The landslide election of Evo Morales to the Bolivian presidency in December 2005 constituted a milestone in the landlocked country's historical development. It signalled the conclusion of a long crisis that had defined, for a quarter of a century, the liberalisation of Bolivia's state and society. The outright majority enjoyed by the political party Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Towards Socialism, MAS) in general elections was an unprecedented occurrence since the emergence of representative democracy in 1978. It endowed Evo Morales, the first elected Latin American president explicitly identifying himself as indigenous, with an exceptional legitimacy and significant political space for the drastic reorganisation of Bolivian society. It also symbolised a popular disenchantment with, if not acute bitterness towards, the policies implemented by successive Bolivian governments since the hyperinflationary crisis that hit the country in 1985.

The Morales government's reform project, centred on a new constitutional order, land and welfare reform, the renationalisation of the hydrocarbons, telecommunications and mining sectors and the development of a so-called ‘Andean’ form of capitalism, attracted unprecedented international academic attention. Sympathetic observers hailed Morales' investiture as heralding a revolutionary change in the Bolivian state–society complex. The MAS constituted something new, something more than a political party: an inclusive, grassroots organisation unifying a wide variety of historically oppressed urban and rural social forces, which successfully sidelined the racist alternative on its flank (the indigenist Movimiento Indígena Pachakuti (Pachakuti Indigenous Movement, MIP)). Marxists, on their side, actively criticised the government's reformism, pointing to its protection of private property of the means of production, its conservation of the liberal state form and its dissociation from organised labour. Others still challenged the occultation of internal relations of domination (class, gender and race) in indigenous movements. Temporarily overshadowed by these ‘radical’ debates, orthodox commentators struggled to explain the manifest lack of ‘viability’ of liberalisation efforts in Bolivia over the preceding two decades.

It is in this context that John Crabtree and Laurence Whitehead, both respected observers of Bolivian politics, joined forces to edit Unresolved Tensions: Bolivia Past and Present seven years after their ill-timed Towards Democratic Viability: The Bolivian Experience (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), published during a cycle of escalating popular violence against Bolivia's government that eventually forced President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada to take refuge in Washington, DC. Both edited volumes featured chapters by many of the same contributors.

Unresolved Tensions was published as a new electoral cycle was beginning in Bolivia and at a moment when the wave of opposition attacks on the Morales government was reaching its culmination point. Crabtree and Whitehead's volume seeks to step back from the flow of events and capture the underlying contradictions defining ‘the nature of political conflict in Bolivia by focusing on some of the main issues that have emerged in recent years’ (p. 5): collective identity (ethnicity and regionalism), state–society relations, constitutionalism and popular mobilisation, and economic development in the context of globalisation.

The undertaking is ambitious and timely, and the delivery successful. The volume constitutes one of the most important academic works published since the election of Morales in 2005. Staging a dialectical confrontation of rival perspectives on relevant issues is especially laudable in the Bolivian context, where ideological lines are so deeply entrenched. Yet the volume is not entirely satisfactory: by purportedly offering the ‘state-of-the-art’ (‘some of the foremost analysts of the Bolivian scene’) on Bolivia's ‘key issues’, the editors confine the volume's thematic controversies to liberal pluralist approaches (with the notable exceptions of contributions by Luis Tapia and Carlos Arze), giving prominence to certain issues while sidelining others.

With a view to ‘encourag[ing] further intellectual debate and help[ing] to overcome problems by understanding their origins’ (p. 7), the volume projects itself as an impartial forum for competing interpretations of existing social contradictions: edited by ‘sympathetic but uncommitted outsiders’, it is ostensibly ‘not designed to promote any one particular standpoint’ (p. 255). Yet the debates are manifestly framed within problem-solving parameters, and the normative predispositions of the contributors hinge towards a carefully controlled reform process:

The editors address much-publicised issues such as the relationship between the Morales and Chávez governments and the revolutionary nature of the policies implemented by the Morales administration: in the first case, they appropriately reject the conservative theses of a Venezuelan ‘fifth column’ in the Bolivian state; in the second they emphasise institutional continuity, as the latest constituent process is aligned with long constitutionalist tradition in Bolivia. Yet the volume also highlights the MAS government's potential ‘to further exacerbate existing contradictions’ (p. 6), rendering the need for a restricted refoundation all the more urgent.

The orientation of the volume towards ‘constrained originality’ may explain the prioritisation of certain issues such as collective identity (five out of 13 chapters focus on ethnicity and regionalism) and the silencing of other, equally relevant issues. The volume neglects inequality-generating mechanisms beyond ethnicity, such as labour exploitation and gender relations, which arguably help to explain social instability and political change. Although Carlos Arze convincingly analyses labour reform in the ‘neoliberal era’, he does not provide up-to-date evidence on labour conflicts under Morales. Gender relations and the ways in which they intersect with class and race in social forces and the state are altogether absent from the volume.

There is little discussion of the economic policy of the Morales government (including its land and welfare reforms), its relationship with business forces and social movements or its management of labour relations. The volume also addresses Bolivia's international relations only superficially, neglecting the government's participation in macro-regional institutions (the ALBA and UNASUR are overlooked, for instance) and the government's evolving relationship with multilateral development institutions. These issues are arguably more relevant than uninspiring discussions of Bolivia's historical dependence on a single export commodity and its need for a ‘broad-based’ economic strategy, ideas well established since the 1941 Bohan mission to Bolivia. In this sense, the volume breaks little empirical ground and rather serves to reframe the scope of ‘relevant’ debates on contemporary Bolivian politics.

While most chapters are rigorous and stimulating, the volume suffers from the uneven quality of some of its contributions. The prominence given to José Luis Roca's chapter is quite remarkable, as its rearticulation of criollo separatist discourses prevalent in the eastern lowland departments demonstrates a manifest lack of scholarly rigour. The spurious evidence presented by Roca to validate the idea that regional rivalries subsume all other contradictions in Bolivia and to advocate regional autonomy is easily demolished by the more serious Rossana Barragán.

The discussion of state–society relations in Bolivia is also inadequate: on the one hand, Barrios Suvelza's (p. 133) depiction of ‘the way in which democracy has overflowed into the decision-making sphere to the detriment of a-democratic and apolitical state functions’ and the government's ‘contempt for a meritocratic state machine’ as a pathetic style of state is reminiscent of Huntington's fear of ‘excesses of democracy’. On the other, Gray's analysis of a ‘weak state’ facing a ‘strong society’, combined with the proposition that the Bolivian state is a ‘state with holes’, is intriguing but unsatisfactory. An offshoot of a UNDP study of the Bolivian state he coordinated in 2007, the article asserts that: ‘the historical form taken by a “weak state/strong society” trajectory in Bolivia helps to explain a number of features that puzzle social and political analysts and policymakers’ (p. 109). Gray neglects to define either ‘weakness’ or ‘strength’, thereby resting his analysis of ‘various forms of institutional pluralism that accommodate social pressures from above, and a society that takes on many features of de facto statehood from below’ on rather shaky grounds. He under-theorises the relationship between the state, capital and labour, and conflates the state (‘from above’) with ‘government’, ‘elite’ and ‘ruling-class’, thereby misjudging where structural power lies by equating (claims to) authority with power.

In spite of these shortcomings, the book will remain essential reading for some time to come; it stages sophisticated theoretical discussions of ethnic identity and constituent power in Bolivia, and presents some useful empirical evidence on Bolivia's foreign trade and natural resources. Crabtree's introduction to the volume and Whitehead's comparative and historical conclusions are masterful, and offer insights into how scholarship on Bolivian politics is ideologically framed.

The volume also brushes aside some of the wilder claims about the Morales' reform project. With hindsight, the Morales government has indeed been demonstrating ‘constrained originality’ in the implementation of reforms, while achieving impressive electoral success. The Bolivian electorate ratified the new Constitution by referendum in January 2009, and Evo Morales was re-elected with an astounding 64.22 per cent of the vote in the December 2009 general elections. To use the Gramscian terminology imbuing the language of Vice-President García Linera, the ratification of the new Constitution closed a cycle of a war both ‘of position’ and ‘of movement’. The firm control of both congressional houses by the MAS following the 2009 elections, buttressed by the popularity of Morales on the one hand and by unprecedented capital accumulation on the other, has temporarily stabilised the Bolivian space and crystallised a (transient) hegemonic order organised by the MAS. I hope that the editors' next volume will attempt to explain the MAS government's political survival and electoral triumphs from a greater variety of perspectives.