In this research I explore artivist performance proposals that lead to an analysis of the spectator position intrinsic to the spectatorial, as a construction linked to colonial discourses of otherness. This investigation presents the encountering processes of the transnational troupe of La Pocha Nostra and the Puerto Rican persona of Freddie Mercado with their respective spectators, where local-global constructs of coloniality become unveiled, made and unmade spectacle through their re-reproduction of otherness. Side by side with performance art-life, I explore the deconstruction and de-linking possibilities of the spectatorial taking the work of these artists to build and develop the dilemmas and alternatives presented. From these complex hyper-othering performance practices I research the social implications on the spectatorial at a local and global level. The artistic proposals discussed are focused under the decolonial lens and researched as practices that make possible the co-creation of decolonial relationalities. I focus in the trans-possibility these ‘other’ encounters produce and are produced by. This work inserts the issue of the spectator within broader social concerns and it is under this umbrella that the ‘question’ of the Other arises within the mechanisms of the modern spectacle. These artistic practices exert diverse tactics that directly imply the figure of the spectator within this social configuration.

This thesis examines sketched portraits of Amerindian peoples created by the English artist Edward Goodall during the 1841-1844 Boundary Survey of British Guiana, now Guyana, which was carried out by the German scientific explorer, Robert Schomburgk. The portraits formed part of a larger body of over 250 drawn and watercolour works labelled as Sketches in British Guiana, and carried out by Goodall in his role as official expedition illustrator. These sketches captured a wide range of geographical subjects, from botany, topography and zoology, to hydrography, geology and historical scenes of the expedition itself, in addition to the ethnographic representations upon which this thesis focuses, and which dominate the body in terms of their numbers and interest. The sketches were carried out in relation to the cartographic and geographical mapping and documenting of the Guayana territory and its peoples by Schomburgk as he moved across the disputed border regions between British Guiana and its neighbouring colonial states, Brazil, Venezuela and Surinam. Focusing on the works as a manifestation of the different subjective forces and ideologies at play within this colonial enterprise, I argue the portraits and Sketches more generally, exemplify art’s cooption as a tool of colonial reconnaissance, expansion and domination during the mid-nineteenth century, playing a key role in visualising the geographical colonization that Schomburgk’s Boundary Survey represented, capturing disputed inhabitants and their locales as they were inscribed onto British colonial maps, and substantiating British imperial claims over them. In essence, through Goodall’s work, Schomburgk sought to cultivate and performatively demonstrate knowledge of and control over Amerindians through their representation, which paralleled the way the Guayana landscape was brought into British guardianship, all under the aegis of Christian humanitarianism, scientific advance and national-imperial prestige.

Since the 1960s, the inhabitants of the British Overseas Territory of Bermuda have serially considered and rejected becoming a sovereign nation. This thesis investigates the extent to which the positions taken by politicians and social commentators, who are involved in the debates concerning independence, are informed by their lived experiences and understandings of the island’s past. Grounded in an analysis of the island’s past, this thesis also investigates how Bermudians have historically defined belonging in the political sphere and public spaces according to ‘race’ and class and how this affects the way in which they interact with each other and regard their relationship with the United Kingdom. The study critically engages with postcolonial theory and asks what the existence of this 21st century colony says about the processes of colonialism and post-colonialism. It also considers how this study fits with other research concerning other remaining Overseas Territories to show the value of conducting in-depth studies of specific societies. By surveying archival documents and conducting interviews a fuller understanding of the political and social development of this island is gained, as viewed by colonial administrators, local government officials, and those who publicly challenged the norms that allowed for social and political inequality on the island. These methods are used to engage with questions of how ideas of self and nation were shaped by segregationist formal education and how this was either reinforced or challenged by what was taught around the kitchen table and in the wider society. It explores how Trade Unionist and the fledgling Progressive Labour Party (PLP) saw a move to independence as part of a wider aim to rectify social injustices. The continuity and change in the debate is then reviewed to see how and the extent to which changes both internally and externally interact with narratives of the past to inform how those involved in the debate imagine the island’s future.

This dissertation is concerned with a road in the Colombian region of Putumayo. The history of this road spans from the mid nineteenth century up to the present, and encompasses a wide range of characters and events, from nineteenth and twentieth century statesmen and missionaries’ ambitious colonization projects to ongoing peasant land conflicts regarding the road’s future. Together, these characters and events could be conceived or read as many different fragments and voices, past and present, of the same story. My main aim, however, is not to assemble these voices and fragments into a single narrative of the road, as much as to place them in the broader historical geography of state and frontier. I focus primarily on the multiple dialectical entanglements, conflicts, and encounters through which the state and the frontier have been discursively and materially constructed in this specific region. In doing so, I will argue that this historical geography of state and frontier has been primarily shaped by a relation of “inclusive exclusion”, or a relation where the assimilation or incorporation of the frontier to the spatial and political order of the state has historically depended on its exclusion from the imaginary order of the nation. Through a historical and ethnographical approach to the road, I emphasize the rhetorical and physical violence embedded in this relation, as well as the everyday practices through which this relation has been challenged and subverted in time and through space.

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This document deconstructs the issue of forced displacement in Colombia, focusing on the period 1992 – 2004, and has two main methodological features. The first is its interdisciplinary approach, which is both sociological and economic. The second is its multilevel orientation, which aims to tackle forced displacement in Colombia on the individual, community and aggregate levels. Given the lack of interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to forced migration, I propose a new one, based on bounded rationality from economic theory and using Castles (2003) and Richmond (1988) for the sociology of forced migration. In order to properly characterise the concept of forced displacement as one of the many modalities of migration, my literature review expands on the thesis’ remit, both in time and scope, including studies of internal migration in Colombia, between 1960 and 2004. The review reveals some interesting lacunas and regularities in the study of forced migration in Colombia: the lack of interdisciplinary studies, the lack of consensus about the real dimension of forced displacement in Colombia - as a consequence of the divergent and hence unreliable nature of current statistics - the historic role of violence for flows of migration in Colombia, the importance of land appropriation and illegal economic activities as catalysts for the decision to migrate, and the specific profiles of gender and ethnic backgrounds. These issues are addressed in three chapters: one concentrates on deconstructing the different statistics available for forced displacement in Colombia, the systems devoted to collect them and the subjective reasons that may explain the differences between them: another evaluates the recurrence of specific patterns of ethnic background and gender among a displaced community and the third evaluates he lack of social cohesion as anomie, through applying the scale of Srole (1956) as used by Lipman and Havens (1965) in their study of the anomie among displaced people in Colombia.

This thesis focuses upon the cacicazgo of Gabriel Barrios Cabrera, in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico during the 1920s. It seeks to analysis the extent to which previously identified trends in post-revolutionary regional politics can be applied to this isolated mountainous region. Conclusions are based upon evidence obtained from national, state, municipal, and private archives in Mexico. In addition, a programme of oral history was conducted within the Sierra de Puebla. The study is divided into six main components, each representing a significant aspect of Barrios' cacicazgo. These comprise: local historical precedents of Indian leadership and co-operation with non-Indian politicians; the range of responsibilities and opportunities that Barrios enjoyed in his pivotal role as a federal military officer under Carrancista and Sonorense administrations; the nature of his grass-roots support, his use of cuerpos voluntarios and patronage of municipal officials; Barrios' political affiliations beyond the Sierra and his struggle for political supremacy within the Sierra; the nature and motives of the cacique's regional development initiatives, and an analysis of the contradiction of his apparent pro-campesino, yet anti-agrarian, stance; a case study of the district of Zacapoaxtla, which demonstrates the importance of local factionalism and portrays the practical application of the Barrios cacicazgo at the most local level. After identifying the causes of Barrios' fall from grace in 1930, the thesis concludes by arguing that caciquismo in the Sierra de Puebla was essentially different from models of regional power-broking found elsewhere in postrevolutionary Mexico. While similarities existed, Barrios' style of leadership displayed more of a consistency with local conditions and precedents than any broader ideological tendencies. Continued research at the local level is essential if we are to obtain a clearer understanding of the diversity of experiences endured by Mexicans in the aftermath of revolution.

The thesis compares Argentine and Australian fiscal systems from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. It uses institutionalist and endowments approaches to evaluate the importance of state credibility and taxation on long run economic development. After rapid convergence in the early twentieth century, Argentina and Australia clearly diverged in the latter twentieth century. Divergence emanated from different institutional experiences, which ultimately originated from dissimilar experiences of state credibility. State credibility is the extent to which society trusts the state to act in its interests. Fiscal institutions are a clear and comparable measure of state credibility over time as they frankly express underlying political economy. As Argentina and Australia were once similarly successful settler economies with comparable geographic prospects for development, the comparison promises to transcend geographically deterministic explanations for development. Geography primarily consists of factor endowments and location. In fact Argentina was better placed to succeed in geographic terms than Australia. Yet Australia, not Argentina, secured the status of a developed country. Australia and Argentina exemplify the relative insignificance of geography in shaping development. Divergence resulted from a failure of Argentine institutions to generate sufficient space for negotiation and compromise, and a ‘latent civil war’ was entered from the 1930s until the early 1980s. A key finding of the thesis is that divergence in fiscal institutions, especially differing capacities to embed progressive systems of direct taxation was crucial to divergence in development. This finding is based upon the discovery of new evidence and the harmonisation of fragmented time series which enable comparison over a long period of time. Argentina and Australia took different paths in the latter half of the twentieth century due to distinct institutional environments and their legacies for social consensus and development.

Within the Political Budget Cycle theory (PBC), it is well known that reelection-seeking incumbents have incentives to manipulate economic outcomes through fiscal policy. However, there is no research to asses the conditions under which manipulating taxes and spending effectively serve those interests of political survival. In our first chapter, we argue that the incentives to do so will depend on the extent to which output can be effectively affected in the short-run. Our theory suggests that politicians follow such strategy with different degrees of information, and shows why some incumbent presidents have been more successful in manipulating the fiscal policy than others using a sample of 13 Latin American countries between 1980 and 2005. Our second chapter estimates the macroeconomic effects of exogenous fiscal policy shocks with a three variable Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) model. Our sample country is Costa Rica, for which there is no literature on the topic. Using quarterly data from 1991 until 2009, we found a negative and small impact of fiscal policy on output, while a small positive of revenue. Based on these results, we decided to test the existence of an indirect tool the incumbent may still have through the regulated price industries. Our theory suggests that a regulator-agency will choose the price which maximizes the political support for the incumbent government-regulator. We provide evidence with monthly data from 1986 until 2014, from a wider regulated market: Costa Rica. We also provide insights on the effect of elections on gasoline prices (as a proxy for regulated markets) for a a panel of ten Latin American countries of annual data from 2001-2012. And we contribute to the literature by proposing a non parametric approach describing the relationship between prices in regulated markets and election timing.

Most of the thesis is devoted to studying the collapse of the Mexican peso in December 1994 using empirical methods that allow shifts in regimes, as well as a small theoretical model based on the escape clause approach. Also, we present a study of the consumption boom observed in Mexico in the period 1989-1994 to highlight the importance of taking into account structural breaks in co-integration modelling. We use a series of realignment expectations, as well as linear and non-linear methods, to look for evidence that helps to characterise the Mexican crisis. Contrary to the predictions of first-generation models of currency crises, we find that the credibility of the peso did not experience any steady deterioration before its devaluation, and there was no stable relationship between realignment expectations and economic fundamentals. By using a Markov-switching regression model, we show that realignment expectations shifted over time between regimes of relatively high and low credibility, and that these shifts were more frequent during the troubled 1994. This evidence makes it problematic to endorse explanations of the collapse of the peso based on models of speculative attacks, and suggests using the approach of second-generation models of currency crises to study the Mexican experience. The theoretical model is designed to illustrate some specific features of the Mexican experience. We argue that the substitution of peso denominated assets for dollar denominated and indexed assets in investors’ portfolios helped policymakers to resist recurrent periods of confidence crisis during 1994, but it also made it more difficult to eliminate a potential self-fulfilling devaluation. In particular, the sterilisation of reserve losses during 1994 seems to be more important in the onset of the devaluation of the peso than the increase in the stock of dollar indexed bonds. We use an index of pressure in the foreign exchange market and mean-variance Markov- switching models to study the timing and causes of the shifts of the Mexican economy between states of calm and crisis. Models with time-varying transition probabilities do not yield conclusive results. Hence, we adopt a two step approach to obtain the probability of the state of crisis at each date in the sample, and then model this series as a function of economic fundamentals and political events. We find that the reduction of the debt-output ratio and positive political events maintained the economy in the state of calm up to 1994, despite a continuous real appreciation of the peso. However, the end of the declining path of the debt-output ratio and negative political shocks produced a shift towards the state of crisis for most of 1994 that finally led to the collapse of the peso. The study of the consumption boom observed in Mexico in the period 1989-1994 illustrates that structural breaks in long run relationships can be dated and evaluated if we allow regime shifts in co-integration modelling. The available data rejects a stable co-integration relationship between consumption and income. Meanwhile, using Markov- switching models, we find that there was a marked shift in the co-integration vector after the implementation of the program for stabilisation and economic reform in December 1987. The program caused the former unitary income elasticity of consumption to increase by almost 30 per cent, but later the shift was reversed when the currency and financial crisis erupted at the end of 1994.