Repressive state violence, intended to tamp down collective mobilisation, sometimes inspires greater participation by protesters. When popular and/or elite reactions cause the repressing party to concede, civil resistance scholars define the failure of state repression as ‘backfire’. Some have proposed that movements’ nonviolent discipline is essential to backfire. This article demonstrates that movements that practise ‘unarmed militancy’ – forceful, combative tactics less damaging than armed violence – can also succeed through backfire, achieving policy concessions and even presidential resignations, and presents a qualitative comparative analysis of the outcomes of 48 protest events with multiple deaths in Bolivia between 1982 and 2019, and a case-based analysis of how either movements or repressors prevailed. Movements that confronted deadly repression succeeded in 57–8 per cent of cases. Whether or not protesters engaged in lethal defensive violence did not affect their likelihood of success. However, state repression of guerrillas and paramilitary groups, and during polarised partisan conflicts, was consistently successful. Current understandings of backfire need to be reconsidered in light of successful unarmed militant protest in Bolivia and numerous other locations worldwide.

In Bolivia, expectations for a decolonised society turned into a political crisis in the autumn of 2019. Discussing the limitations of progressive politics in cultivating democracy, this article identifies three narratives of authoritarianism – liberal democratic, developmentalist and colonial – which the opponents of Evo Morales use to frame their disillusionment with his rule. It argues that these multiple narratives lend meaning to contradictory experiences in a context in which hopes for a major decolonising state-transformation process have devolved into a deep polarisation of Bolivian society. The events in Bolivia are discussed in the context of rising authoritarianism throughout Latin America.

This article explores the complexity of Indigenous citizenship in contemporary Bolivia through the analysis of a land dispute involving the Indigenous people of Coroma and a neighbouring Indigenous group. The Coromeños understand their rights as stemming from the colonial, republican and plurinational periods: their citizenship is thus described as ‘time-layered’. This study highlights the importance of the image of the state for practices of Indigenous citizenship in Bolivia, in contrast with an understanding based solely on rights of self-government. Furthermore, by comprehending these layers as social memories, the article underlines the importance of conceiving of citizenship as rooted in historical experiences and reproduced by practices of collective memory.

On 20 November 2016, residents of Gran Chaco Province in south-east Bolivia voted by popular referendum to approve a statute that established Gran Chaco as Bolivia's first autonomous region. This article examines regional autonomy in the Chaco as an example of how identities, territory and political power are being remapped at the intersection of an extractivist development model and competing visions of a plurinational state. I chart how regional autonomy, an elite-led project centred on demands for a fixed share of departmental gas royalties, has been institutionalised under the framework of plurinationalism and used to bolster central state power in this gas-rich region. The article considers the historical evolution of this regionalist project, its intersection with broader processes of state formation under the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement towards Socialism, MAS) government and its implications for the Chaco's Indigenous peoples, who have achieved significant representation within the regional assembly while seeing their own visions of territorial autonomy sidelined by an extractivist development agenda.

International pressure to suppress cocaine trafficking sustained decades of harsh drug laws in Bolivia against cocaleros (coca producers), thus affecting coca production for traditional consumption and for manufacturing illicit cocaine. These harsh drug laws caused social unrest in cocalero communities outside traditional coca zones. President Evo Morales, leader of the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism, MAS) party, implemented ‘Coca Yes, Cocaine No’ (CYCN), a harm-reduction strategy that authorised ‘non-traditional’ farmers to cultivate legal coca and self-police production. This article compares CYCN outcomes in Bolivia's traditional and non-traditional coca regions and finds that strong cocalero organisations were vital to CYCN success in non-traditional areas. In contrast, organised resistance in traditional zones restricted CYCN success and added to regime instability in the lead-up to Morales’ forced resignation in 2019. Hence, while Morales harnessed state power to change drug policy, he was constrained by the rural grassroots organisations that brought him to power.

Drawing on archives from the US labour movement, personal papers of transnational labour organisers, Bolivian oral histories and press reports, and government records from four countries, this article explores a web of Cold War relationships forged between Bolivian workers and US government and labour officials. Uncovering a panoply of parallel and sometimes conflicting state-supported trade union development programmes, the article reveals governments’ inability to fully control the exuberance of ideologically-motivated labour activists. Rather than succeed in shoring up a civilian government as intended, US President John F. Kennedy's union-busting programme aggravated fissures in Bolivia's non-Communist Left, ultimately frustrating its attempt to steer a non-aligned posture in Latin America's Cold War. Employing transnational methods to bridge gaps between labour, development and diplomatic history, this article points toward a new imperial studies approach to the multi-sited conflicts that shaped the post-war trajectory of labour movements in Bolivia and throughout the Third World.

This article explores the settlement of Russian Mennonites on the Paraguayan Chaco frontier during the Chaco War years. These colonists engaged in a range of seemingly contradictory place-making practices – from the agro-environmental and the political to the spiritual and the cultural – that served to solidify their tenuous claim to an unfamiliar and highly contested landscape. Ideas of food security – seen in terms of both production and consumption – linked these diverse exercises. In the Paraguayan Chaco, these former Russian wheat farmers experimented with new crops and foodways. Although pacifists, they supplied the Paraguayan military efforts even as they also sent their crops to Nazi Germany. Finally, as an ethnic group practising endogamy and seeking isolation from their neighbours, they unexpectedly initiated a campaign to evangelise the Chaco's indigenous population centred, in part, on reforming the latter's ‘deficient’ diet.

This article demonstrates that Bolivian tariff policy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not as passive as previously assumed and that the average tariff ratio remained high. However, high average tariffs coexisted for a long time with free-entry rights for different products which represented the main economic activity of certain Bolivian regions. Furthermore, the competitiveness of products was sometimes mostly determined by the geographic fragmentation of the country and the uneven pattern of railway construction rather by than tariffs. Therefore, beyond its high average level, the protectionist effect of tariffs was sometimes constrained by institutional and geographical restrictions.

Based on comparative research this article analyses indigenous women's organising trajectories and the creation of spaces where they position themselves as autonomous political actors. Drawing on social movement theory and intersectionality, we present a typology of the organisational forms adopted by indigenous women in Peru, Bolivia and Mexico over the last two decades. One of the key findings of our comparative study is that indigenous women have become social movement actors through different organisational forms that in part determine the degree of autonomy they can exercise as political subjects.

This article explores a paradox at the heart of New Left populism in Bolivia and Ecuador – namely, the election of populist leaders in movement societies. Employing Laclau's theory about the emergence of populism, it demonstrates how social movements, not charismatic leaders, first constructed the popular identities that laid the foundations for these regimes. In re-examining theories of populism in light of these cases, this article suggests that populism's transformative and counter-hegemonic potential needs to be given renewed attention, and that the central role of charismatic leadership should be qualified in terms of the origins of populist identity formation.

Presidents Hugo Chávez, Rafael Correa and Evo Morales have all sought to reverse the policies of decentralisation that were adopted in the 1990s in Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia. This article adapts ideational and institutional hypotheses from the earlier literature on decentralisation to explain this recent movement in the opposite direction. At the ideational level, because of the close association of decentralisation with liberalisation in each country, recentralisation emerged as a way for presidents to reverse the legacies of their neoliberal predecessors. Beyond ideology, recentralisation can be explained by paying attention to the territorial distribution of electoral support; presidents used it to weaken the sub-national governments where the opposition had found political shelter, while simultaneously redirecting recentralised resources toward supporters.

The 60th anniversary of the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 led by the MNR provided an opportunity to review a Latin American political experience of disputed importance in the light of the government of the MAS under Evo Morales since 2006. This essay reappraises the historiography of 1952 from the perspective of MNR officialism and from critical positions, particularly those associated with indigenismo or Katarismo. Bolivia hoy, an influential collection of essays edited by René Zavaleta Mercado in 1983, is identified as a key moment in changing interpretations of the 1952 revolution.

Recent political changes across Latin America that challenge mainstream conceptions of liberal democracy have led to speculation about some kind of post-liberal democracy possibly emerging in the region. Up to now, however, there has been no systematic assessment of this proposition or any explicit conception of post-liberal democracy. This article fills this research gap by proposing a conceptual framework for analysing political change in the direction of post-liberal democracy, in Latin America and beyond, and probes the plausibility of this framework in a case study of Bolivia. It shows that the concept of post-liberal democracy helps us make sense of the contemporary transformation of Bolivian democracy and that it has comparative advantages over alternative conceptual frameworks such as radical populism and defective – that is, illiberal or delegative – democracy.

This article addresses the ‘coloniality of gender’ in relation to rearticulated indigenous Aymara gender notions in contemporary Bolivia. While female indigenous activists tend to relate the subordination of women to colonialism and to see an emancipatory potential in the current process of decolonisation, there are middle-class advocates for gender equality and feminist activists who seem to fear that the ‘decolonising politics’ of the Evo Morales administration would abandon indigenous women to their ‘traditional’ silenced subordination within male-dominated structures. From the dynamics of indigenous decolonial projections, feminist critiques, middle-class misgivings and state politics, the article explores the implications of these different discourses on colonialism, decolonisation and women's subordination.

Using the example of nineteenth-century Bolivia, this article argues that economic motivations need to be taken into account in understanding the role of peasants in constructing Latin American nation-states, especially in the Andes. Based on local archives, it considers the case of the altiplano region of Oruro-Poopó. From this perspective, during the half-century that followed independence, Andean communities were mostly in favour of a free-trade regime. They were integrated into the nation-state, but in a subordinate position. By the 1850s there was such prosperity in trading activities that community members refused to participate as authorities in their communities due to the time it would consume. However, the assault on community lands that began in the 1860s impoverished the Indians and marginalised them as peasants, turning them into a threat to the new, racist nation-state.