Sovereignty and grassroots power in Latin America. A multidimensional scenario of power: agents and constituents

Abstract

With the secularization impulse of the modernity, the State-Prince condenses a mystification of political principles and constitutes the sense of order as a materialized metaphysics instance. In Latin America, these cultural elements crystallized the conformation of National States by recurring to the idea of antecedent community and depositing the civilization mission in the ruling classes. The consolidation of network society, the transformations of the capitalism and the question related to the structures of the hierarchical exercise of authority are three axes that from the sixties reconfigure the conditions of the politics in the world. A second secularization impulse of politics undermines the pact structures of modernity. The State is diluted in the dynamic of power/counter networks; this process strengthens the civil society where the limits of public and private sphere are diluted. This paper attempts to study the current political changes, focusing on Latin America as an exploitation zone with weak democratic consolidation. While the State has been a protagonist in different processes, it still represents a simple node in the political scene. In the current new cycle of struggles, it appears various actors, agents and movements that dispute the hegemony control or open a resignification spaces for politics, and at the same time, those actors build a synchronization tests of different social times and open popular constituent scenarios. These elements are collected through registers in collective activities, civic assemblies and multi-sectorial articulations assemblies in Northern Argentina around socio-environmental problems.