Conscript Nation makes an important contribution to the literature on Bolivia and to our understanding of the armed forces' place in Latin American society. Scholars have frequently positioned Bolivia's military as a pivotal player throughout the nation's history, but its internal functioning, its transformations over time, and the importance of conscription as a form of facilitating national integration have been grossly understudied. These omissions have been detrimental to Bolivianists' understanding of the military's role in politics, state making, and nation building. Elizabeth Shesko's study provides several correctives to prevailing misconceptions about the military during the twentieth century and explores how conscription created a form of national belonging for the nation's Indigenous majority that relied on assimilationist ideas and coercion while also providing a space in which conscripted soldiers could and did contest the boundaries imposed on the citizenship offered to them.
The book is a national study of military conscription...
