Laurence Whitehead (Official Fellow) completed his book on
‘characterising’ Latin American, which tackles the more general
issue of how to analyse and compare the distinctive characteristics of large
world regions.  He also finalised a collective volume on
‘statecrafting’ monetary authority, extending and updating earlier
work focused on the Central Bank of Brazil.  In addition, he
neared completion of an edited volume of ‘Cuban political
exceptionalism’.  Another area of collaborative work included
participation in a series of scholarly events to mark the twentieth anniversary
of the publication of the Transitions from Authoritarian Rule
volumes.  These took place at the Wilson
Center in Washington
DC (October 2004) and at the WZB in Berlin (in December) and the Global Foundation for
Democracy in Santo Domingo
in April 2005.  In these events his role was mostly to reassess the
international dimensions of democratisation in the light of developments since
the mid-1980s.  He also continued his collaboration with Desmond King and
Francisco Gonzalez in the project on the ‘democratisation of the USA’.
All of these activities benefited from the close collaboration of Guillermo
O’Donnell (who, together with his wife Gabriela, were the category A
politics visitors in college in Hilary Term).  In June he presented
O’Donnell at an honorary degree ceremony in the Free University of
Berlin.  O’Donnell and Whitehead have just signed up with Oxford
University Press to produce an Oxford Handbook of Democratisation.

In a separate area he has also been working on US-EU co-operation in the area
of democracy promotion.  A first stage of this project was initiated at
Stanford in October 2004, and a second stage took place at CEPS in Brussels in June 2005.

He also continued his study of Bolivian politics, and undertook several
initiatives in Mexico
related to the development of an Oxford Centre of Mexican Studies.  That
Centre held one conference in college this year, on the integrity of the
Mexican electoral system (jointly with the Federal Electoral Tribunal).
It also hosted lectures by the Minister for Public Administration and the head
of the Mexican Research Council (CONACYT), together with various more standard
academic events.

As Chair of the IPSA Research Committee 13 on Comparative Democratisation he
has been involved in preparation for the 20th Congress, and as Chair of the
LASA section on EU-Latin American relations he is also working on the programme
for next year’s conference in Puerto Rico.

In college he served as Acting Chair of the Politics Group for the first half
of the year, and he stepped in for one year as Acting Warden from September 1st
2005.

Publications

‘Money and Party Politics in Modern Market Democracies’,
in Eduardo Posada-Carbó and Carlos Malamud (eds.), The Financing of
Politics: Latin American and European Perspectives.  London:
Institute for the Study of the Americas,
University of London,
2005, pp 10-30.

‘Democratization and Human Rights in the Americas.  Should the Jury
Still be Out?’, in Louise Fawcett and Monica Serrano,
[          ], pp161-184, [200 ].

‘Democratization and Social Policy’, in Thandika
Mkandawire (ed.), Social Policy in a Development Context.  Geneva, UNRISD, 2005, pp 97-115.

‘Entreprises de democratisation: le
role des acteurs externes’, Critique Internationale, 24, 109-24,
[200  ].

‘L’enracinement de la
democratie au Mexique: un rapport d’étape’, Amérique
Latine (de la Documentation Française) Edition 2005, pp 81-89.

‘Notes on Human Development, Human Rights, and Auditing the
Quality of Democracy’, in Guillermo O’Donnell, Jorge Vargas Cullell
and Osvaldo M Iazzetta (eds.), The Quality of Democracy: Theory and
Applications.  Notre
Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 2004, pp176-186.

(with Alexandra Barahona de Brito) ‘Las cumbres mundiales y sus versiones latinoamericanas:
¿Haciendo una montaña de un hormiguero?’, América
Latina Hoy, 40, 2005.