Fashioning Democratic Institutions from Conflict: How Mid-nineteenth Century Latin American Constitutions were Forged in Civil Wars
Natalia Sobrevilla Perea
Kellogg Visiting Fellow
Researcher, Instituto Riva Agüero, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
The civil wars that tore through Latin America at mid-century, from the War of Reform in Mexico to the toppling of Juan Manuel de Rosas in the River Plate, as well as confrontations in New Granada, and Peru, brought new constitutional arrangements that sought to install more democratic institutions, although reaction followed, and conflict continued. This
project compares these upheavals, their causes, their development, as well as the consequences they brought to try to discern patterns that can shed light on how democratic
institutions developed at this time. I argue that although the kind of institutions that existed and were being developed are not necessarily what we would consider democratic today, a better understanding of how they stemmed from conflict is needed.
Natalia Sobrevilla Perea
Natalia Sobrevilla Perea is a researcher at the Instituto Riva Agüero, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She is a historian of nineteenth-century Latin America whose research examines how wars of independence, military institutions, constitutional politics, and political culture shaped the formation of early republican states and national identities in the Andean region...
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