In the 1990s, Colombia decentralised politics and passed multicultural reforms as part of wider strategies to strengthen the state. Multiculturalism produced a complex institutional environment marked by jurisdictional overlap and legal plurality. The literature on Colombia's multiculturalism confirms that violence, indigenous rights abuses and the lack of enabling legislation on indigenous territorial entities limited ethno-political autonomy and instead enhanced the capacity of the state to transform indigenous identity and bureaucratise local decision-making practices. However, some indigenous authorities used the new institutions to take control of communal matters, changing local governments along the way. The better-known case of indigenous self-government is that of the Nasa people in Cauca, characterised by the capture of local institutions to advance ethnic rights. In my study of the Embera Chamí of Karmata Rúa (Antioquia) I argue that they represent an alternative approach centred on institutional embeddedness, or the repetition of ethnic autonomy rules by multiple layers of government.

This article presents an entangled history of Argentina and Egypt in the years surrounding the 1952 Egyptian Revolution. It combines diplomatic, migration and anti-imperial activism histories to delineate the intellectual and institutional links between these nations from the late 1940s to the 1950s – from the rise of Peronism through to Nasser's management of the Suez Canal crisis of 1956. Diverse Argentine social and political sectors saw parallels between the anti-imperial struggles in the Arab world and in Latin America. Though with differing and sometimes competing agendas, these groups learned and deployed the language of non-alignment and South–South solidarity in the escalating Cold War.

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 explores the legal writings of Brazilian sociologist and jurist Francisco José de Oliveira Vianna to reveal the global context that shaped Brazil's corporatist experiment in the 1930s. From the Labour Ministry, Oliveira Vianna was at the forefront of legal and political debates over how to create corporatist laws and institutions. He was often cast as an authoritarian and retrograde thinker, yet this article looks beyond those categories to examine how his engagement with the US New Deal inserted corporatism into global debates over the role of the state in economic recovery and social welfare.

This article examines the dynamics of women's participation in the Communist Party of Uruguay (PCU) from the 1920s to the 1960s. Despite its commitment to women's emancipation and to equality between men and women, the PCU's attitudes towards gender equality were often contradictory and its messages were ambiguous. Though it promoted women's participation, the Party oscillated between seeking to overcome social prejudices, upholding principled and dogmatic positions, and accommodating the conservative habits prevalent among the working class. Women were encouraged to take part in activities but not to assume leadership positions. The 1960s, ironically a period characterised by openness and political success, was a decade of regression in gender equality that stood in contrast to the Uruguayan Communists' long trajectory concerning women's rights.

During the 1820s, Colombia's diplomats in London, Washington and Philadelphia worked hard to obtain diplomatic recognition for their nascent republic. Their efforts were also geared towards making Colombia attractive to European and North American settlers whose industry and work ethic would, they hoped, turn it into a civilised and modern Euro-Atlantic nation. The immigration schemes they promoted enable us to understand the type of nations the nation-makers of post-independence Spanish America envisioned and how, by appealing to sentiments of hemispheric solidarity – among other means – they sought to turn their visions into reality. A comparison with similar eighteenth-century schemes promoted by the Bourbons, moreover, reveals the persistence, albeit with some critical modifications, of late-colonial ways of thinking and envisioning society.

This article examines the ways in which the perception of Rio de Janeiro's drinking water contributed to shaping the city's hydric management in colonial and imperial times. Even though the general assessment of climate and vegetation changed from paradisiacal to noxious in the second half of the eighteenth century in accordance with Enlightenment ideas, this had no effect on the locals’ appreciation of the city's drinking water. The criteria for evaluating the quality and quantity of available water were based on works from classical antiquity and remained essentially unchanged from early colonial times to the end of the empire. Not even population growth and increasing susceptibility to epidemics in the nineteenth century induced the authorities to reform the water supply system, as they were confident that the city was provided with good and abundant water by virtue of its natural predisposition.