Alejandro Peña

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Associate Professor at Torcuato Di Tella University

This article elaborates the notion of hybrid repression, understanding by this modalities of dissidence suppression that involve state and non-state actors interacting in various ways, from fully autonomous to close cooperation. It does so by proposing a framework to scrutinize repressive configurations on the basis of three analytical dimensions –...

How can the convergence of multiple cascading crises create a broader disruptive reality of ‘polycrisis’ in society? How do specific social groups and communities develop purposeful responses to the distinctive forms of insecurity and suffering generated by an enduring polycrisis? Through an exploration of multiple types of crises in a variety of g...

In this article we theorize a new organizational face of political parties that we term the ‘party-on-the-net’, defined as a set of digital partisan activist roles enabled by the affordances of digital technologies. We first explain the conceptual advantages of understanding parties’ media hybridization as an organizational face rather than as a sp...

Scholarship drawing from a wide array of perspectives including field theoretical and functional differentiation approaches has shed increasing light on the sectoral dimensions of world politics. In contrast to dominant approaches emphasizing hierarchy and power in relations between global fields, this article offers a novel interpretive framework...

The article proposes the notion of emotional attrition to capture the process through which activists working in high-risk environments may develop a lasting state of emotional exhaustion caused by protracted exposure to adversarial conditions. Combining insights from clinical psychology and the sociology of emotions, it outlines a novel framework...

The integration of Latin American countries into the global economy has historically proceeded through the export of primary commodities, a dependency that has long exposed them to developments in core industrial nations, changing terms of trade, and “resource curse” externalities. However, in the early 2000s, a new commodity boom coincided with th...

This article analyzes novel patterns of interaction between right-wing parties and protest movements during major contentious cycles in Argentina (2012–13) and Brazil (2013–16), which preceded the advent of the Cambiemos coalition in the former and the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in the latter. Drawing on a dual process-tracing strategy and a wid...

In times of crisis, governments can resort to tax rises and emergency taxation schemes to finance extraordinary needs. These schemes often generate tensions in the fiscal contract between the state and society, as they affect basic definitions regarding who is taxed, for how much, and what for. In the context of developing economies, where availabl...

Integrating insights from party politics, social movement and political communication literatures, with a qualitative discussion of hybrid party behaviours observable in different contexts and regions, the article offers an original typology of four models of partisan mobilisation and focuses on a novel possibility, the activist party. Referring to...

With the rapid rise of China and the relative decline of the United States, the topic of power transition conflicts is back in popular and scholarly attention. The discipline of International Relations offers much on why violent power transition conflicts occur, yet very few substantive treatments exist on why and how peaceful changes happen in wor...

Against current developments in the sociology of IR, from new systemic theorizations of world society to Bourdieusian approaches to the practices of IR scholars, this article claims that relevant problems remain regarding how IR theorizes its social location and reconciles the social character of the world it observes with the social character of i...

The value of transnational civil society is generally understood in terms of its positive contribution to processes of international agenda-setting, cooperation, and regulation. Within the political science and international relations literatures, civil society actors, such as NGOs, social movements, and advocacy networks, have been commonly portra...

Social movements are increasingly recognised as significant features of contemporary world politics, yet to date their treatment in international relations theory has tended to obfuscate the considerable diversity of these social formations, and the variegated interactions they may establish with state actors and different structures of world order...

This article explores the interface of protest movements and opposition parties, considering this remains conceptually under-specified. It does so by proposing a processual framework involving three mechanisms of party-movement interaction – signaling, frame-alignment, and coalition-building – at play in different phases of a contentious cycle unfo...

Relations between business, state, and civil society in Latin America are conventionally discussed in antagonistic or hierarchical terms. This article challenges this position, developing a qualitative case study tracing the activities of an informal network of Brazilian businesspersons that, over the last three decades, promoted an agenda of susta...

This article proposes two models that address the neglected relationship between protests, government countermovement strategies, and democratic politics. By contrasting centrifugal and centripetal dynamics triggered by government responses to mass protest, the models theorize the link between government counterframes and opposition politics in dem...

The concluding chapter reflects over the main contributions of the book, in relation to the diverse pathways assumed by transnational sustainability governance, the advantages (and limitations) of the proposed theoretical approach, and empirical findings concerning private regulation in Argentina and Brazil. I claim that the book makes a valuable a...

In this chapter, I situate transnational governance and diffusion processes against mainstream explanations. I challenge what I consider a pervasive Western perspectivism in conventional theoretical models and point to the limitations of technical and transcendental explanations for unravelling domestic trajectories of private regulation and accoun...

The chapter outlines the book’s overall argument, pointing to the limitations of ‘globalist’ perspectives in the governance literature whereby macro processes and explanations take precedent over developments at the domestic level, particularly when these refer to the global South. Against this, I argue that the diffusion of transnational regulatio...

The situation of sustainability governance in Argentina outlines a scenario of limited engagement by relevant actors and of low visibility in public opinion and civil society. In this chapter, I argue that this ‘indifferent’ pattern of engagement can be explained by three main features of national, political culture interfering with major semantic...

Introducing the special issue on global protest and democracy since 2011, this article surveys the key dimensions of the debate. It provides a critical overview of significant protest events in the post-2011 period and explores a range of the analytical tools that may be used to understand them, before proceeding to identify, disaggregate and draw...

Why do private governance initiatives trigger greater participation in one country than another? This article examines the domestic dimension of transnational regulation through a case study of private sustainability governance in Argentina. Drawing from theories of contentious politics, the argument poses that the resonance of transnational privat...

The chapter explores the evolution of sustainability governance from a global perspective. By tracing the modern origins of international and private programs of social, environmental, and corporate regulation, I identify the context of emergence of distinct strands of the ‘governance of the social’ through the twentieth century. These ‘cleavages’...

The chapter develops the initial examination of the engagement of Argentine and Brazilian actors with contemporary sustainability governance. By mapping participation in three case study initiatives, the UN Global Compact, the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), and the ISO 26000 Working Group, and performing a wider network analysis, I reveal that...

This book examines the interface between transnational private governance and domestic politics in South America. It explores the social and political factors that condition how ‘global’ private norms, discourses, and initiatives dealing with sustainability and CSR regulation are engaged with, hybridized, and challenged by local actors in Argentina...

The introduction of Luhmann’s System Theory to International Relations has been long overdue. In the last few years, articles by Donnelly (2012) and Buzan and Albert (2010) have started to discuss the application of the concept of differentiation to International Relations theory, and an edited book by Albert et al. (2010) has examined how systemic...

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the origins and trajectory of the Brazilian corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement in relation to political economic developments in Brazil during and prior to the 2000s. Design/methodology/approach – This paper relies on a historical political account that traces the evolution of the main actors in the...

This article analyses Brazilian involvement in private labour and environmental governance. It does so by mapping the local actors participating in three recent international initiatives—the UN Global Compact, the Global Reporting Initiative, and the ISO 26000 Working Group—and exploring the activities of a central group around the Ethos Institute...

In its assessment of the origins and early development of the World Social Forum this article challenges traditional understandings of the Forum as representing ‘globalisation from below’. By tracing the intricate relations among elements of business, civil society and the Workers' Party in the first years of the Forum, this article reveals the maj...