Using Critical Junctures to Explain Continuity: The Case of State Milk in Neoliberal C hile

This paper advances the concept of path‐prolonging critical junctures, a category used for eventful historical episodes marked by high levels of contingency that lock in path maintenance. It contributes to recent debates in comparative‐historical social science, adding a pathway of continuity that is the product of agency and activism. The analysis is grounded in the 1985 interruption of C hile's long‐standing state milk programme and argues that against a backdrop of economic, social and policy turmoil, expert and grassroots efforts combined to pressure the military regime to reverse retrenchment. The implications of this juncture help explain C hile's favourable infant malnutrition and mortality indices and the maintenance of a state‐run infant‐maternal primary healthcare network despite neoliberal reform.