que ver con la estructura de clases en el campo, asi como con las luchas campesinas que ocurrieron en ese periodo. En su trabajo, Otero participa de esta polemica, presentando su propia interpret…
The coming revolution of biotechnology
Mexico's Political Future(s) in a Globalizing World Economy
Dans cette étude, nous cherchons à démontrer que le devenir économique et politique du Mexique est étroitement liéà l'évolution du capitalisme mondial. Nous utilisons le concept de «réseaux ascen‐dants» pour analyser les processus qui se développent à l'échelle mondiale et nationale ainsi que leurs interactions. Notre objectif est précisément de théoriser sur ces interactions à l'échelle de l'État‐nation et de décrire, en présentant plusieurs scé…
Mexico's Second Agrarian Reform
Atencingo Revisited
Sugarcane growers have had a close relationship to the state since the 1940s when a series of decrees established a heavy state intervention in the sugar industry, which then became highly regulated. Growers became loyal to the state in exchange for low but secure incomes and other social guarantees. After the introduction of economic liberalism in Mexico during the mid-1980s (called 'neoliberalism' in Mexico), the sugar industry became largely d…
Neoliberal Reform in Rural Mexico
As the economy makes the transition from a state-guided and paternalistic economy toward a more ruthless and marketdriven one, high rates of joblessness and income inequality will be facts of life
Democratization in Mexico
Cuba in Transition? The Civil Sphere's Challenge to the Castro Regime
This article assesses how much the emergence of civil society and private market activities are challenging Cuba's ruling communist regime. The assessment is based on a conceptualization of a "civil sphere," constituted by civil society and private market activities (or the "second economy"), and how this affects democratic transitions from state-socialist societies, using Cuba as a case study. Examining the multiple sectors at play reveals an in…
The "Indian Question" in Latin America
The purpose of this essay is to assess a group of recent books about the "Indian question" in Latin America. We have witnessed widespread and vigorous mobilization by indigenous peasantries throughout the [End Page 248] region in the past two decades, so it is no coincidence that these and many other books have recently been published on this issue. For the case of Mexico, following the 1994 uprising by the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZL…
Challenging National Borders from Within
Nous explorons la récente mobilisation des paysans autochtones en Amérique latine et soutenons qu'elle recherche une reconnaissance des différences culturelles et ainsi remet en question les définitions hégémoniques du statut de nation et de l'internationalisme néolibéral. Les luttes autochtones incluent l'autodétermination et l'usage collectif du territoire pour la reproduction de l'identité indigène, et ébranlent directement les élans néolibéra…
Global Economy, Local Politics
In this article I critically assess the globalist position which claims that the forces of globalization have fundamentally debilitated nation–states, and that the fate of progressive politics and social movements now depends on the degree and extent of international solidarity and the shaping of a transnational civil society (for example, Beck, 2000; Bronner, 1999; Brysk, 2000; Strange, 1996). Against this globalist, internationalist or cosmopol…
Food for the Few
This article introduces the main issues raised in biotechnology in Latin American agriculture in the era of neoliberal globalism. We begin by discussing the theoretical concerns regarding biotechnology's "revolutionary" potential, and identifi where empirical work could respond to these concerns. A historical overview of modern agriculture in the United States provides a means to highlight a number of problems that have arisen as a result of this…
The Third Food Regime
The agricultural sector is currently being shaped by two powerful dynamics as many nations reorganise their national agriculture according to free trade and other supranational agreements while new agricultural biotechnologies are increasingly adopted. This interrelationship between regulatory change and genetic engineering appears set to form the basis of a new food regime. In this article, we compare the role of national and international regul…
Is Biotechnology the Answer? The Evidence From Nafta
Additional informationNotes on contributorsGerardo OteroGerardo Otero is professor of sociology and Latin American studies at Simon Fraser University, in Vancouver, Canada. He is the editor of Food for the Few: Neoliberal Globalism and Biotechnology in Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2008). As of 2010, Gabriela Pechlaner will be assistant professor of sociology at the University of the Fraser Valley, in British Columbia, Canada.Gabriela…
William I. Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism
Introduction
The Neoliberal Food Regime
We undertake a comparative investigation of how neoliberal restructuring characterizes the third food regime in the three North American countries. By contrasting the experience of the two developed countries of the United States and Canada with that of the developing country of Mexico, we shine some empirical light on the differential impact of neoliberal regulatory restructuring on the division of labor in agriculture within the North American …
Neoliberal Globalization, Nafta, and Migration
This article explores the way in which Mexico's countryside was affected by the country's economic integration to its northern neighbors since the start of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Mexico's political technocracy placed its bet for economic growth on the comparative advantage of cheap labor, a losing bet: Mexico's asymmetrical integration into the North American economy, combined with neoliberalism, had a detrimental impact…
Transnational Globalism or Internationalist Nationalism
The neoliberal food regime in Latin America
Biotechnology has become the central technological form in agriculture since the neoliberal reformation of capitalism in the 1980s. The food-regime perspective introduced by Friedmann and McMichael (1989) anticipated a transition to a third regime from the second, nation-centered regime of the post-World War II years. This paper proposes and develops the concept of 'neoliberal' food regime which captures the regime's central dynamic components: t…
Political science (39 obras) · Economics (24 obras) · Law (23 obras) · Sociology (23 obras) · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development (18 obras) · Politics (16 obras) · Agriculture (14 obras) · Geography (13 obras) · Law (13 obras) · Political economy (13 obras)