The purposes and methods of intra-regional comparison merit renewed scholarly attention for examining the nature, dynamics and implications of contemporary processes of change in Latin America. This paper focuses upon the purposes and methods of intra-regional comparison with specific reference to contemporary Latin America and from the disciplinary perspective of Political Science. The increasing complexity of Latin America poses new challenges for the understanding of the very notion of "region" as such. If the internal diversity of the Region along cultural, economic, social and political dimensions was recognized by informed observers in the past, by the 1980s, it has become a fundamental feature, with far- reaching implications for theoretical and empirical research.