Laurence Whitehead (Official Fellow) was elected chair of Research Committee 13
(Comparative Democratization) at the Congress of the International Political
Science Association in Durban, South Africa, where he made a plenary
presentation on ‘Democratization with the Benefit of Hindsight: The
Changing International Components’, and convened a panel on the politics
of financial crises in emerging market democracies. This panel prepared the
ground for a conference on the same subject at the Fundação
Getúlio Vargas in Brazil in September 2003, and will be followed by a
workshop and publication organized by Oxford’s Centre for Brazilian
Studies next year. He also worked on ‘dysfunctional’ democracies in
South America, initially as a conference paper at the Latin American Studies
Association in Dallas (March 2003) and subsequently in Santiago de Chile in
April and Bogotá (Colombia) in September 2003. The final product will be
used as the basis for a conference and publication to be organized in association
with Uppsala University next year. Also, at the LASA
Conference he was elected chair of the research section on EU-Latin American
relations, a longstanding interest that will require his increased attention in
the coming year. In September 2003 he began a collaboration
with Claus Offe (Humboldt University, Berlin) and Andrew Arato (New School
University, New York) on political
change in Cuba
as compared to eastern Europe.

In
November 2002 President Fox of Mexico
visited Oxford
to inaugurate a ‘Centre’ for Mexican
Studies, and as the Centre’s first director Laurence Whitehead made
considerable efforts to consolidate this initiative (which has an initial
two-year time frame). The recent democratization of Mexico makes this a very timely
opportunity for him to combine his long-established interest in Mexican
politics with his comparative politics work on democratization. The new Centre
is attempting to develop six research themes (each with its own academic
co-ordinator) all of which relate to this area of work. So far the most
successful project has concerned Mexican foreign policy, and the new
opportunities and challenges that arise when one-party dominance is eliminated.
Since Mexico is hosting the
third Euro-Latin American summit in Guadalajara
in May 2004 (just after the enlargement of the European Union) this foreign
policy initiative fits nicely with the LASA research agenda as well as with the
comparative democratization agenda.

This
was also the second year of his three-year term as chair of the
university’s Area and Development Studies Committee, which involved him
in the work of the Social Science Division. The main priority here has been the
recruitment of new research staff, mostly in politics, including not only
research fellows (Modern China), but also permanent post-holders (the Nissan
Chair, the lecturer in International Political Economy, the lecturer in
Brazilian Studies, and a departmental lecturer in Russian politics). This has
been the most visible (and rewarding) aspect of broader efforts to strengthen
comparative area studies with the research and graduate teaching agenda of the
university.

Publications

‘Latin America as a Mausoleum
of Modernities’, in Luis Roniger and Carlos H Waisman (eds.), Globality
and Multiple Modernities: Comparative North American and Latin American
Perspectives. Brighton: Sussex
Academic Press, 2002.

‘The Bolivian National Revolution: A Comparison’, in
Merilee S Grindle and Pilar Domingo (eds.), Proclaiming Revolution: Bolivia in
Comparative Perspective. Cambridge, Massachussets:
David Rockefeller
Center for Latin American Studies,
Harvard University/Institute of Latin American Studies, London, 2003.

‘The Transatlantic Relationship After
Iraq’, in Lawrence S Graham and
Ryszard Stemplowski (eds.), The EU-US Co-operation. Warsaw: The Polish Institute of International
Affairs, 2003.