The year 2019 marks the 25th anniversary of the birth of democratic South Africa. While many hoped that the transition from apartheid to democracy would come with improved standards of living, this aspiration remains a mirage to millions confronted with prevalent hunger. To this end, the chapter interrogates whether those who benefitted from the spoils of apartheid, their descendants, the emerging black middle-class and the state have a moral obligation to provide for those still plagued by the legacies of apartheid, the poor and food insecure. But what happens if few honour their moral responsibility and others fail? The chapter argues that in order to mobilise sufficient funds for effective food security programmes, the state needs to establish a separate tax system which allocates specific amounts to each relatively wealthy person to contribute to this end. The chapter recommends that the affluent and the state should provide more than their expected allocation, especially as there is likelihood that some might resist this proposal. Moreover, while serving as a means to the ends of the food secure, the state and the affluent community should formulate an exit strategy for the have-nots to enable the majority to become self-sufficient.

The introduction provides an overview of the history of the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance (APRA) and of its anti-imperialist project of Latin American unity. It details the contributions that the book brings forth not only to the study of the Peruvian APRA and populism, but also to the scholarship on Latin American exile, trans-American solidarity, and hemispheric critiques of empire. The introduction offers a methodology for centring the complexities of transnational solidarity work at the core of the historical analysis. Finally, it presents a summary of the book’s chapters and main arguments.

Chapter 6 studies the impacts that APRA’s engagement with transnational solidarity networks had on the evolution of its ideology, particularly that of its project of hemispheric and anti-imperialist unity. The chapter argues that Indo-América as a political project was not consolidated in the heyday of transnational exile in the 1920s. Rather, Indo-América is best understood as a form of universal appeal at which the Hayista faction arrived more definitely in the 1930s to advance a political struggle inside Peru. By that time, Apristas had all but stripped from their continental program pledges of social and moral revival for Indigenous people it had once, if briefly, comprised. Recurrent state persecution against the Peruvian APRA, the chapter shows, combined with the movement’s innovative political strategies in exile, contributed to imagining an Indo-American project that moved beyond the advocacy of social justice and the rejection of US imperialism originally at its core to focus on the defence of civil liberties and liberal democracy in Peru and the Americas.

Chapter four examines how followers’ attachments survive after the disappearance of the founder. Specifically, I argue that the symbolic narrative initially crafted by the founder helps turn these ties into a resilient political identity that shapes followers’ worldview, perpetuates the cleavage between followers and their opponents, and reaffirms their faith in the founder’s mission of transcendence. When the founder dies or can no longer physically maintain his personal connection with the followers, this narrative serves as a scripture that, like the New Testament for many Christians, upholds the founder’s identification with the movement. To illustrate this process, I turn to focus group discussions with followers of Peronism and Chavismo, who reveal how their preservation of stories and material possessions connected to the founder perpetuate their affective connections to the movement and provide an opportunity for new politicians who portray themselves as heroic reincarnations of the founder to win the followers’ loyalty.

Chapter two details existing explanations for the surprising resilience of charismatic movements rooted in the logic of routinization and presents my alternative theory of personalistic revival. First, I discuss the logic of routinization and illustrate why this theory fails to account for the persistence of Peronism and Chavismo. Specifically, I argue that routinization overstates the ephemerality of citizens’ emotional ties to the charismatic founder and minimizes the immense difficulty of transforming the founder’s authority into a depersonalized party organization. Next, I present my theory of charismatic movement revival, in which I argue that followers’ charismatic bonds can turn into a resilient, affective identity that outlives the founder. Under sporadically occurring conditions, namely the eruption of a crisis, new leaders who portray themselves as heirs of the founder have the potential to reactivate the followers’ charismatic identity, garner support, and restore the movement to political predominance. Thus, charismatic movements can survive during periods of poor leadership and reemerge in personalistic form under more favorable circumstances. This pattern generates a cycle of political volatility that perpetuates personalistic leadership and undermines party system institutionalization.