Contextualization in Political Science: A Latin American Perspective.

Abstract

Contextualization is crucial to make general theories broader because it forces us to specify the scope conditions of their applicability. The recent evolution of the discipline in its application to the study of Latin America in the US is discussed here. The spread of US Political Science due to global trends in education and the expansion of the Latin American academia during the commodity boom have furthered this process in the region, albeit in an uneven way. A more contextualized and interdisciplinary knowledge that reduces the tendency to produce ‘one-size-fits-all’ policies and acknowledge that human beings can strategically react to knowledge, thus affecting our theoretical expectations.