Manuel A. Garretón y la innovación conceptual de los enclaves de la democracia

The Latin American social and political sciences, due to their role in the geopolitics of knowledge, have placed more emphasis on the empirical verification of exogenous theoretical and conceptual formulations, than on discovering how to describe from conceptual innovation. One of the exceptions to this peripheral development was the intellectual vocation of Latin Americanists to understand the change of regime from authoritarianism to democracy, called “transitology”. In this disciplinary domain, one of the intellectual contributions to understand authoritarian locks and inheritances comes from the works of Manuel Antonio Garretón and the notion of "enclaves", which has been widely used but scarcely analyzed in epistemological and methodological terms. To do this, at first, we will analyze the genesis and itinerary in the formulation of this concept; then, we will give an account of the intellectual task to adjective the root concept and give rise to a classification around the types of enclaves; and, finally, we will observe the use and subsequent reformulation that the concept has had in Latin American political science to extend the domain of its applicability.