Kennedy's Alliance for Progress: countering revolution in Latin America Part II: the historiographical record

Within weeks of his inauguration in January 1961, President John F. Kennedy proposed an Alliance for Progress: a $100 billion programme of economic, political and social development for Latin America. Its purpose was to tackle the causes presumed to have sparked the Cuban revolution, chiefly poverty and bad governance, and within half a year every Latin American state except Cuba committed to the goals of the Alliance. But within a few years even proponents of the Alliance doubted its efficacy, a pessimism which increased during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, and more so under Richard Nixon. This review of the contemporary and historical literature on the Alliance sets that scholarship within the broader area of US–Latin American relations, with particular emphasis on US–Cuban relations from the 1960s until the twenty‐first century. An important sub‐theme is the peculiarity, the ‘exceptionalness’ of American political rhetoric, derived from and in turn shaping Americans’ sense of the history and the foreign relations of the US: the ‘American mission’ to the world.     

Sustainability Science Partnerships in Concept and in Practice: a Guide to a New Curriculum from a European Perspective

This paper makes the case for advancing sustainability science partnerships (SSPs) both within universities and through innovative means of integrating universities with external public‐private and civil sectors. It links the basic principles of sustainable development with an emerging science of cooperative learning that connects researchers to a wide range of partners. SSPs are specifically designed to be transformational through becoming active agents for societal change. Universities play a special role here because they can act both as communication networks and as laboratories for developing the capability to design and manage SSPs in the creative transition to sustainability. It is gratifying to note that these ideas are beginning to emerge in a number of universities, with European examples being highlighted in this paper. Further steps towards introducing full‐blooded SSPs across the university spectrum are suggested.     

‘Ending the hegemonic presumption’? Recent writings on US–Cuban relations*

For over fifty years relations between the United States and Cuba have been antagonistic, with each side blaming the other for the continuing impasse. This Caribbean Cold War has seen an unsuccessful armed invasion of Cuba (popularly known as the Bay of Pigs invasion), the threat of nuclear war between the US and the USSR (the ‘Cuban missile crisis’), and an intensifying series of measures by the US government to reverse the Cuban social and political revolution of the 1960s. Since the early nineteenth century Washington has sought to control Cuba; and the US conditions for relaxing its pressure on present‐day Cuba continue this tradition, itself part of a broader ideology (often short‐handed as the Monroe Doctrine) which sees the western hemisphere as America's legitimate and exclusive ‘sphere of interest’. This article examines a number of recent works dealing both with the US–Cuban relationship, placing this relationship in historical and geopolitical contexts, and with the impact on Cuban society of the economic crisis of the 1990s caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union.     

Society and politics in China today

China's social and economic transformations, and their growing global impact, have prompted a plethora of books. This review article examines five recent books in Polity's China today series as a basis for discussion about society and politics in China. The series is structured around applying different themes or concepts to China, and these five look at consumption, social welfare, class, ethnicity, and the nature, role and performance of the Communist Party and state. The books provide well‐researched and balanced accounts of developments in China, especially since the era of ‘reform and opening up’ began in 1978. The article argues that important themes of the books—the growing discourse of consumption, the depoliticization of class as socio‐economic strata, the Party‐state as a pragmatic provider of citizen services, and the role of the private sector in the provision of social welfare—are all features of the current phase of a globalized capitalist modernity, and concludes that while the country wants to be seen as different, the accounts of politics and society in this series suggests that China today offers more of an alternative within that modernity than an alternative to it.     

Codification, patents and the geography of knowledge transfer in the electronic musical instrument industry

Recent research in economic geography has emphasized tacit knowledge as the basis of industrial learning. In contrast, codification and the practices of industrial writing have received little attention for the roles they play in mobilizing knowledge across space. This paper offers insight into the geographies of codification through an examination of technology transfer in the electronic musical instrument industry between 1965 and 1995. The research draws on a variety of primary and secondary data that include interviews with inventors, biographical accounts and patent analysis. These sources offer perspective on the career trajectories of three U.S. inventors who transferred knowledge from various contexts in California's high-tech industry to the Japanese firm, Yamaha. Conceptually, the paper draws on the actor–network theory and Latour's idea of translation to highlight the detours inventors must take to register novelty. The analysis reveals the problematic nature of codified knowledge and its transfer; in this case codified knowledge was mobile internationally but not locally, at least until it reached Japan. The paper argues for the need to understand how texts such as patents are produced—the context of their authorship, the geographies of their circulation and their efficacy for shaping further innovative practice.     

The many faces of food security

Food insecurity occurs when people do not have secure access to food necessary for a healthy life. The food‐insecure are typically the poor, and the traditional focus of food insecurity thinking has been the global poor. Increasingly, it is being recognized that in the rich world, food insecurity manifests itself in calorie‐rich but nutrient‐poor diets, leading to the linkage between poverty, obesity and its associated health problems. Furthermore, the historical link between income and diets, when projected forwards, shows a growth in demand that would be extremely challenging to meet with sustainable production. This is especially true given that emissions from the food system are significant contributors to climate change, perhaps more so than any other sector; and yet, probably less than half the world's calories are used directly for healthy diets (over half of agricultural production is lost or wasted, fed to animals or consumed in excess of healthy requirements). This review article, of a suite of four books, covers the way the food security argument is framed and how this is changing, food politics and justice and why our food system is as it is. The overall conclusion is that our food system is placing unsustainable demands on the planet, as well as creating injustice and inequity. The ‘productivist paradigm’ of growing ‘ever more, ever more cheaply’ while relying on international commodity trade and markets to solve the distributional issues, is unlikely to create a sustainable, just and food‐secure world.     

Kennedy's Alliance for Progress: countering revolution in Latin America. Part I: From the White House to the Charter of Punta del Este

One of the first acts of the new administration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961 was to promote an ‘Alliance for Progress’ throughout Latin America. JFK's stated goal was ‘to transform the American continent’ by improving the often desperate living conditions of its peoples; advancing industrialization; diversifying and increasing exports (especially away from heavy dependence on single items such as coffee); encouraging interstate trade and communications; and—above all—strengthening democracy: a term to inspire but one rarely, if ever, defined. The primary means for achieving these ends would be the extension of loans by the United States and others, thereby building up capital for industrial production while increasing food and raw material supplies to maximize foreign exchange—all with the aim of reversing the ‘dependency’ of ‘underdeveloped’ Latin America upon the more ‘advanced’ economies of the north Atlantic area. Kennedy's expressed fear was that Latin America, its impoverished peoples ripe for revolution, would follow the path of Cuba under the new regime of Fidel Castro. In the first part of a two‐part analysis the historical and political origins of the Alliance are traced to both US and Latin American sources, including schemes within the Organization of American States and ‘Operation Pan America’; in the second part the economic failures and the strategic successes of the Alliance during the presidencies of Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon will be evaluated as another, if varied, stage in the evolving ‘hegemonic presumption’ of the US towards its southern neighbours.