Description
Book SynopsisThe Ends of Modernization studies the relations between Nicaragua and the United States in the crucial years during and after the Cold War. David Johnson Lee charts the transformation of the ideals of modernization, national autonomy, and planned development as they gave way to human rights protection, neoliberalism, and sustainability. Using archival material, newspapers, literature, and interviews with historical actors in countries across Latin America, the United States, and Europe, Lee demonstrates how conflict between the United States and Nicaragua shaped larger international development policy and transformed the Cold War.
In Nicaragua, the backlash to modernization took the form of the Sandinista Revolution which ousted President Anastasio Somoza Debayle in July 1979. In the wake of the earlier reconstruction of Managua after the devastating 1972 earthquake and instigated by the revolutionary shift of power in the city, the Sandinista Revo
Trade Review
[Lee] focuses on internal Nicaraguan affairs, contextualizing American involvement without letting the US dominate his convincing analysis.
* Choice *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Development, Ideology, and Catastrophe in the Americas
The Alliance for Progress on the Doubtful Strait
Decentering Managua
Dis-integrating Rural Development
Pluralism, Development, and the Nicaraguan Revolution
Retracing Imperial Paths on the Mosquito Coast
Institutionalized Precarity in Postwar Nicaragua
Epilogue: Repetition, Alliance, and Protest in Contemporary Nicaragua
