E-Books →From Development to Dictatorship Bolivia and the Alliance for Progress in the Kennedy Era

Field draws heavily on local sources to demonstrate that Bolivia's turn toward anticommunist, development-oriented dictatorship was the logical and practical culmination of the military-led modernization paradigm that provided the liberal underpinnings of Kennedy's Alliance for Progress. In the process, the book explores several underappreciated aspects of Cold War liberal internationalism: the tendency of "development" to encourage authoritarian solutions to political unrest, the connection between modernization theories and the rise of Third World armed forces, and the intimacy between USAID and CIA covert operations. At the same time, the book challenges the conventional dichotomy between ideology and strategy in international politics, and it engages with a growing literature on development as a key rubric for understanding the interconnected processes of decolonization and the Cold War.
Read more