James Dunkerley – författare

Over recent years James Dunkerley has established a reputation as one of the most thoughtful and eloquent writers on Latin America. In his latest book he investigates the high incidence of political suicide in the subcontinent. A sensitive and revealing essay details a number of case studies: the still disputed death of Chilean President Salvador Allende during Pinochet's storming of the Moneda Palace in 1973; the case of the Salvadorean guerrilla leader Salvador Cayetano Carpio who shot himself in the heart in April 1983; the death of Brazilian President Getulio Vargas, who declared in April 1954 that he would only leave the presidential palace dead-and a few days later did so; Bolivian President German Busch, who died at his own hand aged thirty-five in 1939; and the dramatic end of Eduardo Chibas, founder of the Cuban People's Party, who shot himself live on Havana radio in 1951. In the pieces which follow, Dunkerley employs his customary acuity to range over the implications of the Sandinista defeat in Nicaragua, the plight of El Salvador, the modern history of Bolivia, the experience of postwar Guatemala and, in a coruscating broadside, the politics of the Peruvian novelist and the presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa.

"Bolivia is a country with a reputation," writes James Dunkerley. "Not so long ago it was for Che Guevara, for whose death its citizens are on occasions held to be collectively responsible. More recently it has been for cocaine. But in general it is for political disorder."Rebellion in the Veins demonstrates that behind the succession of coups lies an exceptional and coherent record of political struggle. The country's location at the heart of Latin America has not, however, guaranteed it the attention it deserves. Dunkerley here redresses the balance in a masterly survey of Bolivian society since the early 1950s. The revolution of 1952 was, with the Cuban revolution, the most radical attempt in the western hemisphere since the Second World War to break the cycle of capitalist underdevelopment. It was channeled into a more familiar pattern of repression and dictatorship only after bitter struggles, and Dunkerley analyses the pressures that compromised it, providing lucid accounts of the country's economy, political history and class structure, as well as its relations with the United States.The succession of military dictatorships from 1964 to 1982 are described, but this period was by no means one of unrelieved quietude. There was an extraordinarily vital popular resistance, and the unusual sophistication of working-class politics forms a stirring narrative. The tragic death of Che, after a doomed rural guerrilla campaign in eastern Bolivia, had a profound effect on the country's politics. The fate of his imitators, and the eventual resurgence of more classical forms of mass struggle, has provided valuable lessons for what Dunkerley predicts will be a second Bolivian revolution. The story is carried through to the restoration of parliamentary democracy in 1982, presided over by Hernán Siles Zuazo, who first came to power in the revolution thirty years earlier.

The Long War is a serious, radical critique of the political economy and recent history of El Salvador, set in the context of the troubled history of the entire Central American region and detailing in full the extent of US intervention and its importance as a destabilising factor.With the addition of a postscript, this new edition brings the narrative fully up-to-date.

In this book, the most comprehensive analysis of Central America ever to be published, James Dunkerley provides a detailed account of the history of Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Costa Rica and a series of authoritative studies of their national political systems. Written in a fluent and accessible style, the text is supported by a wealth of charts and statistical data making Power in the Isthmus an essential work of reference.

This book offers a nuanced and multifaceted collection of essays covering a wide range of concerns, concepts, presidential doctrines, and rationalities of government thought to have marked America’s engagement with the world during this period. The collection is organised chronologically and looks at the work of intellectuals who have written both in support and critically about US foreign policy in various geographical and historical contexts. This includes Andrew Carnegie, Carl Schmitt, Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, Samuel Huntington, Paul Wolfowitz and many other such thinkers and practitioners who have contributed in shaping the ways in which we have come to think of US foreign policy over the years. The book will be of significant interest to students and academics within the fields of US foreign policy analysis, international relations and intellectual history.

This book offers a nuanced and multifaceted collection of essays covering a wide range of concerns, concepts, presidential doctrines, and rationalities of government thought to have marked America’s engagement with the world during this period. The collection is organised chronologically and looks at the work of intellectuals who have written both in support and critically about US foreign policy in various geographical and historical contexts. This includes Andrew Carnegie, Carl Schmitt, Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, Samuel Huntington, Paul Wolfowitz and many other such thinkers and practitioners who have contributed in shaping the ways in which we have come to think of US foreign policy over the years. The book will be of significant interest to students and academics within the fields of US foreign policy analysis, international relations and intellectual history.

300 years after it was first published, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe remains hugely influential and hotly debated. Since its initial release in 1719, discussions have surrounded the novel’s depiction of individual solitude and work, colonial and racial relations, and mankind’s relationship with the rest of the animal world.To this day, Crusoe’s depiction of self-reliance and “rugged individualism” is often idealized in economics textbooks, mainstream politics, and popular culture. But many have also criticized this approach, most notably Karl Marx, who was one of the first in decrying the efforts of classical economists to extract the “rational actor” and “marginalist calculator” from the island castaway without reference to social history.Alongside a precis with surprising revelations for those not familiar with the detail of the story, and a rich biographical sketch of its creator, Crusoe and His Consequences draws on a range of writers, including Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jacques Derrida and Jurgen Habermas, to bring the debates surrounding Defoe’s first novel vividly to life.

Warriors and Scribes opens and closes using the prism of biography to question the framing of Latin American political life from both a northern, Cold War perspective and from the trivializations of postmodernism. An investigation of Jorge Castaneda's Utopia Disarmed reveals that Latin American politics are eminently transformable beyond the failed nostrums of multilateral organizations and collapsed dictatorships of the 1980s.In surveying regional relations with the USA since 1800, and taking a wry look at Hollywood's treatment of Central America under Reagan, Dunkerley points out that Anglo-America has possessed neither a uniform imperialist vocation, nor the consistent capacity to impose it. Two pieces written in the late 1990s - a reappraisal of Latin American Studies since the Cuban Revolution and a survey of the contemporary politics of Bolivia - reflect the author's concerns with a place that was 'American' for half a millennium before the 'Americanization through globalization' became a watchword.