At the Standing Group on International Relations (SGIR) 7th Pan-European International Relations Conference in Stockholm (7-9 September 2010) I presented a paper entitled ‘Producing Uneven Development: State Formation, Capital Accumulation and Industrialisation in Latin America’. The paper flipped out of the completion of my new book, Revolution and State in Modern Mexico that provides an account of state power that is both spatially sensitive and attuned to its territorial organisation across different scales in Mexico, while also giving consideration to different counter-spaces and concrete movements of contestation. In this post, I relay one key focus that appears in the book and the conference paper, which is the consolidation of capitalism under Import Substitution Industrialisation (ISI) in Mexico between 1940 and 1954 and the specific period known as stabilised development, from 1955 through to 1972. How is this linked to present concerns about capitalism in developing countries and especially those authors that claim the rise of transnational state processes today? I will address this question through a critical engagement with William Robinson’s transnational state thesis in Latin America and Global Capitalism, which claims that we have experienced the emergence of a transnational state as part of global restructuring processes.
