Economic Commission for Latin America Century Mark Selden and Alvin Y So, eds New York: Routledge, 2003; Ricklefs, M C A History of Modern Indonesia: c 1300 to the Present 2nd ed Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993 Patit Paban Mishra Ebadi, Shirin (1947– ) Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi is a democracy and human rights activist and a lawyer She was born in northwestern Iran to a Shi’i Muslim family in 1947 and studied law at Tehran University In 1975 she became the first woman judge in Iran and was appointed president of the Tehran City Court Following the Islamic revolution in 1979, all female judges, including Ebadi, were removed from the bench and given clerical duties Ebadi quit in protest and wrote books and articles on human rights, particularly on the rights of children and women, for Iranian journals After many years of struggle, in 1992, Ebadi won her lawyer’s license and opened her own practice She is known for taking cases at the national level, defending liberal and dissident figures In 2000 she was arrested and imprisoned for “disturbing public opinion” and was given a suspended jail sentence and barred from practicing law (the restriction was later removed) She campaigns for strengthening the legal rights of women and children, advocating a progressive version of Islam Her legal defense in controversial cases, pro-reform stance, and outspoken opinions have caused the conservative clerics in Iran to oppose her openly In 2003 Ebadi was the first Muslim woman and Iranian recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to promote democracy and human rights both domestically and abroad She teaches law at Tehran University, writes books and articles, and runs her own private legal practice Her books include The Rights of the Child (1993), Tradition and Modernity (1995), The Rights of Women (2002), and Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope (2006) See also Iran, contemporary; Iranian revolution Further reading: Frängsmyr, Tore, ed Les Prix Nobel The Nobel Prizes 2003 Stockholm: Nobel Foundation, 2004; Parvis, Dr Leo Understanding Cultural Diversity in Today’s Complex World London: Lulu.com, 2007 Randa A Kayyali 131 Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) One of the world’s most influential schools of economic thought was founded by the United Nations Economic and Social Council Resolution 106(VI) on February 25, 1948, as the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA; in Spanish, Comisión Económica para América Latina, or CEPAL), headquartered in Santiago, Chile Under the intellectual leadership of Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch, Brazilian economist Celso Furtado, and others, the ECLA offered an analysis of Latin American poverty and underdevelopment radically at odds with the dominant and neoclassical “modernization” theory espoused by most economists in the industrial world Building on the work of world-systems analysis, the ECLA pioneered an approach to understanding the causes of Latin American poverty commonly called the “dependency school” (dependencia) in which the creation of poverty and economic backwardness, manifested in “underdevelopment,” was interpreted as an active historical process, caused by specific and historically derived international economic and political structures, as conveyed in the phrase, “the development of underdevelopment.” This approach was then appropriated by scholars working in other contexts, especially Asia and Africa, as epitomized in the title of Guyanese historian Walter Rodney’s landmark book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) Since the 1950s, the theoretical models and policy prescriptions of the ECLA have proven highly influential, sparking heated and ongoing debates among scholars From its foundation the ECLA rejected the paradigm proposed in the neoclassical, Keynesian, modernization school, which posited “stages of growth” resulting from the transformation of “traditional” economies into “modern” economies, a perspective epitomized in U.S economist Walter W Rostow’s book The Stages of Economic Growth (1960) Instead, the model formulated by the ECLA posited a global economy divided into “center” and “periphery,” with the fruits of production actively siphoned or drained from “peripheral” economies based on primary export products (including Latin America) to the “center” (the advanced industrial economies of Europe and the United States) Based on this model, in the 1960s ECLA policy prescriptions centered on the promotion of domestic industries through “import substitution industrialization” (ISI), diversification of production, land reform, more equitable distribution of income and productive resources, debt relief, and increased state intervention to