Institutionalized Precarity in Postwar Nicaragua

Abstract

This chapter evaluates the conflicts between the US and Nicaraguan visions of political and economic development amid global post-Cold War transformation. It looks at the United States' new doctrines of sustainable development and their plans for Nicaragua as a prototypical neoliberal republic after the 1990 election brought an end to the revolutionary order. With the country's changing economic and political horizons, the transition generated local forms of adaptation to structural transformation, as elites used the Latin American model of concertación to manage local conflict in the face of US power. The chapter then uncovers the fractious nature of US power which brought new forms of intervention as dissident elements in the United States and Nicaragua rejected concertación and attempted to turn back the revolution. The chapter then examines how the United States' new forms of intervention to oversee local politics institutionalize new forms of precarity in the new post-development world.