During the first decade of the 21st century, Latin America experienced an intense economic growth that increased access in the school system. In this context, the paper  analyzes four different programs from Bolivia (Intercultural Community Indigenous Universities), Brazil (Quotas´ Law), Chile (Follow up and Effective Access to Higher Education Program) and Ecuador (Scholarship Program based on Quotas) aimed at improving the participation of marginalized students in the university from three different perspectives. First, conceptually, the paper analyzes the governance of these programs in terms of what are the institutional arrangements that define who is responsible for solving this source of inequality in higher education. Second, the study looks at the concepts of equality, fairness, merit, need and diversity behind the different initiatives presented, using the social justice debate. Thirdly, the paper uses the framework of analysis of different types of access programs to study the scope, components and arrangements of the policies.  The results show a high level of heterogeneity in the characteristics and focuses of the programs, which allows to deepen the discussion on the role of access to higher education in the region.

Using both quantitative and qualitative analyses, we examine the role of a college access intervention in the enrollment and persistence outcomes of low-income students in Chile modeled partially after a Texas admissions program. We find that, although students from the program have a mean cumulative GPA significantly lower than that of their peers who entered college through the regular admissions system, most program students nevertheless meet the institution's academic requirements. Qualitative evidence collected through student interviews presents some of the personal challenges and struggles that these students face when making the transition from high school to university while also highlighting the role of the program in student decisions to persist in college through the end of the first year.

The Tubu of northern Chad have long been described as ‘anarchic’, in first travellers' accounts as much as in colonial sources and the (scant) academic literature. The term ‘anarchy’, as used throughout descriptions, is of little use analytically, however, as it tends both to conflate an absence of political institutions with a general unpredictability of social relations, and to define political relations by what they are not. This article suggests that a focus on value might provide a more fruitful and less normative way of understanding Tubu imaginings of the social.

Northern Mali has been shaken by drought and conflict since the 1960s, leading to gradual redefinitions of notions of status, social hierarchy, and rights in land and people. These changes indicate a fundamental shift from genealogical to territorial visions of the world: from notions of infinite encompassment and concomitant hierarchy to conceptions of rights as derived from “indigeneity” and exclusive categories of ownership and belonging. The recent discovery of oil in the area lends further urgency to these issues, as shown here through an analysis of a pilgrimage to Arawān, north of Timbuktu, undertaken by the all‐too‐cosmopolitan descendants of a regional saint.

Since the overwhelming electoral victory of Algeria's main Islamist party, the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), in 1990 and 1991, the annulment of the elections by the Algerian army in 1992, and a decade of apparently random killings that followed throughout the country, religion has been at stake in most contemporary debates on Algeria. Algeria has thereby entered the field of larger debates within the Western world about radical Islam, the rise of religion, the rejection of “Western models,” and other expressions of the putative “clash of civilizations.” At the same time, relatively little has been said about what “Islam” actually means in the Algerian context, even by more perspicacious authors and analysts who are keen to stress the economic and social causes for the success of political Islam in Algeria (e.g., Burgat 1988; 1995; Charef 1994; Martinez 1998). This is not to say that the variety of religious practices in Algeria has attracted no attention from researchers. Rather, it means that those writers who focus on ‘local’ religion, such as Andezian (1993; 2001) and Hadibi (1999; 2002), tend to produce local accounts of the veneration of saints and pilgrimages, without referring to broader cultural dynamics and political struggles, and without attempting to link their findings in more than superficial ways to the emergence of modern Islamism.