Dollarizing state and professional expertise: transnational processes and questions of legitimation in state transformation, 1960-2000

This article aims at analyzing the increasing importance of technopols on key positions of power in Latin-American countries. The career of these professionals, who combine technical expertise and political sensibility, are built in international markets of technical expertise centered in the United States. Their professional trajectories connect and disconnect the national professional fields according to the specific conjunctures and the local inherited structures, in a process that leads to important consequences to the development of each particular country. The article analyses the process through the detailed study of three professional fields: economics, business law and public interest law.