Ciencia Nueva, journal in History and Politics

The Decline of Participatory Democracy: Determinants of Voter Abstention in Peru’s Regional Elections (2014, 2018, and 2022)

Héctor Javier Bendezú-Jiménez — 2025-10-25

Electoral abstention raises serious concerns about the health of democratic systems, as it reflects not only voter apathy but also deeper structural problems such as institutional distrust and the perception of corruption. This study analyzes the determinants of electoral abstention in Peru during the 2014, 2018, and 2022 elections. Variables considered include poverty, perceptions of regional and central government performance, corruption, the disappearance of winning political parties in the subsequent electoral cycle, and citizens’ perception that democracy does not protect their rights. Using the Generalized Panel Data Model (GDPM), the findings indicate that poverty, corruption, and institutional distrust are key factors affecting electoral participation. Furthermore, citizens’ perception that democracy fails to safeguard their rights, along with the disappearance of regional political parties, has exacerbated apathy and distrust toward the electoral process, thereby increasing abstention rates.

Student Activism in Contemporary Mexico: A Review of the Andrés Manuel López Obrador Presidency (2018–2024)

Nicolas Dip — 2025-10-25

What was the degree of involvement and prominence of student mobilizations during the presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018–2024)? What organizational forms did they adopt, and what were their most salient demands during this period? In response to these questions, the present article is organized into four sections devoted to the analysis of student protests that took place at different educational levels during López Obrador’s presidency.

The first section problematizes the various approaches to the concept of the student movement, with the aim of showing how such differentiation affects the research findings. The second section surveys the predominant perspectives in the study of student mobilizations in contemporary Mexico and, in turn, examines the main protest events that have received the most attention in the specialized literature.

The third part of the article presents the findings derived from the analysis of a systematized database of more than 300 student protest events in Mexico between 2018 and 2024. This research seeks to provide a comprehensive overview—supported by various graphics—of what occurred in the country during those six years with respect to student mobilizations, their organizational forms, their demands, and their geographical distribution. Accordingly, the final section of the paper proposes a reading of student activism based on the collected data and delves into the specific features it has adopted during López Obrador’s six-year term.

Geography, Agronomy, and the Continuity of Empires: The Birth of the Geopolitical Age According to Shellen Xiao Wu

Lucio Marinsalda Pastor — 2025-11-04

In the first volume of the Foundation Trilogy, by renowned science fiction author Isaac Asimov, the administrator of a small planetary colony receives a visit from an emissary of a nearby space power. After the customary exchanges of pleasantries, the emissary observes that the planet has vast tracts of unexploited land and asks if they have considered dividing it into states. The novel, published in the mid-20th century, may be symptomatic of deeper processes underway, as we shall see below.

The relationship between unexploited land, the formation of states, and the delimitation of borders for its use has to do with ideas about the administration of territories. This is precisely the theme explored by Wu in Birth of the Geopolitical Age: Global Frontiers and the Making of Modern China. In particular, the author asks how modern China has dealt with its territorial aspect. Wu observes that, despite significant political transformations—such as the fall of the Empire and the establishment of the People's Republic—Chinese territory did not undergo substantial territorial changes. This geographical continuity is reflected, in turn, in a continuity in how its authorities conceive of it.

Resistent Violences and the Political Nature of the Sacred

Pilar Calveiro Garrido — 2025-10-25

This article aims to demonstrate the relationship between violence and the sacred in practices of resistance. While this topic was masterfully analyzed by René Girard in the context of the State, it is examined here from a communal perspective, focusing on the case of the Autonomous Municipality of Cherán K’eri. The practices of this community reveal the deployment of defensive and resistant forms of violence in response to the devastation of the forest carried out by narco-political networks; at the same time, the political nature of the sacred and its rituals serve to reinforce and sustain communal bonds.

Translating for Decolonization (or Resistance and ‘the Sacred’)

Silvana Rabinovich — 2025-10-25

This article examines the decolonizing potential of translation through the lens of “the sacred.” Mahmud Darwish’s poem The Speech of the “Indian”, in its multilingual translation, is proposed as a decolonial horizon. Between Abya Yala and Palestine, the translation of “the sacred” emerges as a promise in the face of sacrificial modernity. Three “translation” experiences in Mexico—those of the Wixárika, Comcaac, and Yaqui peoples—together with the Arabic word nakba, are put forward as keys to a liberatory translation. In the genocidal context, the article underscores the urgency of translating today between Palestine and Latin America.

Biopolitical Violence and Resistance in Foothill Communities of the Los Ríos Region, Chile

Nastassja Mancilla Ivaca — 2025-10-25

The article analyzes biopolitical violence in the Andean foothills of the Los Ríos region in southern Chile, as well as the resistance practices of rural and Mapuche communities in the face of private property understood as the organizing axis of life. Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach and ethnographic fieldwork, it examines territorial dispossession, criminalization, and the exercise of violence by corporate actors who manage and sustain precarity. The analysis of collective memories and territorial recovery processes, through an intersectional lens, contributes to understanding the emerging conflicts and the strategies of agency deployed by the communities.

Life and Territory as Resistant Forces: Violence and Sacralities in the Colombian Pacific

Jefferson Jaramillo Marin — 2025-10-25

The Colombian Pacific constitutes a spatiality shaped by extractive cycles, port capitalism, and armed conflict. Amid various forms of violence, racism, and territorial dispossession, diverse practices of community resistance emerge that reclaim the sacralization of life and territory. Through a historical-processual analysis based on primary and secondary sources, this article examines how the resistant power of the sacred is expressed in two grassroots experiences in Buenaventura, Colombia: The Ethnic-Territorial Organization Asociación Comunidades Negras de los Terrenos Ganados al Mar and the Corporación Centro Pastoral Afrocolombiana (CEPAC). The article concludes that the sacred is not merely symbolic, but a radical form of challenging neoliberal governmentality and dynamics of accumulation by dispossession.

The Quindío Mountain and the Pereira region: two maps for the territorial history of central-western Colombia

Sebastián Martínez-Botero — 2025-10-25

The Complete Atlas of Colombian Geography, published by Francisco Javier Vergara y Velasco between 1906 and 1910, is one of the most significant milestones in national cartography in the early 20th century. Its creation was motivated both by scientific and educational interests and by the need to modernize and consolidate geographical knowledge of the country in a context marked by the devastation of the Thousand Days' War and the national reconstruction policy promoted by the government of Rafael Reyes. Vergara, a geographer, military man, and historian, had devoted much of his life to systematizing Colombia's territorial knowledge. His international prestige was recognized with the Charles Maunoir Medal from the Paris Geographical Society in 1908, demonstrating the resonance his work achieved in the Spanish-American scientific community. In this context, the Atlas became a monumental synthesis that brought together a century of cartographic efforts, from Agustín Codazzi's Corographic Commission to the surveys of boundaries, roads, and railways at the end of the 19th century.

Presentación del número

Sebastián Martínez-Botero — 2025-10-25

En América Latina asistimos a una disputa de larga duración por el sentido de la democracia, de la tierra y del territorio. Este número de Ciencia Nueva propone leer esa disputa desde los bordes donde se cruzan instituciones y comunidades, elecciones y abstenciones, Estado y pueblos, productividad y vida. Los trabajos aquí reunidos dialogan entre sí al mostrar que el poder contemporáneo se juega tanto en el campo electoral como en la propiedad del suelo, en los corredores mineros y en las pedagogías de lo sagrado, en los lenguajes de la geopolítica y en las memorias subalternas. Frente a los diferentes dispositivos de dominación extractivistas, securitarios, tecnocráticos o culturalistas, emergen prácticas de resistencia que reordenan los vínculos sociales y dan nuevos sentidos a las geografías vividas, ocupaciones y retornos al territorio, litigios por derechos, activismos estudiantiles, traducciones descolonizadoras, ritualidades que politizan la vida y la defienden.

Presentation of the dossier “Peasantry and agrarian reform in Latin America: social conflict, territory, and environment”

Alan Dutra Cardoso — 2025-10-25

Since the last century, Latin America has been the scene of increasingly fierce, bloody, and intricate disputes over control and/or access to rural property. Disputes over land ownership and use have been the driving force behind multiple and tortuous political and social confrontations. These conflicts have also shaped a peasantry that, through various expressions, has resisted, organized, and mobilized around the right to land for those who work it. In this context, this dossier is a contribution from academia to review one of the most critical chapters in the history of our continent, with the aim of insisting on a reflection that addresses one of the worst evils that have plagued postcolonial societies: inequality.

The CPT in the Sertão do São Francisco: Struggle and Resistance to Remain on the Land During the Dictatorship

Adauto Guedes Neto — 2025-10-25

We analyze the role of the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) of the Sertão do São Francisco in coordinating and defending the rights of rural communities affected by the construction of the Sobradinho Hydroelectric Plant (BA) during the military dictatorship. Based on the study of documents from the National Information Service, as well as archives from the National CPT and Juazeiro-BA, we examine the functioning of the regime’s repressive apparatus and identify the land struggle initiatives promoted through the articulation between the Diocese of Juazeiro-BA, the CPT, and the fundo de pasto communities in response to the planned violence of the dictatorial state.

Revolver, Hoe and Sweat: Agrarian Issues for the Landing Elite in Central Brazil

Gabriel de Paula — 2025-10-25

The article examines the political and ideological dispute surrounding agrarian reform in the state of Goiás (Brazil) during the 1960s. On the one hand, there were popular movements in favor of agrarian reform, as well as moderate reformist projects promoted by the state government. On the other hand, the agrarian elite of Goiás—drawing on a rhetoric grounded in the defense of private property, Christianity, the myth of the farmer as master of nature, and anti-communism—employed its political and institutional power to block the advancement of reformist models perceived as radical. We argue that, by acting as an accomplice to the 1964 civil-military coup in the country, this elite pushed the government toward an increasingly authoritarian path, thereby enabling a model of exploitation of the Cerrado and, subsequently, the Amazon.

Socio-environmental Conflicts and Non-compliance with the Framework Agreements in the Southern Peruvian Andean Mining Corridor, 2015 - 2020

Enma Tereza Huaman Chulluncuy — 2025-10-25

This study aimed to present the socio-legal foundations for the regulation of mining framework agreements in regions of the southern Andean area of Peru. Using a qualitative approach and a socio-legal and functional methodology, the study employed document analysis as its primary technique. Framework agreements hold normative value derived from a legal analysis that traces back to the sources of obligations. However, they are atypical contracts, and as such, there is no specific legislation that regulates or governs them from their inception to their implementation. In addition, these agreements are always accompanied by internal negotiation guidelines and procedures. Furthermore, the relationship between framework agreements and the socio-environmental conflicts occurring in the Mining Corridor of the Southern Peruvian Andes is legal in nature, given that the breach of certain components or pillars has led to social conflicts which are manifested through protests by the involved communities or populations.

Agrarian Reform and Peasant Movement in National-Populist Experiences

Octavio Avendaño Pavez — 2025-10-25

This article examines the agrarian reforms of Bolivia, following the 1952 revolution, and of Peru, after the military coup of 1968. Both represent two of the most significant agrarian reform processes in the continent, as they involved the expropriation of large estates and the weakening of the oligarchies. In both cases, there was also an intense mobilization of peasants and Indigenous groups, who at times came into conflict with the authorities and those in charge of administering the reform process. Through a historical-comparative analysis, the article explores the similarities and differences between both processes, as well as the central role played by the peasant movement.

The Agrarian Reform in Chile from the Perspective of the Spanish Case

Sergio Riesco Roche — 2025-10-25

The agrarian reform was a central element in the political, economic, and social modernization of both Spain and Chile. Through a comparative historical approach, this study aims to examine the main actors and key elements in both countries. In each case, the reformist process was interrupted by coups d’état that were strongly influenced by the tensions in rural areas, an essential sphere of production and labor. The heterogeneity of the peasantry, together with the growing coalition of interests among landowners, clashed with the capacity of the State.