The Right against Rights in Latin America

In this conversation with the Review of Democracy, Professor Leigh Payne, Dr. Julia Zulver, and Dr. Simon Escoffierdiscuss the development of right-against-rights movements that have grown in numbers, strength, and influence in recent years in Latin America. The discussion draws on their latest book, “The Right against Rights in Latin America,” published by Oxford University Press, in which they show that newanti-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. Their book containschapters that empirically explore the breadth, depth, and diversity of a new wave of anti-rights movements. 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, as their impact extends far beyond Latin America.

Leigh A. Payne is Professor of Sociology and Latin America at the University of Oxford, St Antony's College. She worksbroadly on responses to past atrocity. Together with Gabriel Pereira and Laura Bernal Bermúdez, she has published Transitional Justice and CorporateAccountability: 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). Shehas also edited with Karina Ansolabehere and Barbara FreyDisappearances 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 Wallenberg Academy Fellow at the Swedish Defence University, where she researches  feminist response to backlash in post-conflict settings in Latin America. She was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellow between the Oxford School of Global and AreaStudies and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She earned her D.Phil. in sociology at the University of Oxford in 2018, where she studied how and why organisations of women mobilise in high-risk contexts – actions that exposethem to further danger. Her book High-Risk Feminism in Colombia: Women’s Mobilization in Violent Contexts was published in 2022. Her co-edited volume, Brave Women: Fighting for Justice in the 21st Century was published this February.

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.