This article analyzes the US sociologist Donald Pierson’s views on the process of modernization as expressed in research he conducted while residing in Brazil from the 1930s to the 1950s. Looking first at his study on race relations in Bahia and then at his investigations of rural communities in the São Francisco Valley, it shows that Pierson’s exchange with local intellectuals was decisive to his readings of Brazil’s rural, patriarchal past and his understanding of the potential for building a modern social order out of these traditions. His perspective was also evident during the debate on the relation between racism and modernity in the context of the UNESCO Race Relations Project. This examination of Pierson’s work likewise signals how transnational dialogue between the Global North and South contributed to the sociological debate on modernization, and how US scholars ascribed more than one meaning to the modernizing changes underway in peripheral countries around the world.

The Ford Foundation's involvement with the social sciences in Brazil coincided with the early years of the military regime that ruled the country between 1964 and 1985. The paper studies how changed political circumstances in the United States and abroad induced the Foundation to gradually abandon the technocratic approach that had governed its overseas programme since the 1950s, thus introducing a critical shift in its policies toward the developing world. A grant proposal to the University of Brasília, which had been subject to repeated military interventions since 1964, highlighted the ethical dilemmas raised by the goal of fostering policy-relevant research in an authoritarian political context. Relying on a pragmatic decision-making framework that converted ethical and ideological considerations into cost–benefit exercises, the Foundation finally moved away from the maxims of modernisation theory to embrace new strategic priorities like human rights, democracy and intellectual pluralism.

This article studies the unfolding of a broad conservative bloc amidst the politico-cultural battles that took place in Cold War Argentina. Focusing on the unexplored gendered, sexual and generational dimensions of the figure of the ‘enemy within’, the article shows that this figure was at the core of a project which coincided with authoritarian practices emanating from the state and also from segments of civil society. The creation of that figure had significant effects, not only in the political but also in the educational and cultural realms, including the imposition of censorship and the delineation of restrictive sexual policies. Moreover, it conditioned the ways in which political repression developed in the context of 1970s state terrorism.