The Right Against Rights in Latin America

From President Bolsonaro's openly racist, misogynist, and homophobic rhetoric in Brazil, to the politicisation of gender ideology leading to the rejection of a peace deal in Colombia and beyond, Latin America is home to right-against-rights movements that have grown in numbers, strength, and influence in recent years. New anti-rights groups are intent on blocking, rolling back, and reversing social movements' legislative advances by obstructing justice and accountability processes and influencing politicians across the region.

The Right against Rights in Latin America contains chapters that empirically explore the breadth, depth, and diversity of a new wave of anti-rights movements in Latin America. It details why they are fundamentally different from previous movements in the region, and ― perhaps more importantly ― why it is of vital importance that we study, analyse, and understand them in a global context.

Leigh A. Payne is Professor of Sociology and Latin America at the University of Oxford, St Antony's College. She works broadly on responses to past atrocity. Together with Gabriel Pereira and Laura Bernal Bermúdez, she has published Transitional Justice and Corporate Accountability: Deploying Archimedes' Lever (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and a follow-up edited volume on Economic Actors and the Limits of Transitional Justice (Oxford University Press, 2022). She has also edited with Karina Ansolabehere and Barbara Frey Disappearances in the Post-Transition Era in Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2021) and with Juan Espindola Collaboration in Authoritarian and Armed Conflict Settings (Oxford University Press, 2022).

Julia Zulver is a Marie Sk?odowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies. She is currently based at the Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas at the UNAM in Mexico City (2020-2022). Her project 'High-Risk Leadership in Latin America' focuses on women's leadership in the pursuit of social justice in various violent contexts. She earned her DPhil in Sociology at the University of Oxford in 2018, where she studied how and why organisations of women mobilise in high-risk contexts, actions which expose them to further danger. Her book High-Risk Feminism in Colombia: Women's Mobilization in Violent Contexts was published by Rutgers University Press in 2022.

Simón Escoffier is an assistant professor at the School of Social Work at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He is the author of the book Mobilising at the Urban Margins: Citizenship and Patronage Politics in Post-Dictatorial Chile (forthcoming, 2023). He holds a doctorate from the Sociology Department and St Antony's College at the University of Oxford. His research sits at the intersection of social movements, citizenship, urban marginality, local governance, democracy, and Latin American studies. He teaches on sociological theory, politics, and social movements.