In May 2016, an Argentine federal court concluded a momentous trial, convicting 15 defendants of illegal kidnappings and torture committed against over 100 victims of Operation Condor, and of asociación ilícita (‘illicit association’: conspiracy to commit a criminal offence) to perpetrate these violations. Operation Condor was the codename given to a continent-wide covert operation devised in the 1970s by South American regimes to eliminate hundreds of left-wing activists across the region. The Operation Condor verdict of 2016 broke new ground in human rights and transitional justice, for its innovative focus on transnational crimes and for holding state agents accountable for extraterritorial human rights violations. By analysing this pioneering case, the article brings the question of cross-border crimes into academic debate. As borders become more porous, scholars and practitioners can no longer afford to side-line the topic of accountability for transnational crimes.

This article provides a new interpretation of the changes that occur in party-civil society relations when progressive parties of mass-based origin gain state power by looking at the experience of the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) during the Lula administration. The need to preserve what is defined here as ‘social governability’ changes the nature of party-movement relationships when political parties move from opposition to government. The article shows how the PT in national executive public office, to a large extent, managed to secure social governability through reward-based linkages, such as the distribution of jobs in the state apparatus and the allocation of massive state subsidies.

Non-governmental organisations operate as nodes in networks of ‘managerialism’ – bundles of often Northern, corporate-inspired knowledge and practices that promote ‘good governance’ under neoliberalism. Managerialism is double-sided: it can guard against corruption and help ensure accountability, but it can also be culturally disjunctive, reinforcing North–South power imbalances while diffusing the political potential of NGOs. In this paper we present a framework for studying managerialism's global circulation and discuss a series of empirical findings from a multi-year study of NGOs in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. We conclude by commenting on managerialism's influence on NGOs during the social upheavals of 2006, highlighting its differential and contingent impact on social and political change in Oaxaca.

This article examines the collective action frames that civil societal actors in Argentina have used while engaging in advocacy. It argues that by devising effective framing strategies, members of civil society organisations increase their chances of participating in the agenda-setting, formulation and adoption phases of policy-making. The relationship between framing and participation is supported by a comparative analysis of two cases of advocacy: the campaign for a freedom of information law and the struggle for child protection legislation. The evidence suggests that civil societal actors often rely on the strength of their ideas and their persuasive power to achieve political relevance, which is analytically distinct from political outcomes.

This study provides a new perspective on civil society in Cuba during the nineteenth century based on concrete information about multiple types of association in different regions of the island. Modern associations developed mainly to meet specific social and cultural needs, achieve legal autonomy from the state and exercise free association despite colonial constraints. This long-term evolution covers several periods of intersections between civil society and political spheres, framed primarily by non-violent constitutionalist and reformist struggles rather than armed separatist conflicts. These findings contradict prevalent interpretations that portray an endemically weak yet increasingly militant civil society. Instead, a growing, moderate, and progressively autonomous and diverse civil society contributed gradually to undermine colonial despotism and establish key bases for post-independence democracy.

This article is about the role of civil society after violent conflict. It argues that the transformations that civil society organisations (CSOs) make are more ambiguous than supporting donors and NGOs presume. The article analyses how, ten years after the 1996 peace agreements, Guatemalan CSOs deal with agrarian conflict. It discusses in detail the case of a church-related organisation assisting peasants with agrarian conflicts and the challenges it faced in defining its strategies. The article argues that supporting donors and NGOs should stop seeing the difficulties of organisational change in post-conflict situations exclusively in terms of the internal incapacities of civil society. Instead, they should re-politicise their analyses and focus on the importance of broader social and political processes in post-conflict settings for the strategic options open to CSOs.