Sebastián Carassai
Speaker
Professor of History, Centre for Intellectual History, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes
Coups d’État in Latin America: Continuities and Ruptures from the Cold War to Yesterday
Date and Time
February 17, 2026
12:00PM - 01:30PM EST
Location
CGIS South, Room S216
No registration required to attend in person.
Coups in Latin America are often treated as Cold War artifacts. But some of the patterns that produced them are still active. Building on Coups d'État in Cold War Latin America, 1964–1982 (Cambridge, 2025), the editors extend their analysis to the present, tracing how two forces continue to reshape Latin American politics: US intervention (now morphing from military coups to economic extortion to intimidation) and the Christian right (which has shifted from defending the status quo to remaking society in its image). Contemporary cases—from Bukele’s El Salvador to Milei’s Argentina to current US pressures on Colombia and Brazil—reveal both continuities and innovations.
This event is presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
Kevin Coleman
Speaker
Associate Professor of History, University of Toronto
Steven Levitsky
Moderator
Director, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies; David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies; Professor of Government, Harvard
Bios
Sebastián Carassai, Professor of History and member of the Centre for Intellectual History at the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, is the author of The Argentine Silent Majority. Middle Classes, Politics, Violence and Memory in the Seventies (2014), and Lo que no sabemos de Malvinas. Las islas, su gente y nosotros antes de la guerra (2022), whose English version will soon be published by Cambridge University Press as Beyond the War. Argentines and Islanders in an Unknown Falklands. He is co-editor of Coups d’État in Cold War Latin America, 1964-1982 (2025).
Kevin Coleman, Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto, is the author of A Camera in the Garden of Eden (2016) and co-editor of Capitalism and the Camera (2021) and Coups d’état in Cold War Latin America (2025). Coleman directed the documentary film Stolen Photo, coproduced by Señal Colombia/RTVC, on the 1928 massacre of banana workers in Colombia. He is currently writing a book on Óscar Romero’s life and legacy.
Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times Best-Seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. He has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022). He and Lucan Way are currently working on a book on democratic resilience across the world.
Professor Levitsky has written for New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic, and he has been a columnist for La Republica (Peru) and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil).