The State in the Capitalist Periphery: From the Structuralist Vacuum to the Neo-Structuralist Deviations and Beyond

This chapter contains a discussion that is a product of the lack of a systematic treatment of the state by Latin American structuralism, and of the deformations to which the state was subsequently submitted to by neo-structuralism. At the same time, this discussion relates to a larger field of problems related to the limitations that World-Systems Theory, Structuralist Marxism, and the institutionalists have in order to reflect about the constitutive specificities of the peripheral statehood. Trying to overcome these limitations, this chapter analyzes the complexity of “external” (differentiated combination of geopolitics and geo-economics of the center with the periphery) and “internal” (specificities of the social civil societies and their conflicts) factors that act in the conformation of the structures and implicative forms of the peripheral states, offering a suggestive way to explain the differentiated development paths followed by Latin America and East Asia particularly since the second half of the twentieth century.