From Geopolitical Periphery to Center of Global Attention: Chile’s Historical Path

The center–periphery paradigm has impacted on multiple disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. While criticized and revised for its duality, this paradigm has been most instrumental in tracing shifts in the dynamic positioning of world ‘players’, be they states, societies, or sectors thereof. This article follows it in highlighting the historical development of Chile, a society whose inception, in one of the most remote regions of the world, seemed to determine its path toward remaining a place at the ‘end of the world’. Still, by the late twentieth century, Chile attracted global attention, concern, and debate. Understanding this shift from the world’s periphery to the core of Cold War confrontation and of the neoliberal macroeconomic turn followed by the third wave of democratization enables us to trace how the global system evolved in the course of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and how that Latin American country has been paradigmatic of those momentous changes.