Klaus Meschkat is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Hanover (1975-2000). He received his doctorate from the Free University of Berlin and has been a visiting professor at New York University and the universities of Medellín, Concepción, and Cali.

Over the course of his long academic and intellectual career, he has directed extensive projects analyzing power relationships and social movements in various Latin American countries, such as Colombia’s environmental movement and the World Bank’s policies towards small farmers. From 1999 to 2007, he was co-coordinator of a German-Russian research project to develop a biographical manual of the Communist International in cooperation with the Comintern Archives in Moscow. Within the scope of this project, he deepened his research on the subject of the Stalinization of Latin American communist parties starting at the end of the 1920s.

Generally, his lines of investigation include the political sociology of developing countries, principally in Latin America; the international labor movement, post-revolutionary societies in Latin America and Africa; theories of imperialism and theories of contemporary development; and social movements in Colombia, Chile, Bolivia and Nicaragua.

Research project as CALAS fellow:

Title: Right and left Eurocentrisms and the ways to overcome them.

Abstract:

The recent “crisis” of the progressive Latin American regimes should not be understood only as the cyclical result of the abrupt fall in the prices of raw materials, but it is also necessary to analyze how strategic decisions in favor of extractivism carried out at its highest level and the inability to correct it are rooted in Latin America. This was commonly characterized as "left Eurocentrism", namely the process of taking the ideas put forward by Lenin and Trotzki, which would have direct effects on the Latin American Stalinist turn (or torsion). The consequences of the actions of International Communism will be analyzed through examples from numerous Latin American countries.

The other side of the above is found in the dependency theory, developed by Latin American Marxists as an attempt to theoretically address the structural crisis of dependent capitalism in Latin America. As a way out of the crisis, the creation of politico-military organizations, in the path of armed struggle, seemed to offer a way to defeat capitalism and develop socialism, which was carried out only in Cuba, which, in any case, it was unable to resolve its situation of isolation and became a permanent crisis.

After the failure of the guerrillas, leftist presidents in many Latin American countries came to government through free elections. The recently written Constitutions in the Andean countries combined representative democracy with the demand for an expansion of grassroots democracy, in many cases following indigenous traditions. How properly these demands were resolved will be comparatively examined from the perspective of the crisis of progressive regimes.