In Latin America, rural communities have historically represented a challenge both for the nation-building process and for countries’ development strategies. How should the indigenous population be incorporated into the nation, while moderating the potentially destabilising tensions rooted in persistent ethno-cultural differences? And how can rural households become active contributors to economic development without triggering subversive forces that would threaten the stability of the national economy and its involvement in regional and global markets? To address these questions, since independence Latin American states have adopted a variety of strategies, underpinned by different, and sometimes opposite, visions of citizenship and development. These strategies have had concrete effects in redefining ethnic and class boundaries, shaping at the same time relationships between the state and social groups and among social groups themselves. Since the early twentieth century, citizenship and development regimes have followed somewhat cyclical patterns, oscillating between the dyadic forces of separation and assimilation, social inclusion and differentiation.

In the previous chapter, I briefly illustrated the changes in citizenship and development models institutionalised by Latin American governments from the early twentieth century up to the present day. These transformations have shaped the very identities of social actors, and their modes of interaction with the state and between themselves. How have patterns of collective self-identification changed over time and how have scholars made sense of these processes? In this chapter, I focus on changes in collective identities through a critical assessment of the narratives used to describe the alternations between class and ethnicity as referents for social organisation. Indeed, as Yashar (2005) has famously demonstrated in the Latin American context, different kinds of citizenship regimes diffuse and then activate different identity cleavages. A review of the abundant literature on rural movements in Latin America clearly shows how scholarly production has been greatly influenced by intellectual fashions and political ideologies, often in a cyclical way. As a result, the same aspects of reality have been glorified in certain periods and neglected in others, and most narratives of social change have oscillated between either dichotomous or homogenising interpretations of collective identities. Here, I consciously try to remedy this imbalance as I analyse the political roles, forms of organisation and social relevance of both indigenous and peasant movements since the 1950s.

Mediation is neither novel nor new. However, traditional forms of mediation are different from modern mediation practice; in traditional forms, the role and social standing of the mediator are central to the process, and the outcome focuses more on social harmony than on the individual rights or interests of the parties. This difference has given rise to two broad mediation cultures. Cultural differences can be reflected in different approaches to meeting needs, and can shape the interests of the parties and party behaviour during the process. As an informal and adaptable process, mediation offers the possibility of greater sensitivity to cultural differences. A consequence of globalisation has been the increasing harmonisation of laws and practices, and the harmonisation of dispute resolution systems is an important part of this movement. This is reflected in the emergence of several regional and international instruments, the most recent of which is the Singapore Convention. What matters is the potential for any new regional or international legal instrument to be effective and have a positive impact on the people and corporations involved in cross-border legal relationships.

Chapter 2 deals with methodological preliminaries and introduces the central theoretical concepts. It begins by outlining the extra-linguistic historical background regarding the present habitat of Central Chadic languages. It identifies the exceptional typology of Central Chadic languages, in particular regarding their enigmatic vocalic domain. The chapter introduces the problems of applying the classic comparative method and explains the value of internal reconstruction. It discusses problems of dealing with various formats of data transcription, and it introduces central notions such as vowel epenthesis, weak radicals, vocalisation, and prosodies. Finally, it positions the current study against the background of previous studies on the subject.

In this chapter, we discuss the Western Hemisphere (the Americas), as a continent of peace. Whereas all the international borders in the Americas are peaceful, there is an important variation in terms of the occurrence and proliferation of illicit transnational flows across its borderlands. We assess the thirty-six land borders in the Americas, testing the three hypotheses developed in Chapter 2. We examine the general background of Latin America, including the Latin American movement toward regionalism, the persistence of traditional conflicts in the region, the role of the United States vis-a-vis Latin America, security initiatives of Latin American countries, the new security threats and the persistence of ungoverned spaces in the Americas. Moreover, we assess the reality of transnational crime in the Americas, by referring to drug trafficking, arms trafficking, human trafficking and human smuggling. The second half of the chapter explains the reality of peaceful bordes and illicit transnational flows in the Americas, by presenting and testing the relevant data. In general terms, we corroborate the three hypotheses.