The Right Against Rights: Counter-movements, Uncivil Movements, and Radical Neo-liberalism in Latin America

Right-wing mobilizations and their efforts to rollback rights in the areas of abortion, LGBT+, women, environment, and race and ethnicity, are not a new phenomenon. This talk, however, explores new dimensions of such mobilizations. By doing so, it aims to expand conceptual understandings of right-wing movements that have tended to focus on Europe and the United States. Latin America offers comparative insights into the emergence of new types of right-against-rights mobilizations: counter-movements, uncivil movements, and radical neoliberal mobilizations. It also considers how these mobilizations appropriate social movement framing and tactics to reverse the rights those movements advanced. The study examines when, why, and how the right-against-right has succeeded or failed in their endeavours. The talk draws on a forthcoming volume on The Right Against Rights: The Power of Anti-Rights Movements in 21st Century Latin America edited by Leigh A. Payne, Julia Zulver, and Simón Escoffier.

Leigh Payne is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Latin American Centre at the University of Oxford
Simón Escoffier graduated from Oxford with a DPhil in Sociology in 2016 and is currently Assistant Professor at the Institute for Sustainable Development, Universidad Autónoma de Chile
Julia Zulver graduated from Oxford with a DPhil in Sociology in 2018 and is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Instituto de Investigaciones Juridicas at the UNAM (Mexico) and Oxford School of Global and Area Studies.