Post-independence trajectories, divergent and instructive.
10 topics · 9 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
History Will Absolve Me
Fidel Castro · 1953
Castro's own defence speech after the failed Moncada attack, arguing Cuba's unenforced 1940 constitution had already promised the social reforms his…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Report of the Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation
Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation · 1991
Documents killings and disappearances under Pinochet case by case, establishing that systematic state terror, not isolated abuses, defined the…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action
World Bank · 1981
Argues Sub-Saharan Africa's post-independence economic stagnation stemmed chiefly from domestic policy distortions, such as overvalued exchange rates…
+4 more at this level
9 works
Fidel Castro
Castro's own defence speech after the failed Moncada attack, arguing Cuba's unenforced 1940 constitution had already promised the social reforms his revolt sought to force into reality.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation
Documents killings and disappearances under Pinochet case by case, establishing that systematic state terror, not isolated abuses, defined the seventeen-year dictatorship.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United Nations Panel of Experts
Argues the war in the Congo was sustained financially by the systematic looting of its diamonds, coltan and timber by both foreign armies and domestic factions, making the conflict self-financing rather than merely political.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime
Documents how drug trafficking has evolved into interconnected transnational criminal networks that exploit weak states, arguing the challenge is now systemic rather than a matter of national law enforcement alone.
link checked 17 Sept 2026World Bank
Argues Sub-Saharan Africa's post-independence economic stagnation stemmed chiefly from domestic policy distortions, such as overvalued exchange rates and urban-biased pricing, rather than from external terms of trade, a claim that reoriented decades of debate over African development policy.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jeffrey D. Sachs
Argues Latin America's 1980s debt crisis required negotiated debt reduction rather than continued rescheduling, since the most heavily indebted countries had no realistic growth path large enough to outgrow debts of that size.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Claude Ake
Argues African states pursued development strategies that concentrated power and marginalised ordinary people, so both authoritarian and nominally democratic regimes alike produced development failure.
Guillermo O'Donnell
Argues many new Latin American democracies had already 'consolidated' by conventional measures like elections and constitutions, yet remained trapped in a pattern of weak rule of law and personalist executive power.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa
Records apartheid-era abuses through testimony given in exchange for conditional amnesty, arguing that establishing a shared factual account mattered more to a fragile transition than prosecution would have.
link checked 17 Sept 2026