Eduardo Silva received his doctorate from the University of California-San Diego in 1991. Before joining the Tulane faculty he was professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, where he also served as department chair and graduate director. His research focuses on Latin American politics, and he has published extensively on the political economy of state-society relations, sustainable development with a focus on forest policy, and mass mobilization. He has conducted extensive field research in Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, and Venezuela. He also has expertise in the Andean countries and Argentina. His most recent publications include Challenging Neoliberalism in Latin America (2009). He has been a consultant to the Inter-American Development Bank, the U.S. State Department and the Center for International Forestry Research in Bangor, Indonesia.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a concatenation of diverse social movements arose unexpectedly in Latin America, culminating in massive anti-free market demonstrations. These events ushered in governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela that advocated socialization and planning, challenging the consensus over neoliberal hegemony and the weakness of movements to oppose it. Eduardo Silva offers the first comprehensive comparative account of these extraordinary events, arguing that the shift was influenced by favorable political associational space, a reformist orientation to demands, economic crisis, and mechanisms that facilitated horizontal linkages among a wide variety of social movement organizations. His analysis applies Karl Polanyi's theory of the double movement of market society to these events, predicting the dawning of an era more supportive of government intervention in the economy and society.