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The following article has as objective to analyze the emergence in El Salvador of family farming and the social category family farmer. To that purpose, this article uses mainly two theoretical concepts: family farming and policy transfer. Evidence suggests that the appropriation of the social category "family farmer" in El Salvador responds to an update of formerly used concepts small producer or commercial producer. Hence, it's not possible to find technical, theoretical or methodological grounds to justify the use of family farmer as new social category in El Salvador. The adoption of family farmer comes as a result of a policy transfer enhanced by three vectors: political affinity between Brazil's and El Salvador's presidents, bureaucrat's paper and work performed by intergovernmental organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many international analysts claimed that the Brazilian protests of June 2013 were a consequence of the country's rapid economic growth over the past few years, the rise of new middle classes, the heighten of expectations on government, the increase of citizen participation and the weakness of political institutions to handle all the above-mentioned situations. This explanation relied, explicitly or implicitly, on the modernization theory of Samuel P. Huntington, despite the fact more than forty years have gone by since the first appearance of Political order in changing societies (1968) -Huntington's most famous book on the political impacts of modernization. The purpose of this paper is to question whether Huntington's causality model actually explains the Brazilian protests. In order to do this, ethnographies of the protests that pay particular attention to their causes are contrasted with the model raised by Huntington. Based on the above, the scopes and limits of the modernization theory to explain contemporary social movements are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the analysis of the Post Cold-War International Political System and the corresponding Inter-American System, as important frameworks to carry out the research of regional mediating powers, in general, and of two regional mediating powers in particular, cases in point: Brazil and Mexico. Consequently, two pictures of the states' structural positioning are constructed, a general one (in the International Political System) and an individual one (in the Inter-American System), which makes it possible for us to identify the regional mediating powers in the world and in America. This way, Brazil and Mexico are identified as States that exhibit important capabilities and play mediating roles among the world powers and the neighboring States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]