Latin America in Global International Relations 9780367464714, 9780367464707, 9781003028956, 9781000408621, 9781000408669

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: Latin America and the Caribbean in Global International Relations
From Non-Western International Relations Theory to GIR: Background
The Structure of the Book
2 Alternative World Orders in an Age of Globalization: Latin American Scenarios and Responses
Introduction
Latin American Responses to Alternative World Orders: Analytical and Normative Perspectives
Peace and Security: Promotion of Norms of International Law and Institutions
International Political Economy, (Under)Development, and Globalization
Developmentalism (“Desarrollismo”)
The Latin American Dependency School (“Dependencia”)
Foreign Policy Formulations and Regional Integration
The Autonomy Approach
Peripheral Realism
From the Idea of Regionalism to Post-hegemonic Regionalism and Multilateralism
Conclusions: Explaining Voices and Silences from Latin America
References
3 From Autonomy to Agency (and Back Again): Debating Latin American States as Global Norm Entrepreneurs
Introduction
Autonomy, Agency, and Structure
Autonomy
Agency
The Limits of Non-Hegemonic Agency
From Autonomy to Agency (and Back Again)
Acknowledgment
References
4 Regionalism and Political Violence: Hegemony through Transnational Social Compacts in Cold War South America
Introduction
Regional Social Compacts: Why They Matter and How They Operate?
RSC in Cold War South America
Conclusion and Future Research
References
5 Big Ideas from Small Places: Caribbean Thought for International Relations
Introduction
Acknowledging a Caribbean Intellectual Tradition
Tying the 20th-Century Caribbean Intellectual Tradition to IR Theorising
Caribbean Thought as Theory for International Political Economy
Caribbean Feminist Thought as IR Theorising
The Caribbean Challenge to Western-Centrism as an IR Theoretical Contribution
Conclusion
References
6 Unsettling Knowledges in Latin America
Introduction
Latin American IR
Thinking and Doing: Liberation Theology/Pedagogy/Methodology
Indigeneous and Afro-Descendent Relationality
Spirituality and Ancestrality
Territoriality
Embodied Knowledges
Conclusion: Unsettling IR
Acknowledgements
References
7 The Rise China and the Post-Western World in Latin America: What Is in Store?
Latin America’s Defensive Posture
The Rise of China in Latin America
Latin America in the Post-Western World
Conclusion
References
8 Latin American Feminism as a Contribution to a Global IR Agenda from the South
Introduction
Feminist Theories as an Analytical Perspective for Political Action
Western IR Approaches: What Does Latin America Have to Say
Latin American Contributions to IR Feminism: Insights from Postcolonial and Decolonial Theories
Conclusions
References
9 The Latin American School of IPE: a road from development to regionalism
Introduction
The Relevance of Development Debates in Latin American IR and IPE
Regionalism in the Latin American School of IPE
Toward a Regional Agenda: Is the Latin American IPE a Field under Construction?
References
10 Regionalism in Latin American Thought and Practice
Introduction
On Latin American Regionalism
Mercosur
ALBA
CELAC
Conclusions
Acknowledgment
References
11 From Dependency Theories to Mechanisms of Dependency: The Contribution of Latin American dependentistas to Global IR
Introduction
Latin American Dependency Research Program
Limits of the Theory
Mechanisms of Dependency: A Way Forward
Mechanisms of Dependency in Production
Mechanisms of Dependency in Finance
Mechanisms of Epistemic Dependency
Conclusions
References
12 Between ‘lo práctico’ and ‘lo posible’: International Insertion as an Innovation in Latin America’s Contribution to Global IR
Introduction
Intellectual Innovation and the Latin American IR
Conceptual History: Theory and Method
Between ‘lo práctico’ and ‘lo posible’
Where Does Insertion Come from?
The Brazilian Perspective
Latin American Contributions
The Latin American Contribution to Global IR
Conclusion
References
13 The Concept of Autonomy as an Epistemic Foundation? Many Paths, Many Turns
Introduction
Dependency and Autonomy: Content and Concept
Derivations: Costs, Emphasis on Non-confrontation, and Neo-idealistic Currents of Integration
Autonomy and Diversification
Conclusions: The Content of Autonomy and Its Epistemic Value
References
Conclusion: Taking Stock: Latin American Contributions to Global IR
Melisa Deciancio and Diana Tussie Approaching GIR from LAC
LAC IR Thinking: Order, Regionalism, Security and Development
Bringing “the others” in
Final Thoughts
References
Contributor Bios
Index
Blank Page
Blank Page
Blank Page

Citation preview

“This is a definitive book on Latin American and Caribbean theoretical contributions to the International Relations discipline. Scholars and students will find thorough accounts of the region’s intellectual debates, the strengths and weaknesses of local conceptual developments and how they dialogue with mainstream Euro-American scholarship. But, above all, it is a lucid argumentation in favor of inclusiveness and diversity in a field long dominated by the Global North.” Natalia Saltalamacchia, Professor, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) “A most comprehensive contribution to globalising and decolonising the IR discipline, making visible philosophical and empirical foundations of Latin American perspectives in international relations. Deciancio, Tussie and Acharya brought together a critical and inspiring textbook that expands the intellectual horizons of a discipline that has long been dominated by a narrow Euro-American centric framing of thinking and practising global politics. This is a must-read for all interested in more inclusive accounts of world politics and theorising international relations.” Pia Riggirozzi, Professor of Global Politics, University of Southampton “A brilliant and pathbreaking book! An absolute must for IR scholars and students from and interested in Latin America and the Global South.” Jorge A. Schiavon, Professor of International Relations, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) “Under the outstanding editorship of Melisa Deciancio, Diana Tussie, and Amitav Acharya this pioneering volume is essential reading for students and teachers of International Relations specifically with reference to Latin America, and specialists of Global International Relations. It is also a timely intervention in the fields of International Relations and Political Science at large. For anyone serious about developing more inclusive approaches in the discipline, this book will serve as a valuable example.” Amrita Narlikar, President, German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA)

LATIN AMERICA IN GLOBAL INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

Using decades of their own insight into teaching undergraduate International Relations (IR) courses, leading experts offer an introduction to IR thinking throughout history in Latin America, unfolding ideas, voices, concepts and approaches from the region that can contribute to the broader Global IR discussion. This book highlights and discusses the growing possibility of a Latin American agency, defined broadly to include both material and ideational elements, in regional and international relations, covering areas where Latin America’s contributions are especially visible and relevant, such as regionalism, international law, security management and Latin America’s relations with the outside world. This is not about exclusively “Latin American solutions to Latin American problems”, but rather about contributions in which Latin Americans define the terms for understanding the issues and set the terms for the nature and scope of outside involvement. Written with verve and clarity, Latin America in Global International Relations exposes readers to the relevance of redefining and broadening IR theory. It will serve as a guide for instructors in structuring their courses and in identifying the place of Latin America in the discipline. Amitav Acharya is a distinguished professor at the School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC. He also holds the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance since 2011. He was elected to be the president of the International Studies Association (ISA), the most recognized and influential global network of international studies scholar worldwide, for 2014–2015. As the first ISA president from outside the West, he promoted the idea of Global IR, with the goal of injecting more diversity

into the study of international relations and making it into a more dynamic and inclusive discipline and overcoming its hitherto neglect of the voices and experiences of the Global South. Melisa Deciancio is a fellow researcher in International Studies at FLACSO and a fellow of the Argentine National Scientific Council. Her research interests lie in how International Relations in Latin America has developed as an academic field and how concepts have travelled and internationalized. She has published her work in International Studies Review, Desafíos, Iberoamericana and Colombia Internacional, among others. Diana Tussie is a leading voice in Latin American IPE. Her works span a number of wide issues in the international political economy of development, global economic governance, regionalism, international trade, and the state market relations. She is Professorial Fellow of the Argentina National Scientific Council. In 2017 she was awarded the Distinguished Scholar Award of the Global South Caucus of ISA. She has been a member of the Committee for Development Policy of the United Nations.

LATIN AMERICA IN GLOBAL INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS Edited by Amitav Acharya Melisa Deciancio Diana Tussie

First published 2022 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 Taylor & Francis The right of Amitav Acharya, Melisa Deciancio & Diana Tussie to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Deciancio, Melisa, editor. | Tussie, Diana, editor. | Acharya, Amitav, editor. Title: Latin America in global international relations / edited by Melisa Deciancio, Diana Tussie, Amitav Acharya. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021005618 (print) | LCCN 2021005619 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367464714 (Hardback) | ISBN 9780367464707 (Paperback) | ISBN 9781003028956 (eBook) | ISBN 9781000408621 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781000408669 (ePub) Subjects: LCSH: Latin America—Foreign relations. | International relations—Philosophy. | International relations—Methodology. | International relations—Study and teaching (Higher)—Latin America. Classification: LCC F1415 .L35 2021 (print) | LCC F1415 (ebook) | DDC 327.8—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005618 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021005619 ISBN: 978-0-367-46471-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-46470-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-02895-6 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements xiii 1 Introduction: Latin America and the Caribbean in Global International Relations 1 Diana Tussie and Amitav Acharya From Non-Western International Relations Theory to GIR: Background 3 The Structure of the Book 5

2 Alternative World Orders in an Age of Globalization: Latin American Scenarios and Responses 11 Arie M. Kacowicz and Daniel F. Wajner Introduction 11 Latin American Responses to Alternative World Orders: Analytical and Normative Perspectives 13

Peace and Security: Promotion of Norms of International Law and Institutions 15 International Political Economy, (Under)Development, and Globalization 17

Developmentalism (“Desarrollismo”) 18 The Latin American Dependency School (“Dependencia”) 19

viii Contents

Foreign Policy Formulations and Regional Integration 20

The Autonomy Approach 20 Peripheral Realism 22 From the Idea of Regionalism to Post-hegemonic Regionalism and Multilateralism 23 Conclusions: Explaining Voices and Silences from Latin America 25 References 27

3 From Autonomy to Agency (and Back Again): Debating Latin American States as Global Norm Entrepreneurs 31 Carsten-Andreas Schulz Introduction 31 Autonomy, Agency, and Structure 33

Autonomy 33 Agency 36 The Limits of Non-Hegemonic Agency 38 From Autonomy to Agency (and Back Again) 40 Acknowledgment 42 References 43

4 Regionalism and Political Violence: Hegemony through Transnational Social Compacts in Cold War South America 49 Matias Spektor Introduction 49 Regional Social Compacts: Why They Matter and How They Operate? 52 RSC in Cold War South America 56 Conclusion and Future Research 62 References 63

5 Big Ideas from Small Places: Caribbean Thought for International Relations 67 Kristina Hinds Introduction 67 Acknowledging a Caribbean Intellectual Tradition 68 Tying the 20th-Century Caribbean Intellectual Tradition to IR Theorising 71

Contents  ix

Caribbean Thought as Theory for International Political Economy 77 Caribbean Feminist Thought as IR Theorising 79 The Caribbean Challenge to Western-Centrism as an IR Theoretical Contribution 82 Conclusion 84 References 86

6 Unsettling Knowledges in Latin America 89 Amaya Querejazu and Arlene B. Tickner Introduction 89 Latin American IR 91 Thinking and Doing: Liberation Theology/Pedagogy/Methodology 93 Indigeneous and Afro-Descendent Relationality 97

Spirituality and Ancestrality 98 Territoriality 99 Embodied Knowledges 100 Conclusion: Unsettling IR 102 Acknowledgements 104 References 105

7 The Rise China and the Post-Western World in Latin America: What Is in Store? 109 Oliver Stuenkel Latin America’s Defensive Posture 109 The Rise of China in Latin America 113 Latin America in the Post-Western World 116 Conclusion 123 References 124

8 Latin American Feminism as a Contribution to a Global IR Agenda from the South 126 Jorgelina Loza Introduction 126 Feminist Theories as an Analytical Perspective for Political Action 128

x Contents

Western IR Approaches: What Does Latin America Have to Say 130 Latin American Contributions to IR Feminism: Insights from Postcolonial and Decolonial Theories 133 Conclusions 139 References 140

9 The Latin American School of IPE: A Road from Development to Regionalism 144 Cintia Quiliconi and Renato Rivera Rhon Introduction 144 The Relevance of Development Debates in Latin American IR and IPE 146 Regionalism in the Latin American School of IPE 150 Toward a Regional Agenda: Is the Latin American IPE a Field under Construction? 157 References 158

10 Regionalism in Latin American Thought and Practice 163 Arturo Santa-Cruz Introduction 163 On Latin American Regionalism 166 Mercosur 168 ALBA 169 CELAC 171 Conclusions 173 Acknowledgment 175 References 177

11 From Dependency Theories to Mechanisms of Dependency: The Contribution of Latin American dependentistas to Global IR 182 Stefano Palestini Introduction 182 Latin American Dependency Research Program 184 Limits of the Theory 188

Contents  xi

Mechanisms of Dependency: A Way Forward 190

Mechanisms of Dependency in Production 191 Mechanisms of Dependency in Finance 192 Mechanisms of Epistemic Dependency 193 Conclusions 194 References 196

12 Between ‘lo práctico’ and ‘lo posible’: International Insertion as an Innovation in Latin America’s Contribution to Global IR 202 Fabrício H. Chagas-Bastos Introduction 202 Intellectual Innovation and the Latin American IR 203 Conceptual History: Theory and Method 205 Between ‘lo práctico’ and ‘lo posible’ 207

Where Does Insertion Come from? 208 The Brazilian Perspective 209 Latin American Contributions 210 The Latin American Contribution to Global IR 211 Conclusion 214 References 216

13 The Concept of Autonomy as an Epistemic Foundation? Many Paths, Many Turns 220 María Cecilia Míguez Introduction 220 Dependency and Autonomy: Content and Concept 222 Derivations: Costs, Emphasis on Non-confrontation, and Neo-idealistic Currents of Integration 224 Autonomy and Diversification 228 Conclusions: The Content of Autonomy and Its Epistemic Value 230 References 232

xii Contents

Conclusion: Taking Stock: Latin American Contributions to Global IR 235 Melisa Deciancio and Diana Tussie Approaching GIR from LAC 238 LAC IR Thinking: Order, Regionalism, Security and Development 241 Bringing “the others” in 245 Final Thoughts 247 References 249

Contributor Bios 253 Index 259

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project is the result of years of work and reflection on International Relations from Latin America. In 2017 we invited Amitav to the International Relations Conference at FLACSO following not only his many works on IR but especially the Global IR debate where we knew Latin America had a lot to add to. He accepted with enthusiasm and this project started to develop. In this process, the support of the IADB’s Trade and Integration Sector was fundamental to make Amitav’s presence possible in Buenos Aires. The academic debate was strengthened and enriched by the participation of colleagues from all over Latin America who came to FLACSO to reflect on Latin American contributions to Global IR. The Department of International Relations at FLACSO has been the basis and inspiration for the many debates we engaged in. This book would not have been possible without the drive of Agustina Garino, Juliana Peixoto, Jorgelina Loza, Belen Herrero, Pablo Nemiña, Bruno Dalponte and many other colleagues who encourage and share insightful reflections and debates on a daily basis at the Department. The always-present support of Cintia Quiliconi and Pia Riggirozzi was also fundamental. We would like to thank the authors of this volume, who were patient with our comments and contributed with challenging and constructive works that we are sure will be at the centre of future discussion in our field. The National Scientific and Research Council from Argentina gave us the support and freedom to conduct our research and was also a pillar of our International Relations Conferences at FLACSO. Last but not least, this volume wouldn’t have been possible without the help and support of Natalja Mortensen and Charly Baker from Routledge, who followed up our requests and worked with us for this project to materialize and be disseminated among our community. This book came to end in a particular year, in the middle of the Covid crisis, in an also particularly “global moment”.

xiv Acknowledgements

The extent and reach of the crisis and its effects became a global issue in all the areas of policy and life and forced the reflection on how experiences and approaches from all over the world matter. The “centres” are being redefined every minute and local becomes global in the blink of an eye. Sharing experiences and thoughts, and understanding differences, become today more relevant than ever. This is what this book is attempting to do within our field.

1 INTRODUCTION Latin America and the Caribbean in Global International Relations Diana Tussie and Amitav Acharya

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. Charles Dickens

In his 2014 presidential address to the International Studies Association, Amitav Acharya put forward a twofold challenge to students of International Relations (IR). The transformations playing out in our world are not merely “out there”. They also chime intimately on the way we build our knowledge. Indeed, the challenge caused by the outbreak of Covid-19 and the rise of emerging powers result in the quest for addressing forms of global governance. Moreover, global power shifts visibilize the action of the apparently powerless. Applied to Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), the theoretical model that prevailed of a defenseless object of the United States, its very own backyard where unconscionable promotion of some very nasty dictatorships flourished, has lost sway. Such shifts must necessarily be reflected in scientific decentering, the inclusion of intellectual tools that enable pluralism and inclusiveness. By highlighting these double-fold transformations, Acharya made a call to encourage a movement beyond Western centrism in the study of IR and contribute to the making of Global International Relations (GIR). GIR is a call to bring the rest in, to question the naturalness of global order and to let new canons emerge. It is a call to change the disciplinary landscape. Left unexamined, tradition is destined to cast a shadow over our minds. Eight years later, we believe that this challenge has made significant inroads building on what

2  Diana Tussie and Amitav Acharya

had been brewing in many quarters, not least in the United States. As we write these lines the United States is seen to be losing the moral high ground to lead the world and its theorizing. Let us start by offering the gist of our extensive argument. Of late, the field of IR has seen a growing awareness of, and dissatisfaction with, the narrow and Euro-American–centric framing of mainstream theories. To be sure, a minority of scholars ignores this trend and persists in the belief that the existing body of theoretical knowledge can be extended at large with some minor tinkering and without any serious rethinking of their fundamental assumptions. But most scholars have come to recognize and even demand a more genuine broadening and deepening of the existing knowledge, including its theories, methods and empirical base. Some earlier theoretical perspectives, such as constructivism, postcolonialism, critical theory or the English School, as well as newer ones, such as what has been called “non-Western” or “post-Western” IR, have encouraged the incorporation of the voices and writings from regions into the discussions and debates. The peculiar feature of LAC thought is that it is neither fully “Western” nor “non-Western”. As such, this feature provides an illustration of why we need to take up LAC thought and practice as part of the wider “GIR” movement at a time that world order is changing rapidly into what Amitav Acharya has termed the “Multiplex World”. GIR confronts faux universalism and explores “regional” sites of theory construction, paving the way for the intersection between history and concepts. Narrow Western paradigmatization that in fact applies to the concerns and activities of the powerful states in the world must be opened to multiple voices, experiences, knowledge and perspectives that live, act and thrive outside the West. This volume is thus an invitation to look at ourselves, at the narratives that we construct about our disciplinary history and our relationship to scientific knowledge. Perhaps the most interesting invitation we find throughout its pages relates to how we have constructed ourselves in interaction with our object of study and the academic community we are members of. Moving away but not necessarily at all times displacing Western theory, each of the contributors was challenged to rethink the theoretical and conceptual developments of IR in LAC over time, identifying ontologies and contributions. They were asked to inject indigenous ideas and insights from local practices. How do we theorize and what do we theorize on? Individual authors engage with these questions from a variety of perspectives that are guided by what they consider as important and indeed dominant. Against this backdrop, the volume presents LAC contributions that have relevance for the project of redefining and broadening theory. Along this path we take a broad view of what counts as theory. Our goal is not merely to establish what is unique or distinct in LAC. This is important no doubt, but what is even more important is to find ways to link them and compare them with more general theoretical trends and explanations. Moreover, the goal of the book is not to engage in bland theory-testing or to apply established concepts

Latin America and the Caribbean in GIR  3

in mainstream IR about power, institutions and ideas to a LAC context and make minor adjustments to make them fit better. The goal is rather to identify and conceptualize LAC ideas, voices, analytical tools and connections on their own terms and assess their relationship with those we find in existing theory. Knowledge production is an inherently social process rather than some kind of purely rational scientific exercise that is value- or power-neutral as feminist theories show so very vividly day by day. Critical feminist theories have offered the concept of “worlding”, in this vein, a term that stresses the fact that a situation in which we live is neither homogenized and global nor separate and local but situated at a specific place while at the same time it travels. As we write this introduction in the midst of the pandemic, we are most aware of the concept of worlding. This book especially highlights and discusses the growing possibility of LAC agency, defined broadly to include both material and ideational elements, in regional and international relations, covering areas where contributions have been especially visible and relevant, such as regionalism, security management, peripheral realism, center–periphery, insertion, autonomy or dependence to analyze relations with the broader world and manage asymmetry. This is not about exclusively “LAC solutions to LAC problems”, but rather about contributions in which the academic community defines the terms for understanding the issues and sets the terms for the nature and scope of outside involvement. At the same time, we recognize that LAC theoretical contributions should not and need not be based exclusively on claims about LAC distinctiveness or exceptionalism. In fact, the region embodies a mix of unity and diversity in its member countries. We are not here to found a new school of IR. Rather, we believe LAC voices and contributions merit global resonance and can be brought to the core of the discipline. GIR is not theory-building but a push to recognize the worldwide foundations of IR.

From Non-Western International Relations Theory to GIR: Background In a project on what they call non-Western IR theory, Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan (2007) argued that the main current theories of IR, especially realism, liberalism and, to a lesser extent, constructivism are too deeply rooted in, and beholden to, the history, intellectual tradition and agency claims of the West to accord little more than a marginal place to those of the non-Western world. This creates a “disjuncture”, whereby these supposedly universal theories fail to capture and explain the key trends and puzzles of IR in the Global North. In response, they call for the development of a new paradigm of IR theory that is more global, open, inclusive and able to capture the voice and experiences of both Western and non-Western worlds and avoid the present disjunctures between theoretical tools and the ground realities of the world

4  Diana Tussie and Amitav Acharya

beyond the West and, in the case of LAC, beyond the Euro-American–centric framework. The reasons for the underdevelopment of theory outside Europe and the US are many, including cultural, political and institutional factors. These include the politics of academic knowledge; the assumption that Western theories provide a template; the “hegemonic” status of Western knowledge production whereby the key institutions, journals and conferences are either located in or controlled by the West; the possibility that indigenous theories may exist but remain hidden from global eyes due to language and other barriers; and finally the commitment to a tradition of scholar–activist–practitioner exemplified by towering figures such as Eric Williams, C.L.R. James, Norman Girvan, Frantz Fanon, Orlando Fals Borda, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. The concept of a non-Western IR theory was met with criticism. Some would rather call the new project “post-Western”, with a more radical agenda to disavow and displace the existing “Western” IR. Others criticize the category non-Western as divisive and outmoded in view of the blurring differences between the West and the Rest. This forms the core rationale for the idea of GIR. GIR puts regions at the center of the scene, calling for the importance of conceptualizing and investigating forms and functions of regionalism in an attempt to bring non-European experiences into light. The end of North– South and East–West governing principles have led to an increasingly decentralized system, setting the stage for a new geography and the reconfiguration of political-diplomatic strategies. Regions became arenas of contestation, articulation, competence and inter-state coalition building. Regionalism speaks of and to the world even as it seeks to speak of, to and for the region. It is a concept to cover internal and external norms constantly shaping and reshaping IR. At the same time, a great deal of the theoretical debates in LAC have been mainly built on numerous approaches to regionalism, focused on the idea of gaining leverage in global affairs and improving insertion while retaining autonomy. The analytical focus on contestedness also locates the analysis within GIR that sees regionalisms and regions as purposeful, and socially constructed spaces animated through the exercise of widening agency to include resistance, evasion, side lining, normative action and local constructions of global order. Against this backdrop, the book sets out to investigate broadly how LAC fits within the scope of the idea of GIR. As part of this effort, we pay some attention to what are the reasons for LAC’s marginalization in the field and how this issue can be addressed. While this has to some extent already been studied, the new challenge is how to redress it. Using the GIR paradigm, we argue that to gain relevance for LAC, GIR needs to be more authentically grounded in history and the ideas, institutions, intellectual perspectives and practices of states and societies. To this end, our approach identifies the following as the sources of LAC contribution to theory: history and culture, thoughts

Latin America and the Caribbean in GIR  5

of revolutionary leaders, practices of statecraft, writings of contemporary IR scholars, and distinctive local and regional interaction patterns. Lived LAC realities on the ground mean that they can offer local and regional interaction patterns to inform, enrich or transform contemporary studies. Too often, LAC, as other parts of the developing world, have been the testing ground for outside concepts which have been experimental or had little durability. Not only is there, overall, a need for more embracing theories, but these also need to be more truly or holistically grounded in the lived world, LAC history and the ideas, institutions, intellectual perspectives and practices of states and societies. More embracing theories, therefore, ought to look toward taking fuller cognizance of events in the developing world, as well as to develop concepts and approaches from developing world contexts. Concepts that have local validity but do also have wider applicability to how the world works need to be tied into the disciplinary landscape. In offering LAC theoretical contributions, we recognize, consistent with the GIR concept, the aim to eschew connotations of exceptionalism. We recognize limitations of theory-building that relies exclusively on the unique historical and cultural matrix and behavior patterns of LAC, its sub-regions, nations and civil societies. Relatedly, we believe that the more embracing and hence more adequate theories must develop concepts and approaches from LAC contexts that are valid locally but have applicability to the wider world. Such theoretical progress cannot, and need not, supplant Western theories but should aim to enrich them with the voices and experiences of LAC, including its claims to agency in global and regional order. This is strengthened by our focus on an agency, again a key element of GIR that takes us beyond the marginalization narrative found in most existing contributions to the literature. The issue of agency is not only critical to addressing LAC’s marginalization in Western theory, it also helps to illustrate an approach to the study of regions found in the “regional worlds” perspective that goes beyond the traditional view of regions as either passive spheres of influence or self-contained entities to stress how regions link with the global level and contribute to world order at large. Enough has been said, we hope, to explain the common thread of the book. We can now move on to briefly expound the structure of the volume.

The Structure of the Book Arie Kacowicz and Daniel Wajner start off showing how LAC contribution interacts with debates from the Global North. The premise here is that we should engage in an intellectual dialogue across the virtual or constructed North– South academic divide. This dialogue challenges the prevailing hegemonic assumption that only Northern world order concepts have a global reach, whereas Southern inputs are minimal or non-existent. Getting rid of that hegemony, in scholarly terms, means that we have to see and understand the world from the

6  Diana Tussie and Amitav Acharya

perspective of the South in general, and Latin America in particular. The authors examine the LAC responses to alternative world orders in analytical and normative terms. They assess general attempts of theorizing in the region and from the region and show approaches to world order(s) along three issue-areas: peace, security, international law and institutions; international political economy, development and globalization; and foreign policy formulations. Carsten-Andreas Schulz, in turn, explores the strategies of state actors seeking to influence the “rules of the game”. He elaborates the concept of agency (as distinct from autonomy). Agency denotes actors’ ability to act upon and transform structural constraints, whereas autonomy is an ability to pursue foreign policy aims. The chapter then elaborates on the scope conditions of nonhegemonic agency. Schulz applies this discussion to the three crucial cases of Latin American agency: the role of delegates at the Second Hague Conference of 1907; their contributions to institutionalizing the human rights regime after WWII; and the more recent influence in the Law of the Sea. The chapter by Matias Spektor looks at the practice of regional hegemony by introducing the concept of regional social compacts—hierarchical assemblages that establish networks to bind governing elites. These points are illustrated through a regional social compact led by the United States in Cold War South America that established terror regimes. The chapter brings to the fore the manner and pervasiveness of US influence in the region. By the same token it stands apart from prevalent understandings of security regionalism as a force for good. Telling the story through this prism, we can honor one of GIR’s most valuable intellectual contributions to our field: establishing an explicit connection between the global organization of political authority in practice and its vast human consequences for people worldwide. Kristina Hinds develops further the interconnectedness of the world order to its human consequences. She takes us to the Caribbean to expose the racialized way in which the world system has been fashioned through colonization. The Caribbean is an intriguing region, being a meeting point (voluntary and involuntary) of cultures and peoples and because of its bond to Africa. The proposition that the world is ordered around racialized exclusions is a common thread that runs through Caribbean analyses. The state appears as secondary to the racialized structure based on white supremacy. This historicist approach is the pillar of the theoretical contribution that Caribbean thought makes to GIR. We can glean that power relations across the state system cannot be separated from oppressive and racialized histories, as the history of the Caribbean–European relationship exemplifies. On this note, Franz Fanon deserves a mention as a founding father of the postcolonial tradition. In the area of international political economy, Caribbean scholars have also provided systemic theorizing about the nature of underdevelopment. Pride of place is held by conceptualizations offered from Nobel Laurate Sir Arthur Lewis, such as industrialization by invitation and development with unlimited supply of labor.

Latin America and the Caribbean in GIR  7

The point here is to understand race and development are not addenda but lie at the core of GIR, an invitation to unsettling understandings of the field. The invitation to unsettling understandings is further taken by Querejazu and Tickner. They argue that GIR needs to unearth the triad of theology, pedagogy and methodology of liberation rooted in the narrative of underdevelopment, inequality and injustice. The triad cultivates an epistemological “siding with” the oppressed, akin to that propounded by Caribbean and feminist thought. The triad had a profound effect on the critical social sciences, offering an alternative toolkit for thinking and acting conceived primarily in terms of the emancipation and empowerment of oppressed groups. A second strand taken by this chapter is relational indigenous and Afro-descendent thought, key precursors of decolonial theory. These ontological claims, present in “landbased” struggles, from the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Mapuches in Argentina and Chile, or the Sin Tierra in Brazil, challenge traditional categories of space and territory. Such knowledges resonate internationally, as suggested by the Universal Declaration of Mother Earth Rights or the idea of vivir bien/buen vivir. They can be expected to acquire salience as a result of the pandemic. Stuenkel picks up on the advent of the post-Western World shaking political and economic dynamics and the academic debate in a region that has been boxed as the US sphere of influence. The term “post-Western World” here refers to a world in which the West is no longer economically and politically dominant, and where non-Western actors possess system-shaping capacity and significant agenda-setting power. It is closely related to Amitav Acharya’s concept of the “multiplex order” in which elements of the liberal order survive but where order is produced by a much larger number of actors. The multiplex or post-Western order offers strategic opportunities as well as opportunities for academia in contributing to the growing debate about how to update theory, helping us navigate a less Western-centric world. Yet there are unprecedented challenges. A key factor that limits LAC agency and increases vulnerability is a toxic combination of economic crisis and domestic political instability, which obliges governments to be cautious and to focus on domestic challenges. LAC, as much of the developing world, have been obliterated from Western theory because they are categorized as inherently unstable and hence incapable of thinking beyond the short term. Such boxing neglects the uneven development that lies at the root of instability or the long-handed great power interventions. Yet the emerging system of sticks-and-carrots, no longer centered on the United States, has induced fertile academic discussion with the potential to strengthen the construction of GIR. Loza’s chapter expands on how feminist analyses led to an epistemic turn in all social sciences. Offering a tour d’horizon, she shows that the jumpstart took place in development studies, a starting for contributions of significance. The paradigm then opened the box of gender hierarchies which do not focus exclusively on the state system. The decolonial school of thought, a major

8  Diana Tussie and Amitav Acharya

contribution from LAC that both compliments postcolonialism and supports the aspirations of GIR, indicates the conquest of America as the launching pad for the construction of modernity. The conquest gave rise to Latin America, constituted it as a region and as a political project. Thus, LAC feminism cannot be understood separately from theories that reveal the persistence of colonialism. A genuine making of GIR must by force become gender sensitive and gender inclusive. Feminisms propose tools to recognize themes, actors and actions that happen in spaces outside the West, in an attempt to overcome ethnocentrism and exclusion. Quiliconi and Rivera show how what we now call international political economy is a brand in LAC theorizing. Structuralism and theories of development exposed the center–periphery structure of the world order which provided theoretical or state-led rather than laissez faire or market-led development. Analyses of the “peripheral condition” promoted a new way of understanding IR. They showed that commodity-exporting developing countries experienced declining terms of trade over the long run, meaning that the economic gap between core and periphery would grow rather than narrow over time. Prebisch and colleagues inaugurated a structuralist approach in order to understand the peripheral condition in world politics, which in turn led to a global push to reform the international economic order. The study of LAC political and economic history fleshes out how trade and politics have been tied together at the hip. Regionalism has been a cross-cutting issue embedded in a number of discussions. Regionalism is taken upfront in the chapter by Arturo Santa-Cruz. The author shows how regionalism has been a key concept in Latin American thinking and a “dominant strategy” for political elites due to social identification. Efforts at integration move with the tide but persist through time, speaking to the value attached to thinking regionally. Regionalism follows LAC as a shadow while the shadow of the US endures as well. The integrative ethos is an important part of the contribution of LAC to the theory and practice of regionalism. The normative structure has been successfully “exported” to other regions—and to the international system as a whole. The study of extraEuropean experiences is at the core of GIR, putting a premium on the diversity of methodological and theoretical approaches. Palestini develops the specific contribution of dependency theories to GIR. Dependency theory evolves from the center–periphery toolkit, and its originality is its starting point. While theories of imperialism did not exclude the developing world as other theories of IR have, they started from the dynamics of the Global North before moving on to explain the consequences for the Global South. The Global South was at the receiving end. In contrast, dependency theory considered how the Global North posed a particular problem to the Global South, but it went further by addressing the economic, political and social problems that affected postcolonial societies when they integrated

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into global capitalism. Dependentistas put theories of imperialism upside-down and influenced research in the Global North, such as world-systems theory, the developmental state and the first studies on global commodity chains. As a seminal contribution to GIR to be stressed is the analytical stance which contends that “the international “consists of more than the big powers merely missing those chains of dependence, value extraction, cooperation and competition “out there” in which peripheries only appear when they emerge and hence gain entitlement to become objects of study. Taking up this notion, Chagas Bastos presents the concept of international insertion. The concept has heuristic value insofar as it refers to the missing piece in dependency. Insertion is about creating agency spaces. From a Northern point of view the argument that a state must be “inserted” undoubtedly sounds alien. This is not true, however, if we consider that agency with respect to the international in the South has its starting point in marginalization, and is commonly dominated by the need to expand or affect the spaces of agency in which they articulate—precisely, their insertion. The problem of managing insertion is common to all those not in privileged positions. It implies moving the focus from “emergence” or from autonomy (as opposed to dependence) to a status for agency that must be theorized from its material, ideational components but also the psychological aspects of contempt and prejudice intrinsic toward the South. Miguez’s chapter reviews the concept of autonomy which has had wide currency in foreign policy analysis, especially in the southern tip of LAC. The concept was born in the midst of the North–South debate and the push for the reform of the international economic order. Autonomy like insertion is alien in mainstream foreign policy studies. Insofar as they are given there is no need for a quest. The problematique of autonomy stemmed from a reading of center– periphery development and dependency, marked by the need to defend policy spaces. As defined by one of the founding fathers, autonomy is the maximum capacity for self-determination that can be achieved, considering the structural conditions. It depends on the capacity of elites to desire and sustain it. Autonomy was not conceived as revolutionary delinking, yet it has strong elements of contestedness. It surfs through spaces of permissibility, but it is inspired by a critical social drive, ethical questioning and open confrontation regarding inequalities in the world system. The importance of concepts such as these is their ability to travel and leave the silos to which they have been relegated by the politics of knowledge. This is what GIR broadening is about. Taken together, the chapters that make up this book represent a rich and original contribution to GIR. They raise probing questions such as: what kinds of thinking are viewed as legitimately contributing to knowledge production? And, what counts as theory? We are confident that a major strength of the book is the quality and variety of its contributors, whom we would like to thank for their commitment and their substantive input into theoretical debates. Special

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thanks must go to pioneering work from Arlene Tickner and Melisa Deciancio. This book is the result of a long-term, carefully developed debate that started with Amitav Acharya’s presidential call in 2014 and continued through a number of meetings. Ideas and concepts have been discussed with many scholars and have been presented in 2017 at the FLACSO International Relations Conference. Feedback has been encouraging, stimulated debate and prompted further discussion and adjustments to the conceptual framework and the contents. This book thus reflects the efforts, contributions and enthusiasm of a wide group of scholars over the past four years amongst which we had a chance to work side by side and develop the theoretical bulk of this project.

2 ALTERNATIVE WORLD ORDERS IN AN AGE OF GLOBALIZATION Latin American Scenarios and Responses Arie M. Kacowicz and Daniel F. Wajner

Introduction There is a long tradition in the discipline of International Relations (IR) of studying the future of international politics by imagining alternative institutional designs of world orders as objects of interests in themselves for academic and policy purposes (Hakovirta 2004, 47). In this chapter, we present the ways in which Latin American thinking on IR perceives and interprets these scenarios and responds to different world and international orders as “architectures” of the world, as well as possibilities of transcending the traditional structure of the state system. In this sense, we present a particular Latin American perspective that might address gaps in the existing IR literature, as part of the agenda of developing “Global International Relations” beyond the traditional scope of North America and Europe. At the same time, following the rationale of this volume, we aim to explain and to understand Latin American international relations not as an isolated, sui generis phenomenon, but rather as an integral and distinctive part of global politics. Hence, this chapter should be regarded as part of the goal of developing a “Global International Relations” by “opening up the neglected story of thinking about IR that took place outside the West” (Acharya and Buzan 2019, 2), in this case, the Latin American region. The discussion of alternative world orders is particularly relevant in the context of global governance as an attempt to cope with the complexities and challenges of globalization. This intellectual exercise carries very important analytical and normative implications nowadays, about 30 years after the end of the Cold War. There has not been a uniform analytical concept that can classify as the “new world order”, but actually multiple, overlapping, and contradicting

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ones. From an analytical standpoint, the concept of world order implies alternative architectural designs that include the international order of nation-states, but since they include humanity as a whole, they might transcend the mere international system and international society of states. From a normative standpoint, world order is concerned with a prescriptive vision about how the world society should look like, including an agenda of human rights, needs, and justice (see Clark 2011, 547). In philosophical, normative, and ideological terms, there is a clear gap between Liberal/optimistic scenarios and Realist/ pessimistic ones. As with many other issues in the discipline of IR, the choice of the “right” scenario remains in the eyes of the beholder. From the standpoint of the Global North, we can refer to several alternative world order scenarios, which attempt to explain the contemporary reality of international relations as follows: 1

2

3 4 5 6

7

“New Medievalism”: A world order in which individuals are governed by a number of overlapping authorities and multiple identities (the term was originally coined by Bull 1977, 264–276, though it aptly describes the contemporary reality of the post–Cold War order); “A Tale of Two Worlds”: The North–South divide and the bifurcation of the world into developed zones of peace and underdeveloped zones of conflict (see Goldgeier and McFaul 1992); A Cultural “Clash of Civilizations”, as a pessimist world order embodied by the multiplicity of cultural conflicts (see Huntington 1993); A “Coming Anarchy”: Disorder and disarray spraying from the developing world into the developed one (see Kaplan 1994); Liberal Globalism and the “End of History”: The triumph of globalization and of Liberal values (Friedman 2005; Fukuyama 1989; Ikenberry 2000); A Multilateral, Fluid, and Polycentric World of Nation-States: This is characterized by the end of U.S. hegemony, a “multiplex” world (see Acharya 2014a; Kupchan 2012). This “fluid” world (paraphrasing Bauman 2012) is characterized by an international order of globalized states that includes the dynamic forces of globalization, nationalism, and regionalism (see Clark 2011; Kacowicz 1999); A Cosmopolitan and Global Democracy, but without necessarily reaching a world government (see Falk 1999).

What have been the potential reactions, translations, and adaptations of these alternative world orders from a regional perspective, in (and into) the Global South? Some scholars have expanded the horizon of theorizing in IR to non-Western countries (see notably Acharya 2014b; Acharya and Buzan 2010, 2019; Tickner and Blaney 2013; Tickner and Waever 2009). Their prominent regional examples refer mostly to East and South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, rather than the Latin American region.

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In this chapter, we argue that there has been a rich and not-enoughemphasized literature from the Latin American region that has suggested responses, complementary and alternative scenarios to the world orders formulated in the Global North. This literature has contributed explicitly to the development of a Global International Relations. Although there has been a substantial literature that referred so far to Latin American contributions to the study of IR, we argue that there has not been much emphasis upon how this Latin American contribution interacts with the debates from the Global North about the present and future of international politics. The premise of this chapter is that we should engage in an intellectual dialogue across the virtual or imagined North–South divide. This dialogue challenges the prevailing hegemonic assumption that only world order scenarios enacted by Northern scholars, politicians, and practitioners have a global reach, whereas the Southern inputs or agencies are minimal or non-existent. Getting rid of that hegemony, in scholarly terms, means that we have to see and understand the world from the perspective of the South in general, and Latin America in particular. Thus, following the genial poem title of the Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti (2011, 213–214), we want to argue here that El Sur también existe (the South also exists). Hence, we suggest that Latin American visions and revisions of the world order are relevant beyond the realities of Latin America itself. Conversely, we also challenge the dissenting emancipatory calls for completely breaking from the “Northern hegemony” (in political and intellectual terms), or the plea for discarding the exhausted and exhausting voices from the North. Instead, we follow the golden rule’s tradition of the English school of International Relations, continuing the thread from Bull (1977) and Bull and Watson (1984), to demonstrate that the Northern scenarios of world order have a definitive impact upon different regions of the Global South, including Latin America, though they should be interpreted and re-framed in their particular regional context. In the following pages, we examine the Latin American responses and reactions to alternative world orders in analytical and normative terms. First, we assess general attempts of theorizing in the region, and from the region, about world order(s). Second, we present the different Latin American approaches to world order(s) along several issue-areas. Third, in the concluding section, we explain the relative silence and limitations of the Latin American approaches, as well as the potential dialogue between Northern scenarios and Latin American responses.

Latin American Responses to Alternative World Orders: Analytical and Normative Perspectives In Latin America, as in other regions of the Global South, we can trace different efforts of theorizing about international relations in general, with different implications regarding the validity of alternative analytical and normative world

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orders. For instance, we can refer to Arlene Tickner (2003, 2008, 2015), Jochen Kleinschmidt (2016), Lucy Taylor (2010), and Tom Long (2018) as Northern scholars and Latin American experts who have engaged in this type of intellectual exercise and introspection as related to the sociology of knowledge. This refers to the possibility of IR theorizing in the region, about the region, and beyond the region. For instance, Lucy Taylor offers a non-conventional, postcolonial perspective, by arguing that “Latin America’s position in the global order is not a ‘Third World order’, but rather an extreme manifestation of the Occident, of Europe [itself ]” (Taylor 2010, 13–14; the term “Extreme Occident” originally derives from Rouquié 1989). Lucy Taylor suggests that we should instead “Read IR through Latin America”, from the South side up, by focusing on inter-community relations, colonialism, and slavery. In contrast, José Lucero (2016) has called for the relevance of alterity, culture, and indigenous approaches to make sense of international relations in general, and security studies in particular, in the region. Conversely, Jochen Kleinschmidt (2016) argues that many Latin American scholars do not claim a separate regional academic identity, sticking instead to the paradigmatic confines of Northern IR; hence, there is no much reflection on global architectures and alternative world orders. Likewise, Tom Long (2018) emphasizes that the Latin American region has been an integral part of (and has substantially contributed to) the Liberal International Order, as we illustrate further on in this chapter. As for Latin American scholars per se, relevant intellectuals have substantially contributed to a Latin American particular thinking about world orders, as distinct scripts and prescriptive scenarios linked inherently to the Northern alternatives, but also separated from them. Since World War II until today, a partial list includes scholars and practitioners such as Amado Luiz Cervo (2012); Andrés Serbin (2016); Carlos Escudé (1997, 2016); Celso Furtado (1964); Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto (1979); Guillermo O’ Donnell (1973); Helio Jaguaribe (1979); Juan Carlos Puig (1980); Pia Riggirozzi and Diana Tussie (2012); Raúl Bernal-Meza (2016); Raúl Prebisch (1950, 1959); Roberto Russell and Juan Gabriel Tokatlian (2010); and Tullo Vigevani (2007, 2009), amongst many others. As in other regions of the world, thinking about international relations in/ from Latin America, and by extension, about the world, has been a function of political, economic, and social factors that are largely region-specific while affected by the larger context of the international system (see Tickner 2015, 83). In addition, some of their normative analyses, prescriptions, insights, and policy suggestions became alternative and complementary scenarios to the realities of international relations dictated by the Northern paramountcy. In this sense, the formulation of Latin American paradigms and blueprints has been a dialectical response to overarching world order shaped by the North since the independence of the Latin American countries until the current third decade of the 21st century. In chronological terms, that world order included the British economic

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hegemony until the turn of the 20th century; the U.S. hegemony in most of the 20th century, including the Cold War period of 1945–1989; the post–Cold War era and the unipolar moment of the 1990s; and the decline of U.S. hegemony and the rise (or return) of a multilateral order in the last decade or so. While we will focus naturally upon the most contemporary approaches and perspectives, there is a long intellectual and normative pedigree regarding the Latin American contributions, interpretations, and understandings of the world order(s) that dates back to the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. In this sense, we divide the discussion in terms of three issue-areas: (1) peace and security, as related to international law and to international institutions; (2) international political economy, development, and globalization; and (3) foreign policy formulations.

Peace and Security: Promotion of Norms of International Law and Institutions In their 200 years of independence, Latin American intellectuals, diplomats, jurists, and practitioners have vastly contributed to the promotion of norms of international law and international institutions as related to international peace and security, with implications not only to their region but to the world order as a whole. In that sense, in normative terms, Latin Americans have depicted a Grotian world order based on the paramountcy of international law and institutions. Conditions of economic underdevelopment and high political instability within the Latin American countries have led Latin American intellectuals and politicians to prioritize international law and institutions, as a way to preserve Latin American sovereignty from foreign intervention, turning to the diffusion of international law as the “weapons of the weak” while preserving Latin American cooperation and solidarity (see Deciancio and Tussie 2019, 14–15; and Schulz, Chapter 3). In contrast to other regions of the developing world, the basic social, political, and economic values of Latin America directly derive from its European tradition; hence, its norms are part of the Western Christian civilization pace Huntington’s depiction of Latin America as a different category. An entrenched culture of legalism characterizes the political and diplomatic systems of the region. In terms of international relations, this legalist culture helps us to understand the unique importance of procedural considerations and formal(istic) practices in Latin American approaches; for instance, the peaceful settlement of international conflicts. Over the course of their two centuries of political sovereignty, Latin American countries have developed a strong rejection of overt external intervention, due to the significant record of European and U.S. involvement, so they showed a remarkable sensitivity to the issue. Moreover, Latin America as a region developed a distinctive juridical tradition of embedded principles of

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national sovereignty, nonintervention, and peaceful settlement of disputes among themselves, avoiding through legal mechanisms the involvement of extra-regional powers (see Kacowicz 2005). Indeed, in Europe, the main threat to Westphalian sovereignty came from the same European states, and the resulting solution in the last 50 years has been to modify the relationship among them in a supranational direction. By contrast, in Latin America, the principle of nonintervention has traditionally been enshrined as a legal antidote against foreign intervention. Therefore, the norms of sovereignty and equality of states have been deeply rooted in the tradition of Latin American and inter-American international law, despite their inconsistency with the actual practice of powerful states, first and foremost the United States. As a corollary, the principle of nonintervention has received special attention, reflecting the Latin American resistance to unilateral acts of intervention by the European powers and the United States. This principle was clearly exposed in the Calvo Doctrine of 1896, the Drago Doctrine of 1902 (see Drago 1907), and the Estrada Doctrine of 1930. All these doctrines stressed the absolute juridical equality of states and the inviolability of sovereignty, pointing out that foreign intervention was legally invalid. In addition to the preservation of sovereignty and nonintervention, Latin American norms of peace and security in international law have been adopted in the region and “exported” and diffused to other regions of the world, including Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. First and foremost, the norm of uti possidetis, the recognition of the colonial borders as the post-colonial political borders of the new states, has fulfilled a crucial role in the peaceful settlement and management of territorial disputes and conflicts. It directly relates to the norm of territorial integrity, according to which force should not be used to alter interstate boundaries (see Goertz, Diehl, and Balas 2016). Second, norms of arms control, collective security, and confidence-building measures have been implemented in Latin America well before Europe. Likewise, the Treaty of Tlatelolco in 1967 established the first nuclear-free zone in the world, setting a precedent for other regions (see Lacovsky 2019). This regional regime has been the most important Latin American contribution to the implementation of norms of disarmament and non-proliferation in the nuclear realm (see Kacowicz 2005, 139–145). Third, norms of peaceful settlement of international disputes, convivencia (coexistence), and concertación (concert) encompass a pattern of regional cooperation that has resulted in mediation, arbitration, and diplomatic solutions short of war. Sometimes peaceful settlement was arranged through international congresses and multilateral diplomacy; more frequently, it took place through bilateral solutions with noncompulsory, ad hoc resources for the management and resolution of international disputes, such as arbitration (see Kacowicz 2005; Puig 1983). In terms of alternative world orders, the benign vision projected from Latin America to the rest of the world contradicts the scripts of a “tale of two worlds”

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(bifurcation between North and South), as well as the cultural “clash of civilizations”. Moreover, instead of promoting the “coming anarchy” from the South to the North, it seems that Latin America, at least in terms of international law and institutions, has often taught the rest of the world, including the North, relevant lessons about the “coming order”. At the same time, an international order that preserves sovereignty and nonintervention fits a multilateral and polycentric world of nation-states. Thus, Latin American thinking illustrates the ways norms travelled and are diffused, not only from the North to the South, but rather in the opposite direction, thus contributing to the expansion of global IR.

International Political Economy, (Under)Development, and Globalization Since the end of the 19th century, Latin American countries have been mainly concerned with issues of economic development and socioeconomic problems, essentially in their own domestic arenas, but also with reference to issues of international political economy, including economic globalization. This overwhelming concern has been prioritized over traditional security issues of war and peace. Thus, the central political stake, both in domestic and international terms, continues to be economic development and underdevelopment, not power or interstate security (se Muñoz 1980, 335). It is in this realm of economic development that we can clearly trace significant and original contributions of the Latin American thought and practice to the promotion of alternative world orders, in response to the Northern scripts and realities of the international economic order. Thus, the post–World War II Liberal vision of free trade, economic interdependence, and economic globalization, has been challenged, interpreted, and reformulated in the region through several theories, paradigms, and schools of thought that offered alternative scenarios, ranging from reform to revolution. This Latin American genuine thinking about development has been relevant not only for the region but also for the entire Global South and the whole world order, examining the close relationships and tensions between national processes of development and external influences and constraints. We present the different approaches and theories in a chronological and dialectical way. In the first place, developmentalism evolved as an analytical and critical assessment of the international political economy in the 1950s and 1960s, in the aftermath of World War II. Second, the dependencia (dependency) approach in the 1970s followed through, as a more radical and even revolutionary version, transcending structuralism. Third, dependency led to the Latin American school of autonomy, as depicted by Helio Jaguaribe and Juan Carlos Puig in the 1980s. Fourth, the critical reactions to the autonomy approach led to the approach of peripheral Realism as formulated by Carlos Escudé in the 1990s, during

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the unipolar moment. Finally, in the last two decades, we have witnessed the emergence of the post-hegemonic regionalism. Like Marxism (and other paradigms in international relations), these different approaches sustain both analytical and normative dimensions with respect to the current and desired regional and world orders. Moreover, they sometimes reflect the given regional and international realities and they also suggest blueprints of action how to change these realities, with an explicit normative agenda.

Developmentalism (“Desarrollismo”) As a precursor of dependency theory, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) model of economic reform and integration suggested a reformist plan of action that critically assessed the distorted structure of the international political economy in the post–World War II period, by emphasizing the need for autonomy and economic development, at the national and regional levels. The ECLAC model was elaborated by the economists Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado; it inspired the evolution of “developmentalism” (desarrollismo) and the establishment of the Inter-American Development Bank in 1959 and the Latin American Free Trade Area (LAFTA) in 1960. ECLAC argued in favor of the need for a strong, active Latin American state with an autarkic agenda to promote its economic and political autonomous agendas. Aiming to explain and understand the prevailing world order, echoing the Northern scenario of a bifurcation between North and South, Prebisch and Furtado claimed that the post–World War II global trading environment did not provide a level playing field for the developing countries. Instead, the “terms of trade” widened the gap between the rich and poor countries. In this structural framework, Latin American countries provided minerals and agricultural products (at low prices), whereas the former colonial powers and the United States exported manufactured products to the Global South, at exorbitant prices. This created asymmetrical relations and a lopsided distribution of power, in both economic and political terms, so that the countries of the Global South, and Latin America in particular, should opt for autarky at both the national and regional levels, through the adoption of policies of import substitution industrialization (ISI) and regional integration (see Furtado 1964; Prebisch 1950, 1959). Yet, the policies of ISI brought mixed results, since there were limits to the extent to which the production of automobiles, refrigerators, and television sets could promote the economic growth of the Latin American countries, ultimately leading to economic, political, and institutional crises (see O’Donnell 1973). Paradoxically, in the early 2000s, the economic bonanza that characterized many of the Latin American economies due to their primary exports to China seemed to render Prebisch’s binary North–South divide about the terms of trade rather anachronistic.

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The Latin American Dependency School (“Dependencia”) At the end of World War II, several Latin American countries seemed to be ready for industrialization and self-sustaining economic growth. Instead, they found that they had exchanged old forms of political and economic dependence for a new kind of dependency on the international capitalism of multinational corporations, what we should call nowadays “economic globalization”. Thus, the Latin American version of the dependency approach, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, emphasized the negative role and impact of international structural factors, first and foremost the U.S. influence, the role of the international financial institutions, and the transnational presence of multinational corporations for the region’s economics and politics. The dependency school built upon the argument as previously elaborated by Prebisch and his associates, but at the same time, it criticized the limitations of the ISI economic policies and the reformist model of developmentalism. In the domestic political realm, Guillermo O’Donnell (1973) convincingly showed how the “deepening” economic crisis of ISI ultimately led to the emergence of Bureaucratic–Authoritarian regimes in South America, as a hybrid military–civilian regime. According to the dependencia argument, the processes of economic globalization have led to the incorporation of the countries of the region into the global economy, even allowing for some form of “dependent development”. In this sense, Cardoso and Faletto (1979) developed an original theory of international relations with a specific analytical version of a world order that accounts for an alternative and nuanced version of North–South relations in terms of the international political economy. In their sociological and historical model, unlike the zero-sum and simplistic version of Northern versions of dependence, they examined the complex links between the dominant local and external elites, breaking the stereotypical dichotomies of the bifurcation model that separates the North from the South (see Cardoso and Faletto 1979; Deciancio and Tussie 2019, 4). As with the Marxist paradigm of International Relations, the dependency school not only offers a sophisticated analytical account of the international political economy; it also has a strong normative basis. Thus, the approach is a result of a vivid intellectual commitment to bring about radical social, political, and economic change in Latin America while rejecting the reformist modernization projects and structural reforms pointed out by ECLAC (see Tickner 2015, 76). However, like Marxism, the prognosis of the school has remained ambiguous: Was it about promoting national revolutions? Conversely, was it about delinking completely from the global economy? In prescriptive terms, the empirical practicality of the dependency school remains inconclusive. Having said that, we might argue that dependency and the reproduction of power relations have remained a central theme in the study of international relations, with relevance not just to Latin America but also to other regions of

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the Global South. Many of the arguments raised by (neo) dependency views seem relevant to assess, in a critical way, the post–Cold War and globalization era, engaging both Realism and Liberalism in normative and analytical terms. In this sense, this approach obviously challenges the Northern scripts of Liberal globalism as well as the “tale of two worlds” regarding the bifurcation into North and South, perhaps approximating a scenario of “New Medievalism”, as well as Amitav Acharya’s “multiplex” characterization, including a variegated and multiple foci of political authority.

Foreign Policy Formulations and Regional Integration In addition to legal and normative contributions for the maintenance of peace and security, as well as scholarly accounts and prescriptions in the issue-area of economic development and international political economy, the Latin American theory and praxis of international relations is particularly relevant in the formulation and implementation of foreign policy, both in the economic and security realms. In this sense, we refer to two approaches that combine development and foreign policy in different ways: autonomy and peripheral Realism. Moreover, autonomy approaches and peripheral Realism are also related to two features and strategies that have characterized the Latin American responses to the challenges of the world order: regionalism and multilateralism. In contrast to European ethnocentrism, we claim here that Latin American countries have adopted these two approaches and strategies well before their European counterparts.

The Autonomy Approach The autonomy approach, embodied in the scholarly work of Juan Carlos Puig in Argentina and of Helio Jaguaribe in Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s is considered one of the most original Latin American contributions to the theory of IR, as an offspring of the dependency approach, in conjunction with a Realist vision of the world order (see Miguez, Chapter 13). Since Latin America has had a relatively irrelevant place in the design of global governance and world order, the different strategies to enhance the autonomy of Latin American states relied on a multi-level analysis at the national, regional, and global realms: diversifying alliances in terms of foreign policy, promoting region-building, and enhancing attempts to reshape the rules of the international regimes in the global economy through formulations of a New International Economic Order (NIEO) at the global level. As Puig (1980) suggested, the transit from dependency to autonomy is enabled through the enhancing of viability and willingness, not only through material resources but mainly through the drive of self-interested elites in aspiring to self-determination and (more) autonomy (see Deciano and Tussie 2019, 2; Jaguaribe 1979; Puig 1980; Tickner 2015, 75).

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Along the lines of political Realism, Puig and Jaguaribe regarded international politics as a zero-sum game, evoking Latin American predicaments and their subaltern position in the global order, reflecting unequal power relations. According to Puig, the functioning of the international system depends on the division of labor and the international order that guides its activity. This international order includes three groups of international actors: the “supreme rule makers”; the “subaltern rule makers”; and the “takers” (Puig 1980, 141). Similarly, Jaguaribe (1979, 91–93) portrayed a world order in which different states occupy differentiated positions as a function of their self-determination and their territorial integrity. In a Janus-faced analysis of domestic and international politics, both authors stressed the possibility of enhancing the autonomy of the Latin American “takers” by simultaneously enhancing state- and nationbuilding at the local/national level, and by taking initiatives at the regional and global levels. In national terms, Puig delineated a foreign policy strategy to enlarge Argentina’s international room to maneuver through the diversification of its economic external alliances, as a form of “heterodox autonomy” (Puig 1980; see also Deciancio and Tussie 2019, 4–5). At the global level, the oil crises of 1973 and 1979 created a sense of optimism regarding the region’s potential role as a global player, leading to the Mexican and Venezuelan promotion of an NIEO at the United Nations, which ultimately failed. As with the dependency school, the autonomy approach continued to shape IR theorizing in the region into the 1990s and 2000s. As a hybrid approach, another branch of autonomous thinking adopted the principles of complex interdependence and neo-Liberal institutionalism in the scholarly work of Roberto Russell and Juan Gabriel Tokatlian as “relationist autonomous” scholars (2010). In their view, being autonomous and being dependent were not contradictory notions, since in a world of interdependence states could never be completely free from the influence of others. Despite this apparently oxymoronic logic (i.e., combining structural dependency, a normative quest for independence, and interdependence under the same intellectual roof ), the authors argued that autonomy can no longer be defined in terms of exercising power and influence; rather, it should be defined by the degree of participation in international organizations, regimes, and other institutions (Russell and Tokatlian 2010, 136– 137; see also Bernal-Meza 2016, 6–8). In a similar vein, Tulio Vigevani (2007) explains Brazilian foreign policy and the quest for autonomy in terms of three interrelated dimensions: distance, participation, and diversification. Unlike the dependency school, it is not completely clear whether the autonomy approach offers a distinctive and alternative world order, in juxtaposition to the North–South bifurcation or Liberal globalism. Whereas in Puig and Jaguaribe’s version, we find a mix of dependency and Realism, in Russell– Tokatlian’s and Vigevani’s more recent formulation, there is an hybrid context of interdependence, neo-Liberal premises, and a lingering structural reality of dependent relations. What remains a shared concern for all these scholars

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is the persistent quest for autonomy, one way or another, as a normative goal, and not just as an analytical category. In addition, the autonomy approach also emphasizes the regional integration component, as autonomy perspectives emphasize the role of the region to disengage from the hegemon and/or soft-balance it, moving from a pan-American paradigm to a Latin American (or Bolivarian) one.

Peripheral Realism In a dialectical fashion, the failure to implement the different autonomy approaches (from “heterodox” to “relational”) led to criticisms and reactions. In this context, scholars from the developing world such as Carlos Escudé (1995, 1997, 2016) and Mohammed Ayoob (2002) developed original IR theories that suggested alternative and complementary world orders, from the perspective of the South. Both scholars applied and re-interpreted basic Realist tenets in terms of “subordinated” or “peripheral” Realism, in order to explain the asymmetrical and unequal relations between the countries of the Global North and those of the Global South. In this case, the power structure of the international system has been examined from the perspective of the South, with emphasis upon its oligarchic and nondemocratic nature. According to Escudé (1995), the goal of autonomy in the shaping of Latin American foreign policies has become an end in itself, ultimately competing with other important national goals, such as economic development. In his analysis, the two major fallacies of dependency thinking and subsequent writings on autonomy (heterodox and relational) were to assume that autonomy was a prerequisite for development; and conversely, that dependency necessarily led to underdevelopment. Instead, “peripheral Realism” recognizes in analytical terms the existing division of labor between the rule-makers of the North and the rule-takers of the South, both in global and regional terms. In normative terms, Escudé advised the Latin American countries to cater to the hegemon, whether that was the United States until recently, or perhaps potentially China in the present and near future. Thus, for Escudé, autonomy should be considered as a burden and a cost, not as an advantage or a normative goal. In his view, autonomy should be reconceptualized in terms of power relations and the relative costs of a potential confrontation with the hegemonic power. With respect to the Argentine case, the adoption of an autonomous foreign policy led to its international isolation and to an unnecessary conflict with the hegemonic power. Hence, pursuing autonomy in the form of a “grand foreign policy” might be detrimental to the benefit of its own citizens (Escudé 2016). In analytical terms, scholars that emphasize foreign policy formulations, ranging from the autonomy school to peripheral Realism, echo the North– South divide in terms of the division of labor. In normative terms, they prescribe

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a course of action that would avoid the “coming anarchy” and disruption of the world order by adopting either progressive or conservative approaches that would keep the order in the international system, and it might allow the economic development of the Latin American countries by respecting the rules of the game dictated by the North.

From the Idea of Regionalism to Post-hegemonic Regionalism and Multilateralism As suggested by Melisa Deciancio, regionalism has been a central idea, school, approach, and political praxis in the development of the international relations of Latin America since the beginning of the 19th century, embodying and reflecting upon the possibilities and challenges posed by the quest for economic development and political autonomy. Regionalism has been a foreign policy resource used to achieve other state ends such as international visibility, regional stability, opposing foreign interference, gaining access to external support and markets, and maintaining and enhancing regime legitimacy (see Deciancio 2016, 94–96; Deciancio and Tussie 2019, 6–7; Jaguaribe 1979; Tussie 2009, 2018). The Latin American nations in general, and the Spanish-speaking states of South America in particular, have always sought to build upon a structure of political cooperation on the basis of their common historical, cultural, and institutional heritage. Schemes of political integration, such as Bolívar’s dream of a South American political union, or even more modest confederation schemes such as Gran Colombia (Colombia-Venezuela-Ecuador), Mexico with Central America, the small states of Central America, and Peru-Bolivia, all broke down a couple of decades after independence in the early 19th century. However, the idea of a Latin American consciousness and identity, of a regional society based on a common history, culture, and language, never disappeared and remains relevant nowadays. During the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, the Latin American nations adopted the norm of universal participation in regional organizations and integration, which later became an international norm (see Finnemore and Jurkovich 2014). Hence, Latin American and pan-American regional and transnational efforts have been pioneer, compared to Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Later on, into the 20th century, even before the creation of the first global institutions for international development in the post-war era, Latin American policymakers in the 1930s and early 1940s began striving for the creation of a regional institution aimed at promoting development (Helleiner 2014). In 1948, at the regional level, Latin America adopted its own Declaration of Human Rights, even before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was approved by the United Nations (see Sikkink 2014). As mentioned before, in the security realm, the Tlatelolco Treaty became the first agreement on

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nuclear non-proliferation negotiated within a regional multilateral framework, preceding international treaties such as the NPT (see Lacovsky 2019). In sum, regionalism has been a widespread instrument to shape the regional (and by implication, the international) order well before its adoption in Europe and other regions of the Global South. Nowadays, following the rise and decline of the “open regionalism” of the 1990s that was premised upon the principles of economic globalization, we have witnessed in Latin America the emergence of the so-called posthegemonic regionalism in the last decade, with an emphasis upon political and social dimensions, and not just economic priorities (see Riggirozzi and Tussie 2012). In normative terms, current Latin American regional constructions build upon a strong tradition of defensive multilateralism and defensive regionalism, with the quest for economic development and political autonomy returned to center stage (see Malamud and Gardini 2012, 117–118; Riggirozzi 2012; Tussie 2009). Against the current crises affecting the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), and the Boliviarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), there is a lingering gap between the normative premises, the high rhetoric of regionalism, and its modest praxis and results. As Malamud and Gardini (2012, 131) cogently suggested, a recent motto to synthesize Latin American current strategies and practices is that they “speak regional, act unilateral, and go global”. In contrast, Petersen and Schultz (2018) argue that the notion of “post-hegemonic regionalism” is a core idea that has been present ever since the late 19th century. In normative terms, we can argue that an enhanced role for Latin America in offering a sensible response to the alternative world orders designed by the North will be dependent not only on external factors to the region, such as the global distribution of power and the rules of the game. First and foremost, it is a function of the willingness and capabilities of Latin American countries to embark on a significant integration project that will increase their bargaining power vis-à-vis the rest of the world, beyond their rhetorical utterances of good Bolivarian intentions. In the last few years, different projects of Latin American integration have stalled and withdrew, if not completely disintegrated, partly due to the overlapping and contestation of different forms of regionalism (see Wajner and Roniger 2019). Thus, the region is experiencing a significant disarray and identity crisis, as epitomized in the multi-dimensional Venezuelan crisis of 2019. In terms of the formulation of foreign policy at the national level, and following the logic of heterodox autonomy as formulated by Puig in the 1980s and of “autonomy of diversification” to emphasize South–South cooperation, it is relevant to emphasize the traditional Brazilian foreign policy of multilateralism, as epitomizing a praxis of “multilateralism of reciprocity” (see Bernal-Meza

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2016; Cervo 2012; Vigevani and Cepaluni 2007, 2009). This logic is similar to that of “soft balancing”, and it expresses a tendency of diversifying foreign relations through cooperative multilateralism, the use of soft power, and the forging of diplomatic schemes, such as BRICS or IBSA (India, Brazil, and South Africa), that challenge the traditional structures of the world order. The most recent wave of progressive neo-populist governments in the region further radicalized this trend towards soft-balancing multilateralism (see Wajner 2021). The analytical perspective here is almost identical to that of the Northern scenarios regarding the emergence of a multilateral and polycentric world of nation-states, a fluid world. In tandem with regionalism, these two Latin American scenarios and scripts reflect an international order of globalized states that includes the dynamic forces of globalization, nationalism, and regionalism.

Conclusions: Explaining Voices and Silences from Latin America World orders are intellectual devices of architectural design of the post–Cold War era that carry both analytical and normative significance. In analytical terms, we can summarize and scrutinize whether the alternative world orders as formulated in the North have resonated within the scenarios and responses from Latin America. We summarize that dialogue, or lack thereof, in Table 2.1. TABLE 2.1 Northern and Latin American scenarios of world order

Northern scenario

LA scenarios in favor

LA scenarios against

New medievalism A tale of two worlds

Clash of civilizations

Dependency? Developmentalism; heterodox autonomy; peripheral Realism Not relevant

Coming anarchy

Not relevant

Liberal globalism

Not relevant Norms of international law and institutions; dependency; regionalism; multilateralism Norms of international law and institutions; regionalism; multilateralism Norms of international law and institutions; regionalism; multilateralism Developmentalism; dependency; autonomy; peripheral Realism Developmentalism; dependency; autonomy; peripheral Realism

Relational autonomy; multilateralism Regionalism; multilateralism; relational autonomy; norms of international law and institutions Norms of international Not relevant law and institutions?

Multilateral, polycentric

Cosmopolitan global democracy

26  Arie M. Kacowicz and Daniel F. Wajner

From the reading of Table 2.1 we can draw the following conclusions: 1

2

3

4

Not all of the Northern world orders are relevant to make sense of the political realities of Latin America. As Tickner (2008) suggested, many Latin American scholars do not perceive theoretical work or academic debates about world order as their major concern, but rather prefer to have a certain impact in practice, applying (social) sciences to bring about change and to improve the world in general, and their own countries and region in particular. In concrete terms, the “beyond the state” scenarios of “New Medievalism” and a “Cosmopolitan global democracy” seem to be less relevant for the theory and praxis in the region. Northern scenarios that are relevant to understand the problematique of economic development and (lack of ) political autonomy carry dialectical reactions, both in favor and against, in the formulation of Latin American scenarios. That is the case particularly with the “Tale of Two Words” (the North–South divide), and the “Liberal globalism”, which affected the most important alternative formulations of world orders from the Latin American perspective, from developmentalism through dependency and autonomy all the way to peripheral Realism. The two Realist and/or pessimistic Northern scenarios; i.e., “Clash of Civilizations” and “The Coming Anarchy”, do not have clear analytical and normative support among Latin American scholarship and praxis. To the contrary, Latin American approaches can teach the North about Liberal, Grotian, and legal approaches that seem to neutralize and contradict these two Northern gloomy scenarios. The global reach and importance of the Latin American scenarios have not been recognized enough, and it should be further emphasized. The “multilateral and polycentric” Northern scenario has important equivalents in the Latin American region, in the form or relational autonomy, regionalism, multilateralism, and norms of international law and institutions. This relatively optimistic scenario, like that of “Liberal globalism”, has its opponents, challengers, and adversaries in the form of the most important schools of development and underdevelopment in the region, including developmentalism, dependency, and autonomy.

What role should Latin America play in the shaping of these alternative world orders, both from the North and from the South, if at all? As Merke (2011) and Smith (2008) suggest, the different roles that Latin America could or should play in shaping the alternative world orders are a function of three different factors. First, the distribution of the power in the international system in general, and in the Western Hemisphere in particular. Second, the normative framework, identities, and ideologies sustained by the Latin American countries, with a particular emphasis upon the strong adherence to the norm of sovereignty and

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its corollaries of nonintervention and territorial integrity. Third, the structure of the international political economic system, through the effects of economic globalization and the lingering relations of dependency (in addition to asymmetrical interdependence) in terms of North–South relations (see Kacowicz 2005, 2013, 2016). In more general terms, we suggest that world order scenarios affect unevenly different regions of the world, since they are grounded by different cultural and institutional traditions. Moreover, different regions have been exposed to different political experiences. Thus, in coping with different world orders, the view from the Global South in general and from Latin America in particular, remains very relevant. In practice, we can argue that world orders are translated, adapted, and distorted by the view from the South. Hence, the design of global architecture through world orders should be channeled through specific regional perspectives, like in the Latin American case. Ultimately, the formulation of alternative scenarios and responses by Latin American scholars and practitioners is relevant not only to understand the realities of the region but also to make sense of international relations at large, and not only in the Western Hemisphere.

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Taylor, Lucy. 2010. “Soutside-Up: Imagining IR through Latin America.” Paper presented at the 2010 Millenium Conference on “International Relations in Dialogue,” October 17. Tickner, Arlene B. 2003. “Hearing Latin American Voices in International Relations Studies,” International Studies Perspectives 4(4): 325–350. Tickner, Arlene B. 2008. “Latin American IR and the Primacy of lo práctico,” International Studies Review 10 (4): 735–748. Tickner, Arlene B. 2015. “Autonomy and Latin American International Relations Thinking,” in Ana Covarrubias and Jorge I. Domínguez, eds., Routledge Handbook of Latin America in the World. London: Routledge, pp. 74–84. Tickner, Arlene B., and David L. Blaney, eds. 2013. Claiming the International Worlding around the World. New York: Routledge. Tickner, Arlene B., and Ole Waever, eds. 2009. International Relations Scholarship around the World. New York: Routledge. Tussie, Diana. 2009. “Latin America: Contrasting Motivations for Regional Projects,” Review of International Studies 35 (February): 169–188. Tussie, Diana. 2018. “Bringing Power and Markets,” in Jonas Tallberg, Karin Backstrand, and Jan Aart Scholte, eds. Legitimacy in Global Governance: Sources, Processes, and Consequences. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 201–212. Vigevani, Tullo, and Gabriel Cepaluni. 2007. “Lula’s Foreign Policy and the Quest for Autonomy through Diversification,” Third World Quarterly 28 (7): 1309–1326. Vigevani, Tullo, and Gabriel Cepaluni. 2009. Brazilian Foreign Policy in Changing Times: The Quest for Autonomy from Sarney to Lula. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Wajner, Daniel F. 2021. Exploring the foreign policies of populist governments: (Latin) America First. Journal of International Relations and Development (online first), 1–30. Wajner, Daniel F., and Luis Roniger. 2019. “Transnational Identity Politics in the Americas: Reshaping ‘Nuestramérica’ as Chavismo’s Regional Legitimation Strategy,” Latin American Research Review 54 (2): 458–447.

3 FROM AUTONOMY TO AGENCY (AND BACK AGAIN) Debating Latin American States as Global Norm Entrepreneurs Carsten-Andreas Schulz

Introduction Global International Relations (GIR) seeks to overcome the parochialism of conventional International Relations (IR) scholarship through engagement with theoretical perspectives from outside the “core.” Early proponents of the approach cast the debate largely in terms of the binary opposition between the “Western” and the “non-Western” world (Acharya and Buzan 2007; see Acharya 2014). Yet Latin America fits only awkwardly within this frame (Fawcett 2012; Schulz 2014). Historically, the very notion of the region’s Latin identity reflected local creole elites’ sense of belonging to the wider European world— as Europeans born in the Americas. The association of “Latin America” with the Global South, and other subaltern identities, is of more recent origin (see Tenorio-Trillo 2017). It should not come as a surprise, then, that Latin American contributions do not radically break with Western traditions. The “founding fathers” of Latin American international thought formed part of a social, political, and economic elite. They were often well integrated into internationalist circles at the “core.” Consider the 19th-century jurist Carlos Calvo, for example. Calvo was one of eleven founding members of the Institute of International Law; and although he is nowadays remembered as a defender of Latin American sovereignty against great power “gunboat diplomacy,” he also justified the usurpation of indigenous rights by “civilized” settler states (Obregón 2006, 257). All this is not to deny the originality of Latin American contributions.1 In fact, Latin American states’ “liminality”—as being part of international society but often treated as subordinate—is important for understanding both the distinctiveness of Latin American international thought and the reasons for why

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actors from the region have often been able to shape the “rules of the game.” Accordingly, the present chapter focuses on Latin American contributions to understanding the agency of non-hegemonic states. It focuses on both Latin American conceptual innovations and IR scholarship that uses the region as an empirical anchor point. GIR requires a constructive debate (Gelardi 2019). The discussion of “autonomy” and “agency” in this chapter seeks to advance this dialogue. For a long time, conventional IR scholarship assumed that only great powers shape international order, i.e., the fundamental norms and institutions that structure global politics.2 Because of the vast power asymmetries between Latin America and the United States, the region served as an example of how great powers tend to carve out a sphere of influence in their “backyards.” Following this view, realists emphasized the extent to which regional hegemony has curtailed Latin America’s room to maneuver (Atkins 1999; Smith 1996). Latin American variants of this approach either identify “autonomy” as the traditional foreign policy goal of these states ( Jaguaribe 1979; Puig 1980; Russell and Tokatlian 2003) or warn about the costs incurred when confronting more powerful actors (Escudé 1997, 2014).3 The numerous US interventions in the region provide ample evidence of the limits imposed by the powerful upon the weak(er).4 Viewed from this perspective, non-hegemonic states cannot change the “rules of the game” but must operate within the limits set by structural constraints. Although this view is typical of realists, in fact, it is more widely shared (see Long 2018). Scholars who are interested in the agency of the “Global South” contest this view. Latin America has received particular attention in this regard, as existing accounts single out the region’s jurists and diplomats for their “norm entrepreneurship” in the development of modern multilateralism and international law (see Becker Lorca 2014; Scarfi 2017). Norm entrepreneurs are principled actors who advocate normative change, including the reinterpretation of existing norms or the promotion of new “standards of appropriateness” (Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, 896–899). Constructivist scholars, in particular, emphasize persuasion as a mechanism of influence and the power of legal arguments. They argue that legal interventions from Latin Americans were crucial in redefining the legitimate use of force in international affairs (Acharya 2011, 113–114; Finnemore 2003), in instituting sovereign equality and inclusive multilateralism (Finnemore and Jurkovich 2014), and in defining modern understandings of sovereignty (Reus-Smit 2013; Sikkink 2011). Their accounts complement existing literature on Latin America’s concerted efforts in shaping international economic norms and institutions (for example, Helleiner 2014; Thornton 2018; Tussie 2020). This chapter argues that scholarship on the agency of non-hegemonic states benefits from a critical engagement with both debates. Paradoxically, although the “autonomy school” is heralded as a genuine Latin American contribution

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to IR theory (Bernal-Meza 2005; Deciancio 2016, 7; Gelardi 2019; Tickner 2003), scholars in this tradition either deny the possibility of non-hegemonic agency or fail to adequately distinguish autonomy from agency. By contrast, the “norm entrepreneurship” literature is rich on agency but poor on the structural factors that enable or constrain the agency of non-hegemonic states. To foster this dialogue, the chapter proceeds as follows: Section “Autonomy, Agency, and Structure” develops the conceptual distinction between “autonomy” and “agency.” Section “The Limits of Non-Hegemonic Agency,” then, focuses on theoretically informed contributions on Latin American “norm entrepreneurship.” The conclusion points at possible directions for future GIR research that acknowledges the importance of positionality and structural constraints for understanding the agency of non-hegemonic states.

Autonomy, Agency, and Structure GIR rests on the idea that great powers do not shape international relations alone but that seemingly peripheral actors can also influence international political processes and events. Non-hegemonic agency, thus understood, deals with the large and heterogeneous group of states that do not possess the attributes generally associated with great powers, including (a) great material power; (b) the recognition as having legitimate interests beyond their immediate region; and (c) an institutionalized managerial role in the maintenance of international order. Agency, however, should not be conflated with autonomy. The next section develops both concepts as ideal types by highlighting analytically relevant distinctions.

Autonomy IR is dominated and characterized by its emphasis on great power politics. This is particularly true for realists who conceive international politics in terms of the struggle of states for power in a hostile international environment. A central theme within the realist tradition has been the role of great powers in the making and breaking of international order (Kennedy 1987; Mearsheimer 2001). In this view, the distribution of material capabilities ultimately determines “who governs the international system and whose interests are principally promoted by the functioning of the system” (Gilpin 1981, 29). By definition, smaller powers have little impact on the international order.5 Few realists argue that the foreign policy options of smaller powers are structurally determined. Balancing and bandwagoning, both central concepts of realist theory, only make sense if states actually have some degree of decision-making autonomy, especially in their ability to form alliances (see Levick and Schulz 2020). Williams et al. (2012), for example, categorize foreign policy options available to “secondary powers” by the degree of resistance,

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FIGURE 3.1

Ideal-type conception of “autonomy.”

ranging from outright opposition to accommodating the hegemon (see also Walt 2005); David (1991) and Ayoob (2002), in turn, maintain that weakly consolidated states in the Global South tend to balance against both external and domestic threats. Different states, however, face different structural constraints, and smaller powers naturally have more limited room to maneuver. Figure 3.1 illustrates the ideal-type conception of “autonomy.” The proponents of Latin America’s “autonomy school” share this view: for Puig (1980, cited in Pinheiro and de Lima 2018, 5), autonomy signifies “the maximum capacity of choice that one can have, taking into account objective real world constraints.” According to this broadly realist strand, the central question for “peripheral states” has always been whether to pursue an independent foreign policy (and to assume the associated cost) or to acquiesce to the will of great powers, especially of the United States (Muñoz and Tulchin 1984).6 The approach emerged in South America during the 1970s as a theoretical reflection on Cold War bipolarity (Colacrai 2006). Just like Waltz’s neorealism, it was deeply influenced by the geopolitical context of the time. Whereas Waltz (1979) argued for the stability of bipolarity, Latin American authors were concerned whether states could pursue independent foreign policies in a world defined by two ideological blocs and dominated by superpowers. Contrary to Waltz, who regards the international system as “functionally undifferentiated,” these authors contended that the international realm is hierarchical, as states do not perform the same tasks (for an early formulation, see Lagos 1963).7 Jaguaribe (1979, 91), for example, identified four strata in the “interimperial system” of the 1970s: general primacy, regional primacy, autonomy, and dependency. Whereas many Western European countries were “autonomous,” most countries lived in “dependency”: they lacked the necessary capabilities to guarantee the inviolability of their territory, punish eventual aggressors, and decide their own affairs ( Jaguaribe 1979, 93). Consistent with Latin American structuralist social thought of the 1960s and 1970s (for example, Cardoso and Faletto 1979 [1969]), both authors consider elites’ perceptions and their commitment to national development as critical for achieving autonomy. Puig (1980, 141) insists that, depending on the degree of

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“permissibility” at the international level, foreign policy elites can implement strategies that either reinforce dependency or increase autonomy. However, at the most basic level, the international system is hierarchically organized in three tiers: (a) superpowers, acting as “rule makers”; (b) the enforcers of those rules; (c) and, finally, those who have to accept the commands of the more powerful, encompassing most of humanity. For example, whereas Puig exalts Perón’s “Third Position” (1946–1955) between the United States and the Soviet Union as an example of “heterodox autonomy”—a figurative “walk on the razor’s edge” that increased Argentina’s independent decision-making capacity— he chastises later realignment with the United States (Puig 1980, 153). More recent proponents of this tradition debate whether the international order principally imposes restrictions or whether the international structure also provides opportunities. Escudé’s “peripheral realism” (1997, 2014) offers a particularly stark interpretation of the structural constraints that nonhegemonic states face. Although Escudé sees his own approach as a departure from the “autonomy school” (see Schenoni and Escudé 2016), he closely follows the latter in conceiving of the international system as hierarchical and divided between “rule makers,” “rule takers,” and “rebel states.” In contrast to Puig who believes that peripheral states can increase their “room for maneuver” through “autonomizing strategies,” Escudé warns of the cost that such policies impose on the population of those states. While countries, such as Argentina, have a considerable degree of autonomy, society at large—and not political elites—tends to bear the cost of an adventurist foreign policy that ignores the limitations imposed upon the weak. Peripheral states have little to no agency in this formulation: “they play a modest role in the establishment of the written rules of the system and practically no role in the establishment of its unwritten statutes” (Escudé 2014, 45). Without turning to authoritarianism, these states have little choice but to align with the more powerful unless they develop economically and, as a result, rise in the ranks. In contrast, Russell and Tokatlian (2003) argue that the “context for action” in the aftermath of the Cold War has significantly changed the opportunities for peripheral states. Complex interdependence provides non-hegemonic actors with what they term “relational autonomy,” defined as “a country’s capacity and willingness, in conjunction with others, to make decisions of its own free will and to face situations and processes arising both within and beyond its borders” (Russell and Tokatlian 2003, 13). Governments and social actors can harness these opportunities through participation in international organizations and transnational networks (Russell and Tokatlian 2003, 16).8 Russell and Tokatlian are primarily interested in redefining autonomy in non-oppositional terms, as a condition and foreign policy aim that is not limited to either bandwagoning with or balancing against the hegemon: autonomy is no longer defined by a country’s power to isolate itself and to control external processes and events, but instead by its power to

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participate in and effectively influence world affairs, particularly in all types of international organizations and regimes. (Russell and Tokatlian 2003, 16) Unfortunately, the authors leave the question of how “relational autonomy” may be different from or connected to agency unresolved.9 In sum, Latin America international relations offers a rich conceptual discussion of autonomy and the structural factors that condition the “room to maneuver” of non-hegemonic states. However, existing accounts tend to conflate autonomy with agency. Clarifying these differences opens the possibility of more fruitful engagement with GIR.

Agency Agency refers to the ability to act purposively upon and eventually transform one’s social environment. Thus defined, agency entails something quite different from autonomy. Social theorists have long debated the meaning of “agency.” This is not the place to review the debate in great detail.10 In what follows, the discussion concentrates on two crucial elements of agency, namely “purposive action” and “mutual constitution.” First, following Weber’s (1968) theory of social action, agency implies the ability to act purposively. Weber identifies “social action” as a distinctive feature of human agents, which goes beyond mere reactive behavior: We shall speak of “action” insofar as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to his [sic] behavior–be it overt or covert, omission or acquiescence. Action is “social” insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby directed in its course. (Weber 1968, 4) This aspect of agency is central to English School accounts that focus on the subjective understandings of human agents acting through and on behalf of states, such as diplomats and international jurists. It is also crucial to constructivist research, a large part of which, according to Finnemore and Sikkink (2001, 400), examines “the purposive efforts of individuals and groups to change social understandings.” The understanding of agency as “purpose action” has been criticized as essentialist because it presupposes certain attributes of agents (Epstein 2013, 7).11 This is problematic because constructivists assume that agents and structures are mutually constituted. However, if agents are defined by some innate attribute that is independent from structure, then the mutual constitution of agency and structure can no longer be considered primordial. However, not everything that has an effect should be understood as an agent, and

From Autonomy to Agency  37

reflexivity in this sense serves the purpose of distinguishing agents from other factors that can influence and be influenced by structures (see Archer 2003; Wight 2006).12 Constructivists, then, propose that agency stands in a specific relationship to social structure. Earlier constructivists drew on Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory, which argues that because agents and structures are “mutually constituted,” human agents necessarily possess the ability to shape their social environment (Wendt 1987, 339). “By making, following and talking about rules,” Onuf (1994, 6) elaborates, “people constitute the multiple structures of society; through such rules societies constitute people as agents.” Agents are constrained by their environment, but their actions are not determined by it. In international relations, this environment consists of other agents, and the norms, rules, and institutions that define actors’ identities and guide the relations among them. Naturally, material factors form part of this structure, even though their impact is mediated through the meaning that agents attach to them.13 From a constructivist viewpoint, human agency is the principal driver of social change. As Wendt (1987, 337–338) put it, “human beings and their organizations are purposeful actors whose actions help reproduce or transform the society in which they live.” Consequently, agency implies a certain degree of freedom to act upon—and eventually transform—structural constraints (Giddens 1984, 15; see also Acharya 2018, 13). The mutual constitution of agency and structure is first and foremost an ontological statement about what constitutes the social world. As such, it does not readily lend itself to empirical analysis. To deal with this problem, early constructivists recurred to Archer’s (2003) “bracketing” (for a critique, see Jackson and Nexon 1999). When following this methodological strategy, the abstract process of mutual constitution is replaced by a sequence of relatively discreet moments: in the first instance, structure conditions agency, agents then interact, which leads either to “structural elaboration” or “reproduction,” and so forth. Figure 3.2 simplifies Archer’s “morphogenetic approach” to the agent-structure problem. All this is to say that agency entails something very different from autonomy. To recognize that the foreign policies of non-hegemonic states are not

FIGURE 3.2

Ideal-type conception of “agency” (adapted from Archer 2003, 3).

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determined by structure is not the same as to argue that peripheral actors can, in principle, transform the “rules of the game.” To illustrate the distinction, consider the recent debate on Latin America’s Cold War. Over the past two decades, historians (and, to a lesser extent, IR scholars) have challenged the view that saw Latin America, and other parts of the Global South, as passive objects of Cold War superpower politics thereby reclaiming the agency of Latin American actors.14 However, only insofar as these accounts show that these actors were able to act upon and transform their external environment, for instance, by shaping US foreign policy, is this the case (for example, Long 2015). In contrast, findings that suggest that Latin American foreign policy was not determined by US or Soviet interests point at autonomy rather than agency (for example, Harmer 2011).15 Unfortunately, the distinction is frequently conflated. In sum, realists have a clear understanding of autonomy but struggle with the notion of agency thus defined. Constructivists consider autonomy a necessary but insufficient condition of agency. However, by prioritizing agency, they often fail to consider the structural constraints that agents face adequately.

The Limits of Non-Hegemonic Agency This section revisits the norm entrepreneurship literature and its treatment of Latin American agency. The criticism focuses on two points: (a) the persuasiveness of legal reasoning as a mechanism of change; and (b) norm research’s thin account of structural constraints. A large part of constructivist research examines the agency of individuals, advocacy networks, non-governmental organizations, and, although to a lesser extent, non-hegemonic states. A central concern of this “agentic constructivism” (Reus-Smit 2013, 201; Sikkink 2011, 235–237) has been the role of “norm entrepreneurs” in promoting international change. Norm entrepreneurs are principled actors “who invent or deploy ideas and information to produce significant structural change” (Goddard 2009, 251; see also Finnemore and Sikkink 1998, 896–899). They exercise agency through the deliberate creation or reinterpretation of norms or “collective expectations about proper behavior for a given identity” ( Jepperson et al. 1996, 54). Prominent accounts focus on how actors from outside the traditional centers of power have influenced the fundamental norms and institutions of international politics. Following the distinction discussed above, this goes beyond the notion that agents can preserve some room to maneuver. In fact, their findings imply that one cannot understand the evolution of international order simply by analyzing the interests and actions of hegemonic states. Focusing on the non-hegemonic agency of the Global South, Acharya’s work on “agency from below” is exemplary in this regard, examining not only how the diffusion of global norms generates regional variations (localization) but also how regional initiatives feed back into the global normative order (subsidiarity).

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In other words, he shows how purported “rule takers” can become “rule makers” (Acharya 2009, 98). Constructivist norm research has been criticized for its liberal bias and emphasis on socially desirable norms (Adler-Nissen 2014; Epstein 2008; Towns 2012; Zarakol 2014).16 The general liberal outlook is also evident in constructivism’s approach to international law. This type of constructivism shares with legal scholarship the belief that change can be brought about through human reason, which is why persuasion and legal argumentation feature so prominently in this debate (Adler 2013; Checkel 2001; Finnemore and Sikkink 2001). This is especially true for accounts on Latin American norm entrepreneurship. Finnemore (2003) examines how delegates from Latin America argued against the use of coercive recollection of sovereign debt at the Second Hague Conference in 1907 (see also Schulz 2017). At the turn of the 20th century, European states frequently recurred to “gunboat diplomacy” to force governments that were either unwilling or unable to service foreign loans, most notably during the Venezuela Crisis (1902–1903). Led by Argentina’s delegation, Latin Americans contested this practice by reframing the issue as a matter of sovereignty rather than contractual obligations, thus challenging prevailing notions about the legitimate use of force in international politics. According to Finnemore (2003, 26), they were successful because of the persuasiveness of their legal arguments. Or consider Sikkink’s (2014) treatment of Latin America’s role in the creation of the human rights regime in the aftermath of WWII.17 Sikkink (2014) argues that Latin Americans’ efforts to promote human rights preceded the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. In fact, she makes a strong counterfactual claim that without their efforts, the UN Charter would not have included references to human rights at all (Sikkink 2014, 394). Latin Americans coordinated their position through the inter-American system. Influenced by the long republican tradition, they argued that non-intervention and the protection of human rights were in principle compatible, as sovereignty derives from the consent of the people (see also Long and Friedman 2020; Sikkink 1996–1997). Persuasion played a central role, as did the fact that Latin Americans counted with support from US-based NGOs and constituted an important voting bloc at the San Francisco conference. The same mix of legal suasion and coalition politics informs accounts on Latin American protagonism in the negotiation of the Law of the Sea.18 Legal and diplomatic historians agree that the episode represents an important case of Latin American agency. The prevailing (European) norm, firmly established by the 19th century, distinguished between sovereign rights on land and the freedom of the sea in open oceanic waters. This meant that states could only legitimately claim jurisdiction over immediate coastal areas, conventionally up to a 3-mile limit. Encouraged by President Truman’s proclamations (1945) concerning US jurisdiction over natural resources in coastal areas, Latin American states contested the prevailing norm (García-Amador 1974, 33–34).

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The emergence of industrial fishing fleets threatened Latin America’s fishing grounds and put these developing countries at a disadvantage. In response, they declared jurisdiction over an extended maritime zone. Their legal arguments in favor of an exclusive economic zone up to a distance of 200 nautical miles—a distance that corresponds roughly to the influence of the Humboldt Current which flows along South America’s Pacific Coast—finally persuaded others, leading to the regime of differential jurisdiction that characterized the Law of the Sea today. These examples illustrate the fact that norm research not only takes its cues about social mechanisms from legal scholarship but also adopts a similar view on what constitutes structure in international politics. This builds on the idea that international law comprises a coherent and logical system of norms. Authors agree that the clarity and internal logic of a norm increase its “compliance pull” or inherent normative authority (Brunnée and Toope 2010, 88; Franck 1990). Similarly, constructivists frequently discuss “framing” and “grafting” as strategies adopted by entrepreneurs who seek to introduce a new “standard of appropriateness” by establishing its congruence with the body of already existing norms (exemplary: Klotz 1995; Price 1997). In this sense, the normative structure of international politics enables actors at the same times as it imposes certain limitations on the types of claims that actors can reasonably make (Hurd 2017, 54). Agents are constrained by collectively shared understandings of what constitutes legitimate action. Compared to the autonomy school, this is a rather limited view of structural forces. The view leads Jackson and Nexon (2004, 340) to argue that when liberal constructivists hypothesize situational factors, these tend to look something like Habermasian “ideal speech” situations, where agents can deliberate and present their rational arguments free of coercion. The criticism is certainly overdrawn.19 Building social contestation research, constructivists note the importance of “opportunity structures,” including the openness of the political system and the availability of external allies ( Joachim 2003; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Klotz 2002; Risse-Kappen 1995). That being said, actors’ positions within the international order are often left unaddressed or remain undertheorized (but see Epstein 2008; Towns 2012). Similarly, when authors discuss “opportunity structures,” these largely exist independently from actors in the sense that “agents” have little opportunity to shape the structures that condition their capacity to act. However, if actors cannot influence the “opportunity structures” themselves, then we do not deal with agency but autonomy.

From Autonomy to Agency (and Back Again) The exploration of non-hegemonic agency has been a central concern in GIR (Acharya 2018, 12–23). Non-hegemonic agency assumes that international order does not merely reflect the interests of the most powerful states but that peripheral actors can shape the “rule of the game” of international affairs.

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In order to advance this view, this chapter provided a conceptual discussion of autonomy, as a central concept in Latin American theories about international politics, and agency. Whereas autonomy denotes the degree to which actors can pursue their own interests under external constraints, agency refers to the ability to act upon and transform these forces. Although both concepts invoke two very different notions of the possibility of non-hegemonic states in international affairs, existing accounts frequently conflate them. Both the Latin American “autonomy school” and norm research on Latin American agency would benefit from separating these notions more clearly. They would also benefit from a more explicit treatment of the agency-structure problem addressed here. The autonomy school either denies peripheral agency or fails to explain the conditions under which agency (may) occur. By contrast, Latin American agency is clearly developed in constructivist norm research. But these accounts draw either on a thin notion of international structure or treat “opportunity structures” as exogenous forces beyond actors’ reach. By way of conclusion, this chapter argues that relational social theories may provide a bridge for both debates. Relational theories suggest that who actors are and what role they can play within social structures do not (exclusively) depend on their individual attributes—think of the size of a country’s economy or its territory—but depend on their position within a wider network of relationships (see Emirbayer 1997; Jackson and Nexon 1999, 2019; McCourt 2016; Qin 2018). Norm research that draws on network theory reflects this approach. Focusing on actors’ gatekeeping capacity, Carpenter (2011) argues that actors who are connected to global stakeholders are more influential in “vetting the agenda,” as are so-called brokers—actors who are simultaneously central to various networks. In much the same way, Goddard explains that brokers play a particularly crucial role in fragmented networks, using the vacuum created by the existence of loosely integrated networks for “strategic action, and even the invention of new ideas” (Goddard 2009, 262). Importantly, an actor’s position within a network creates “the conditions of entrepreneurship” (Goddard 2009, 250). This focus on the importance of brokers highlights the way in which network theory deals with the issue of structure versus agency: actors’ position within a structure conditions their ability to act. However, because networks are not fixed, agents can shape structures—the defining characteristic that distinguishes agency from autonomy. This represents an important departure from earlier constructivist research developed from structuration theory, which treated agency and structure as “ontologically inseparable” (Archer 2003, 1; see Jackson and Nexon 1999, 2019). Although many of these accounts use the idea of a “network” metaphorically, they do not adopt a relational approach. Relational social theory offers a way of addressing the question that both the “autonomy school” and constructivist norm research left unresolved. The creation of relationships, the active participation in international norms and institutions, as Russell and Tokatlian (2003) would have it, changes non-hegemonic states’ positionality. Their position then becomes a source of influence. In this

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sense, their “room for maneuver” is not limited by structural constraints as they can shape their social environment. This is not to argue for voluntarist theory of non-hegemonic agency. States in the periphery certainty face constraints that they cannot easily manipulate. Economic realities matter. States vary significantly in their ability to organize force. However, much can be gained from considering both limitations and opportunities when thinking about the role that non-hegemonic states play in defining the “rule of the game.”

Acknowledgment I am grateful for the research assistance provided by Margarita Figueroa Sepúlveda and for financial support from Chile’s National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT) through FONDECYT No. 11170185. The usual waivers apply.

Notes 1 This point builds on Bilgin’s (2008) critique of over-emphasizing the need for difference in “non-Western” international thought. 2 On conceptual discussion of international order, see Bull (2002 [1977]) and Tang (2016). 3 For an overview of Latin America’s “autonomy school,” see Bernal-Meza (2005), Briceño Ruiz and Simonoff (2017), Tickner (2003), and Chapter 13. 4 As elaborated below, this view no longer reflects the historiographical debate. 5 The argument is not exclusive to realism. English School theorists and liberal institutionalists, too, argue that the principal rules and institutions of international politics resulted from great power compacts, especially after major war (Clark 2005; Ikenberry 2001). However, because the argument features prominently in the realist tradition, the discussion focuses on these accounts. 6 Briceño Ruiz and Simonoff (2017) question the characterization of the “autonomy school” as realist; for Tickner (2003, 344), the approach is a hybrid that combines dependency theory with “Morgenthauian realism” and reflections on interdependence. 7 Although Waltz introduced the problematic distinction between a hierarchy at the domestic and anarchy at the international level, he did not dispute the hierarchical nature of the latter. He merely rejects the notion that states perform different roles based on authority or status distinctions (see Schulz 2019). 8 Similarly, Fonseca Júnior (1998) distinguishes between “autonomy through distance” and “autonomy through participation;” Vigevani and Cepaluni (2007) further distinguish “autonomy through participation” from “autonomy through diversification.” They argue that the former characterized Brazil foreign policy under Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2002), Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–2010) pursued the latter seeking to increase Brazil’s autonomy to strengthening South– South relations without adopting a confrontational stance toward the Global North. 9 Pinheiro and de Lima’s (2018, 11) critique of “relational autonomy” exhibits the same conceptual confusion. In their view, non-hegemonic states that align with or participate in international institutions that are dominated by great powers lose their agency as autonomy would be the opposite of dependency.

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10 For a discussion from an IR perspective, see Bieler and Morton (2001), Carlsnaes (1992), Dessler (1989), Epstein (2013), Wight (2006). 11 For a critique of “substantivism,” see Emirbayer (1997) and Jackson and Nexon (1999). Some social theorists question the assumption that agency presupposes intentionality and reflexivity (Latour 2005). However, this conflates agency with action. In the Weberian sense, not all action is “social.” 12 For a critique of this view, see Latour (2005). 13 This dialectic relationship between ideational and material factors is central to constructivism’s “practice turn” (Adler and Pouliot 2011). 14 For an overview of this historiographical debate, see Darnton (2013); Friedman (2003); Kirkendall (2014). 15 The same applies to accounts that draw on Scott’s (1985) “weapons of the weak” to argue that non-hegemonic actors have agency (for example, Acharya 2018, 17). However, Scott’s non-openly confrontational forms of resistance, including “foot dragging” and “false compliance,” relate to autonomy, and not agency. 16 It is telling that only recently have scholars begun to examine the erosion of existing norms (Panke and Petersohn 2012; Zimmermann and Deitelhoff 2019), and the role of “antipreneurs” in contesting the diffusion of liberal norms (Bloomfield and Scott 2016; see also Wiener 2008). 17 Latin America’s role in the creation of the rule-based international order in the aftermath of WWII also receives consideration in Helleiner’s Forgotten Foundations of Bretton Woods (2014); Acharya (2018, chap. 6) discusses Latin America’s protagonism in promoting regionalism within the UN system. 18 There is a large literature in legal and diplomatic history from Latin America that examines this episode (García-Amador 1974; Orrego Vicuña 1984). Surprisingly, the negotiation of the Law of the Sea has attracted little attention from norm researchers, although (Anglophone) IR scholars have long highlighted Latin America’s role in this regard (for example Keohane and Nye 1977, part II). 19 Constructivists do not necessarily argue that the “best” norm will win, but rather that successful entrepreneurs take advantage of the attributes of the norms (and their relationship with other norms) for which they advocate.

References Acharya, Amitav. (2009) Whose Ideas Matter? Agency and Power in Asian Regionalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Acharya, Amitav. (2011) Norm Subsidiarity and Regional Orders: Sovereignty, Regionalism, and Rule-Making in the Third World. International Studies Quarterly 55:95–123. Acharya, Amitav. (2014) Global International Relations (IR) and Regional Worlds: A New Agenda for International Studies. International Studies Quarterly 58:647–659. Acharya, Amitav. (2018) Constructing Global Order: Agency and Change in World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Acharya, Amitav, and Barry Buzan. (2007) Why Is There No Non-Western International Relations Theory? International Relations of the Asia-Pacific 7:287–312. Adler, Emanuel. (2013) Constructivism in International Relations: Sources, Contributions, and Debates. In Handbook of International Relations, edited by Walter Carlsnaes, Thomas Risse-Kappen and Beth A. Simmons, pp. 112–144. London: Sage. Adler, Emanuel, and Vincent Pouliot. (2011) International Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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4 REGIONALISM AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE Hegemony through Transnational Social Compacts in Cold War South America Matias Spektor

Introduction We have grown accustomed to understanding security regionalism as a force for good in the international system. The bulk of the existing work looks at policy coordination, trust-building, collective security, security communities, zones of peace, and zones free of weapons of mass destruction. But how about security regionalism designed to organize, coordinate, and legitimize political violence by member states against perceived shared enemies? This chapter draws on insights from Global International Relations (GIR) to shed new light onto the workings of repressive regional orders in which actors seek to suppress and undermine domestic political upheaval and dissent, as well as promote autocracy among member states. Mainstream IR offers important tools to make sense of regionalism for repressive ends. Repressive regional orders build institutions to reduce uncertainty, enhance the flow of information, lower transaction costs, monitor compliance, identify defectors, increase the odds of cooperation, promote issue linkages, and select focal points to overcome the hurdles to collective action (Keohane 1984). Like other forms of regionalism, cooperation for repression too can be rooted at the level of the preferences and capabilities of powerful domestic constituencies and ruling coalitions (Haggard 1997, Kahler 2000, Moravcsik 1998, Solingen 1999). Mainstream theory can also account for why a liberal great power such as the United States might want to promote repressive forms of regionalism: great powers engaged in security competition against peer rivals are incentivized to create regional bounded orders even when the principles and ideologies governing these orders are at odds with the values upheld at the hegemonic metropole (Mearsheimer 1994, 2019). Furthermore,

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mainstream work in the tradition of the “rational design of international institutions” offers a useful point of departure to make sense of the membership rules, scope of issues, level of centralization, institutional autonomy, and flexibility of repressive regionalism (Koremenos, Lipson, and Snidal 2001). More recently, scholars of hegemony have highlighted the domestic and international constraints within which hegemonic powers operate (Ikenberry and Nexon 2019, McConaughey, Musgrave, and Nexon 2018, Musgrave and Nexon 2018, Nexon and Neumann 2018), offering productive insight for the study of how security regionalism can, under certain circumstances, be crafted with the purpose of deploying political violence cooperatively. These scholars explicitly show some of the mechanisms through which subaltern actors influence hegemony, reinforcing the point that cores rarely get away with generating hierarchy as they please. Yet, those theoretical approaches can only take us so far. To properly account for the emergence, trajectory, and collapse of repressive regional orders, we need to focus on dimensions of them that rarely get any attention in mainstream theories. First, domestic power-political dynamics within peripheral states are crucial in understanding the actual working of hegemonic regional orders (Acharya and Johnston 2007). This occurs not only because domestic political battles in secondary states constrain the agency space of subaltern incumbents but also because they shape the patterns of violence on the ground that will then constrain the domestic agency space of incumbents in the hegemon. Second, cores and peripheries are bound together by ties that go well beyond the state. Much of the glue that holds regional orders together is transnational in nature, and it is not restricted to culture and ideology, oftentimes including “technologies of repression” that emerge and travel regionally and across regions. Because hegemons have no exclusivity over the origin of these practices, hegemons are order makers, but they may under certain conditions also order takers (Acharya 2016, 2017). Peripheries constrain hegemonic cores through the norms and principles of acceptable behavior that structure regional order (Helleiner 2014). I illustrate these ideas through an account of the regional social compact that emerged in Cold War South America as the United States threw its weight in support for autocrats bent on routing domestic political dissent. This conservative “Holy Alliance” embodied illiberal norms and principles that fueled and legitimized unprecedented levels of political violence by its member states against rebellious societies. The values and institutions that resulted did not reflect the liberal and democratic nature the dominant power professed to hold, but the autocratic forms of government that resorted to state terror to repress domestic dissent and facilitated the closing of national economies to bolster domestic rent-seeking constituencies. Contrary to what the dominant narrative that prevails to this day, here we do not have a story of officials in Washington condoning the illicit practices of South American dictators. What goes on is

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both more precise and disturbing: what we find is political leaders in the United States throwing their weight – oftentimes in secret but other times in ways that confounded the press, Congress, and other elites – to back the practices of state-organized harassment, surveillance, book-banning, university closures, the outlawing of political organizations, domestic spying, arbitrary arrests, torture, and extra-judicial killings. The purpose of hegemony in this particular case was to make a region safe for autocracy. Telling the story through this prism, we can honor one of GIR’s most valuable intellectual contributions to our field – establishing an explicit connection between the global organization of political authority in practice and its vast human consequences for people worldwide. To make my case, I introduce the concept of regional social compacts (RSCs). As I define them here, RSCs are transnational networks of ruling elites across regional member states that are bound through military, economic, and ideological ties (for an alternative concept of RSCs, see Goh 2013). Compacts are networks that tie transnational elites together in ways that produce cooperation in spite of vast asymmetries of power. Compacts are hierarchical in the sense that the ties that bind these governing elites are stratified, with those individuals in the regional hegemon enjoying centrality in the network vis-à-vis their counterparts in subordinate regional states. But more specifically, compacts are hegemonic in that they express the hegemon’s mobilization of leadership to create regional order. Compacts, however, are unlikely to be coercively dominated by the dominant state. For compacts to properly operate, the hegemon needs to decentralize authority to subordinate states, empowering them in ways that increase their leverage. Although the metropole will likely have disproportionate say over the compact, it cannot normally control it. In the case of Cold War South America, regional inward-looking autocratic coalitions that were bent on fighting irregular wars against guerrilla groups and nonviolent dissenters formed a social network to improve the repressive capabilities of each state, to jointly surveil and chase dissenters abroad, and to use the non-material backing of the regional hegemon of the day to legitimize political violence at home and internationally. The subordinate political elites that initiated these arrangements sought the resources provided by the United States through the compact because they lacked political stability at home, encountered intense opposition to their goals, and knew that their technologies of repression against combatants and noncombatants alike were illegal under domestic and international law. In the process, they secured the support of a liberal hegemon for illiberal ends. As compact activities progressed in the 1960s and 1970s, successive US administrations found themselves supporting brutal dictators in South America at growing domestic political cost, especially as US-based activists and members of Congress began to take issue with the range of pro-autocracy policies enacted by the White House. This chapter explores the concept of RSCs by looking at how networked regional ordering played out in South America during the Cold War. First, the

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chapter shows how networked authority allows hegemons to coordinate action with a range of peripheral actors. Second, it makes the case that hegemons may be drawn to networked hierarchies because they facilitate the exercise of domination, but subaltern entities can profit from hierarchy. In particular, subordinate actors may demand the creation of stratification to satisfy their domestic, geopolitical, and economic needs (MacKay 2019, Mattern and Zarakol 2016, Mulich 2018). Third, the chapter explicates why the domestic politics of peripheral actors are critical to the creation of hegemonic orders, a necessary corrective to the assumption still prevalent in the mainstream literature that the domestic politics that matter are those within the hegemonic cores. Fourth, the study of the South American security compact during the Cold War helps refine our understanding of how ideas and norms work in international hierarchies. By and large, mainstream IR literatures narrowly focus on the conditions under which the normative fabric of hegemonic actors may influence the wider world. But transmission belts can and often do travel in the opposite direction: hegemons may, in their quest for order, end up borrowing or accommodating the values and institutions their subordinate counterparts create. As Barder (2015) has shown, methods of rule developed at the periphery may come to be sanctioned, supported, defended, and legitimated by the core. This is exactly what happened with the technologies of state terror developed by South American autocracies in the 1960s and 1970s. Last but not least, the chapter helps move the needle in our understanding of processes of legitimation in international hierarchies. Up to now, most scholarship has framed legitimation in terms of dominant states trying to render their privileged status palatable to the subaltern polities they dominate (Finnemore 2009, Krebs and Jackson 2007, MacKay 2019). In most scholarly accounts, subordinate actors limit themselves to exercising some form of resistance to hierarchical rule (Riggirozzi and Tussie 2012). While these notions surely capture an important aspect of how hierarchies operate, they are incomplete: effective hierarchies require that weaker actors render the stratification of the day legitimate. Subordinate actors may under certain conditions actually collude with the hegemon in legitimating the hierarchical formation in which they coexist. The remainder of this chapter presents RSC dynamics and the scope conditions under which this particular formation rises and collapses. It then illustrates the argument through the compact that developed in Cold War South America. A conclusion provides a brief summary of the argument and recommendations for future work in the field.

Regional Social Compacts: Why They Matter and How They Operate? RSCs are transnational social networks of regional governing elites tied together by a shared conception of regional governance in the security and the

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economic realms. RSCs are not networks of states but networks of politically influential individuals within those states. Actors in the RSC network may variously include incumbents, their advisors and foreign-policy teams, and the top-ranking bureaucrats who manage the diplomatic interactions among states in a given region and vis-à-vis nonmembers. Treating RSCs as networks of elite individuals improves our understanding of micro-foundations linking domestic interests and beliefs with collective action and regional outcomes. RSCs perform two functions in the international system. First, they help create the social power that is necessary to implement purposeful collective action. In highly hierarchical regional settings, the pursuit of consensus is a form of authority sharing on the part of the dominant state. The dominant state will engage in such an exercise as long as it does not undermine its own interests by empowering subordinates to the point of challenging the hierarchical authority relationship that the RSC embodies in the first place. Second, they help legitimize the hierarchical regional distribution of material power and political influence. In the process, RSCs generate mutual consent among parties who coexist under conditions of vast power asymmetry, paving the way for the creation of order. While they are not a necessary condition for the rise of regional orders, RSCs facilitate the process of sustaining such orders: they reduce uncertainty, enhance the dissemination of information, lower transaction costs, monitor compliance, detect defections, increase opportunities for cooperation, facilitate issue linkage, and provide focal points for the resolution of conflict. RSCs display the properties that are typical of international network activity (Hafner-Burton, Kahler, and Montgomery, 2009). Within the RSC network, a few privileged actors are centrally positioned because they attract the largest concentration of interactions and ties with other actors. By and large, the central nodes are individuals from the hegemonic state. RSCs therefore work as a networked hierarchy. As a form of international governance, RSCs illustrate a broader theoretical point: networks and hierarchies need not be alternative forms of social ordering in world politics. Being centrally positioned in the network gives governing elites in the regional metropole unique access to material, informational, ideational, and prestige resources. This has three implications. First, network centrality allows elite individuals in the regional core to more easily identify intermediaries, recruit them as collaborators, set the agenda, and socialize elite individuals in subordinate societies through norms and ideas that help bolster the hegemon’s authority – a practical expression of social power as access (MacDonald 2014, 2018). Second, privileged access to information equips individuals in the regional cores uniquely to manipulate geopolitical competition among regional states in their state’s favor and to preempt rebellions, thereby limiting the space for anti-hegemonic defiance. Third, central location grants them unequal leverage to shape the concepts, norms, and principles for regional management.

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In sum, these network dynamics have the cumulative effect of transferring authority to the hegemonic core. RSCs do not necessarily require a dense form of institutional “lock in” (Ikenberry 1996, 1998, 2001). The institutional constraints on hegemonic power that RSCs represent tend to be thin rather than thick, and are oftentimes embodied in informal rather than in formal institutions. As it occurs in other types of hierarchies, however, the structure of the RSC network also opens a door to a range of patterns of resistance among subaltern actors. These may include conditioning support for the policies of the hegemon for concessions; blocking consensus over the political, economic, social, and cultural ideas the compact seeks to promote and protect; or building intraregional coalitions to increase the cost of hegemonic governance. Yet another form of resistance occurs when individuals in a subordinate state refuse to abide by the rules of the game established by the hegemon with regard to intraregional geopolitical competition among subordinates. To be sure, the hegemon as the leading political community “uses its outsized military and economic capabilities to organize relations among weaker polities” (Ikenberry and Nexon 2019, 2). But subordinate actors in the network manage flows of resources and information in ways that constrain their more powerful counterparts in the regional core. As the literature on hierarchies has pointed out before, brokers are enablers of hierarchy, but they also operate as a check on its scale and scope (MacDonald 2014, 2018). Under what conditions do RSCs arise? First, when levels of regional interdependence are high. Regions such as Latin America marked by deep interdependence create powerful incentives for the creation of a trans-elite consensus to guide region-wide purposeful action, lower transaction costs, and help carry out the range of interactions that need to take place among member states if regional order is to be sustained over time. In regions with low levels of interdependence, there is little, if any, need for socially driven consensus on how best to manage the regional order of the day. Second, the likelihood of an RSC emerging is dependent on the type of security competition the regional hegemon faces vis-à-vis extra-regional challengers. Security competition can be intense, aggressive, and risk-taking or low-key, passive, and risk-averse. RSCs are more likely to emerge in the latter. The reason for this is easy to understand. Regional orders allow rival great powers to wage security competition with each other (Mearsheimer 2019). The more poignant the competition, the highest the degree of unquestioned, unnegotiated compliance regional great powers will demand from regional subordinates. By contrast, the more benign the security competition a regional hegemon encounters in its interactions with other great powers, the less stringent the terms it will impose on its regional subalterns. RSCs are more likely to occur when the regional core has an incentive to exercise authority through consensus – and consensus can never be imposed. It is therefore in conditions of lessened stringency that there is

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the greater chance that a trans-regional elite network will develop. Absent an aggressive extra-regional challenger to threaten the regional hegemon, power preponderance can afford to engage in RSC creation and maintenance. The ideological fabric of RSCs does not necessarily follow the values and domestic institutions of the regional hegemon. In the case of Cold War South America, the dominant theme emerging out of elite interaction was the utility of autocracy as a tool to resist revolutionary domestic upheaval. This included the extensive use of extra-judicial killings, torture, “disappearances”, and several other methods of repression. Successive US administrations had little qualms supporting brutal responses to social change in Latin America, even if they kept the bulk of this activity in secret and by the early 1970s their leaders in the Executive were forced to confront growing criticism from Congress. Nothing in the logic of RSCs mandates that subordinate elites across the board will converge on a single set of core values espoused by the regional core or that they will reshape their own domestic institutions to emulate those of the hegemon. The regional elite network surely demands high levels of complicity among regional states – in the sense that all major actors consent and acquiesce to the given process of ordering – but from this it does not follow that interaction will transform the dominant ideology of the member states they represent. As we will also see in the case below, RSCs may or may not breed shared identities. How does legitimation work within RSCs? The notion that elites and the states they represent ought to confer legitimacy if hegemonic rule is to properly function can be found in the most diverse traditions of political philosophy (Acharya and Johnston 2007, Clark 2011, Cox 1981, Gramsci 1971, MacKay 2019). Here, the regional hierarchy of the day is legitimate as far as it is linked to a socially constructed consensus (Kang 2010). This implies two moves. First, in order to be viable, RSCs require that actors positioned within the regional core share some degree of authority with counterparts in subordinate states. This sharing strengthens rather than weakens the central position of the core. Authority is not so much imposed by the strong on the weak as it is embedded in the networks that bind them together (MacDonald 2018). Second, actors within subordinate societies play a critical role in making hierarchy happen. These peripheral elites embrace hierarchy because, in so doing, they secure the leverage to fight their own domestic battles with the cover, protection, and support of the hegemon. This is exactly what recent literatures on the wide variety of hierarchies in world politics have shown – be them colonial settlements to European empires (Grovogui 1996), impoverished Latin American states (Grandin 2006, Schoultz 1998), or defeated empires (Zarakol 2011). What causes RSCs to unravel? There are two major factors to take into account: (a) cessation of the common threat that led to the creation of the RSC in the first place or (b) abandonment by key actors. The end of RSCs may be caused by the end of the external threat that pushed the various regional elites

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into sponsoring the creation of the compact in the first place, suggesting that change in the environment within which RSCs operate will, to a degree, determine their duration over time. But RSCs can die when the hegemon decides to brake them, a form of revolt by the rule maker. Contrary to other types of international relationships, RSCs are unlikely to survive hegemonic exit or decline. This may be the result of changing geopolitical preferences on the part of the hegemon. Alternatively, exit may result from divided government within the hegemonic state that complicates the ability of the leadership to honor its contract with subordinate elite individuals in the network. Exit may also be caused by a change in government in the hegemon that displaces the ideas that had given birth to the RSC originally. Or the hegemonic exit may result from the growing costs of governance that the hegemon has to shoulder in the process of operating the RSC, especially when the costs of building regional consensus become closer to the costs of coercion. RSCs can also unravel when subordinate states abandon them. This may happen when geopolitical competition among subordinate member states over their relative position in the regional ranking gets out of hand, sucking the hegemon into regional competitive dynamics that it might otherwise be able and willing to ignore. Or it may happen when domestic change in subordinate states compels relevant parties to abandon shared values and consensus, exiting the compact. Interest in sustaining the RSC reflects the changing influence of domestic coalitions both within the most powerful states within the compact and within weaker polities in the group. The section below draws on recent secondary literatures on Cold War South America to illustrate the argument.

RSC in Cold War South America In the process of interpreting the case, I build on and seek to fill the gaps in the extant literatures on Latin American regionalism. Some of the best work in this tradition has focused on regional ordering in the post–Cold War period, be it with a focus on regional political economies (Gomez-Mera 2013, Riggirozzi and Tussie 2012, Santa-Cruz 2019) or security regionalism (Battaglino 2018, Diamint 2004, Herz 2010). Unsurprisingly, research in this tradition focuses on processes such as democratization, liberalization, institution building for trade liberalization, confidence-building measures, the overcoming of old-time rivalries, and the production of trust to turn South America into an incipient security community (Adler and Barnett 1998, Buzan and Weaver 2003). When focusing on earlier historical periods, the focus has been on dyads or system effects on single states (Oelsner 2005, Poggio 2014). Within IR, little, if anything at all, is said about the networked dimensions of autocratic cooperation. Consider dependency theory with its focus on the structural constraints besetting secondary state autonomy in a global capitalist order (Cardoso and Faletto 1979,

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O’Donnell 1973). Or consider the influential work on processes of US delegation of authority to Brazilian “sub-imperialism” in the pursuit of regional order (dos Santos 1973, Mariani 1969, 1977, Schilling 1981). It is historians of Latin America who have made the greatest recent strides in unearthing the cooperative dimensions of South American repression (Brands 2010, Grandin and Joseph 2010, Harmer 2013, 2017, Marchesi 2018, McSherry 2005). In what follows I re-tell the story with the purpose of illustrating the core dynamics of regional social compacts at play. Youth-led insurgent rebellion in Cuba and other Central American states spread fear of revolution across Latin America (Brands 2010, Gleijeses 2002, Harmer and Alvarez 2017). The Kennedy administration first responded by launching the Agency for International Development and the Alliance for Progress that were meant to provide financial aid to progressive leaders across the region, only to change tack as further radicalization picked up across the hemisphere and Republicans began to use regional politics to attack the president (Pereira 2018). After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in particular, the White House embraced Right-wing authoritarianism as a more efficient tool to control revolutionary contagion than reform and democratization. In 1962 alone, 9,000 Latin American officers were trained at the School of the Americas to beef up counterinsurgent capabilities (Gill 2004). When an elected government in Brazil was toppled in 1964 in a US-backed military coup, a wave of authoritarian rule rose across South of Panama. Within a decade, ten South American democracies had reverted into autocratic rule under the auspices of the United States. Allied elites in the region increasingly received aid for aerial surveillance and advanced telecommunication equipment in support of interdiction missions. CIA money rigged local elections, US military officers trained local battalions to fight urban guerrillas, and American embassies and consulates offered real-time intelligence to local security forces as they interrogated, tortured, or executed detainees. Soon after the coup in Brazil, the US supported coups in the Dominican Republic and British Guiana, financed its favorite candidate in Chile and Costa Rica, and sent troops to put down riots in the Panama Canal Zone. Counterinsurgency efforts led by local governing elites supported by the United States became the regional norm (Brands 2010, Harmer and Alvarez 2017, Rabe 1999, 2012). The obvious temptation is to write off these dramatic events as an illustration of the broader point that hegemons will create regional bounded orders to wage great power competition against potential challengers, with little if any attention to the values that shape public discourse and political life in the hegemon. But this perspective obscures more than it illuminates the actual workings of hegemony in regional environments. New area studies scholarship strongly suggests that around the wake of the Nixon administration in late 1968, a collection of individuals in the United States and in capital cities across South America coalesced in a network that

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actively set out to create a distinctive pattern of regional ordering. This pattern lasted for about a decade until its final demise in the early 1980s. This was not a Latin American phenomenon but a South American one. Whereas US authority in North and Central America expressed itself in this period through a range of coercive tools including full-fledged intervention, South America required a more balanced approach. This was a part of the region where the United States sought to build a greater degree of consensus, even if successive administrations engaged in cajoling, threats, arm-twisting, economic punishment, and covert intervention. The decision to beef up counterinsurgency efforts in South America through an active network of key individuals did not take place until the arrival of Richard Nixon in office. “A time bomb almost certain to explode”, a 1968 CIA report concluded as it perused prospects for the hemisphere (quoted in Brands 2010, 56). Fears of youth-contagion and a spike in political violence pointed to the urgency of curbing “subversive” activity (Grandin 2006, Joseph and Spenser 2008). Within months, Nelson Rockefeller, an old Latin American hand, had traveled the hemisphere to produce a detailed report which concluded that the future of regional stability lay in the security forces and in the establishment of close interpersonal ties between US officials and brokers in regional states that would be willing and able to act as collaborators (Capello 2013). The rise of a conservative alliance was targeted at guerilla groups, organized students, peasant movements, and dissenters more broadly. In this respect, Nixon’s attempt at engaging South American leaders in an autocratic front echoes the push in Washington toward engagement with governments in Western and Eastern Europe, and indeed China, to curb social protest (Suri 2003). In the decade that it operated, the compact succeeded in regionalizing the practice of state-organized harassment, surveillance, book-banning, university closures, the outlawing of political organizations, domestic spying, arbitrary arrests, torture, and extra-judicial killings. The individuals that made up the network included incumbents, advisors, professional diplomats, military officers, top-ranking bureaucrats, businessmen, and media people. Individuals in the United States were centrally positioned in that they attracted the largest concentration of interactions and ties with other individuals in the network. The density of connections varied over time. US individuals were in a privileged position to identify intermediaries, recruit collaborators, set the regional agenda, and socialize the group into norms and ideas that helped bolster the authority of the hegemon. The central location also allowed US officials to detect and preempt rebellions from other members in the network which, as we will see below, threatened to erupt over a number of clashing interests. But crucial to the operation of this scheme was the identification of regional brokers, who carved a niche in the network as delegates or collaborators of the regional core (Allcock 2018). This assemblage was a form of regionalism, in that it involved policy coordination through informal (and

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often secret) region-bound practices set to reduce uncertainty, disseminate information, lower transaction costs, monitor compliance, detect defections, increase opportunities for cooperation, facilitate issue linkage, and provide focal points for the resolution of problems. The Condor Plan is one the most visible institutions in the South American RSC, and one that has attracted a great deal of scholarly attention in recent years (Dinges 2004, Lessa 2019, López 2016, McSherry 2005). This was the secret initiative originally led by Chile to establish channels through which South American autocracies could exchange surveillance and intelligence information to facilitate the identification and capture of dissidents within the region, in the United States, and in Europe. Regional elites engaged Washington with a view to secure the necessary material and global political resources to do battle against their domestic political enemies, including organized labor, student unions, and peasant movements demanding political participation and economic opportunity. “The security services used violence and terror not simply against the guerrillas, but against anyone that challenged the privileges of the dominant elite” (Brands 2010, 61). In their quest for combating ideological Left contagion and guerrilla groups activity, these elites received anti-revolutionary aid programs and counterinsurgent assistance. When they began to seriously crack down on domestic dissenters through a host of illegal means, they also turned to the United States in search for cover, protection, and legitimacy. So the incipient regional compact that emerged had the putative mission of creating a coalition to contain domestic social upheaval and regional revolutionary contagion coming from Havana and, in the process, seal the region off to Soviet power and influence. But its core purpose in practice was to strengthen traditional South American elites in their quest to resist bottom-up social change, and reinstate the power structures that urbanization, the spread of higher education, and the rise of Third World anti-imperialist protest seemed to be upending. South American political elites engaged in compact activity not only merely because they wanted the political protection from the hegemon but also because their policies were questionable and their methods were illegal. Formal regional institutions such as the Organization of American States could not possibly become the prime site for regional coordination because so much of the activity that was going on was covert and subject to legal questioning due to its emphasis on covert action, assassinations, forced disappearances, and the use of torture. But the need for protection was not limited to the South American members of the compact. US officials themselves worked to shield their activities from Congress and the media (Blanton 2008, Kornbluh 2013, Menjívar and Rodríguez 2005, Rabe 2012, Weyland 2019). The South American RSC was built on the ideological terrain of the socalled national security doctrines (Feierstein 2010). These bodies of principles varied across country, but they coalesced around the notion that genocide was

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justified in the quest for domestic stability amidst constant threats of Communist infiltration. As such, the ideological fabric of these doctrines was a rebuttal of the twin ideologies – liberation theology and dependency theory – that were fueling urban unrest, student mobilization, and an overt challenge to the West. That the United States should throw its weight behind these national security doctrines is far from obvious, and it shows that even when the hegemon is a liberal democracy, the pattern of ordering that it engenders need not defend, promote, or even care for democracy. The ultimate goal of the leading state was not to project its own values and institutions across the region but to strengthen the governing autocracies there in their fight against domestic subversion which, if successful, might have cracked the region open to Soviet (and Cuban) influence. The aim was to create a regional system safe for autocracy as long as this helped the dominant state retain regional hegemony and wage the global Cold War. In the process of constructing a regional compact, the United States did not push these partner autocracies to open up their economies to Western capital. On the contrary, the quest for beefing up local elites justified accommodating the protectionist tendencies of the majority of these governments (with the notable exception of Chile, which ran a deregulation experiment in the wake of authoritarian rule under Pinochet from 1973 onward). The bulk of US aid to compact member states incentivized police, surveillance, defense, and other repressive capabilities rather than economic reform. Some regional states acquired vast sums of credit from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, but they normally received little if any pressure from the US Treasury to curb the appetite of their domestic rent-seeking constituencies and establish rules and norms to ensure good governance. The United States also tolerated a great deal of regional resistance to its economic preferences. Secondary states in the network bargained for concessions, promoted and protected their own interests, and at times cooperated with other peripheral players to increase the costs of hegemonic governance. This can be seen in the fact that as the compact was taking shape, South American nations were challenging US positions on a range of negotiations including commodity prices, Law of the Sea, North–South Dialogue, economic compensation over nationalization of public utilities, UNCTAD, and nuclear proliferation (Brands 2010, Kedar 2016, 2018). The United States underwrote an economic order in South America that helped produce the private goods that subordinate elites required in order to support the order of the day. This is an example of how hegemony can breed stability when the hegemon is willing to provide private goods from which key partners in the regional social network can benefit. This occurred even when partner administrations in South America celebrated deals with the USSR encompassing commodity sales and technology purchases, including sensitive materials such as uranium yellowcake. Conservatism in Cold War South America

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came with a great deal of economic nationalism that the US was willing to accommodate. At the time, South American states felt empowered in their relations with a regional hegemon that had suffered a major defeat in Vietnam, had seen the Bretton Woods system collapse, and had seen a cartel of oil producers wreak havoc with the global economy. Many calculated that the United States was in decline, in a major departure in hemispheric relations (Brands 2010). For the reasons laid out above, the meaning of RSCs cannot be properly captured by parsimonious characterization of bandwagoning, given the complex dynamics of consent and resistance at play. In any case, compact formation might be a very soft form of bandwagoning, one in which secondary states retain significant leeway over the terms of their engagement with superior power. In fact, in-depth historical studies of key relationships at the time illustrate the degree to which ties between the United States and its autocratic partners were fraught with problems of policy coordination (see for instance Harmer 2013, Spektor 2009, Walker 2011, Weyland 2019). How and why did the South American RSC recede and die? A preliminary answer would take three factors into account. First of all, counterinsurgency was successful in South America to the point of virtually eliminating guerrilla activity toward the late 1970s. Second, the hegemon suffered growing divisions as the Church Committee in Congress exposed the atrocities committed by South American autocrats with the support of the White House in the altar of anti-Communism. This was compounded by the early attempt of the Jimmy Carter administration to suspend support for human rights violations, even if the final record of the administration on this particular score is more checkered than its supporters will acknowledge (Schmitz and Walker 2004, Sikkink 2004, Kelly 2018, Keys 2010). A third factor behind the end of the compact may be the fact that the US failed to curb intra-network geopolitical competition between Argentina and Brazil on the one hand, Argentina and Chile on the other, and then, more critically, between Argentina and the United Kingdom over the Falkland/Malvinas islands. During the Anglo-Argentine war, as the Reagan administration threw its weight behind Margaret Thatcher, the hierarchy that had formed through the compact itself broke down. If legitimacy is about making the order of the day “appear presumptive of inevitable” (MacKay 2019, 2), the United States lost the ability to restrain one of its major subordinates short of applying coercion. A working hypothesis to test against the record in the near future is the notion that failure by Washington to be the ultimate guarantor of regional order by deterring and managing intramural security competition among regional states came at a big cost. Hierarchical cores undertake costly symbolic capital in securing their status, and they pay the price when their endeavor does not succeed (Musgrave and Nexon 2018). Compact activity in Cold War South America succeeded in eliminating guerillas, but it caused mass atrocities that haunt regional societies to this day, and it helped wreck economies across the board. It instilled a culture of impunity

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that has helped South America retain high levels of inequality and abuse. Rabid disputes over the memory of that time remain to this day. With the benefit of hindsight, it is striking to see how far apart are the realities on the ground from the Nixon/Kissinger talk of hard-nosed realist calculations. The White House at the time paid the cost of destruction in the region at a level that was not warranted by the material environment of geopolitical competition against international Communism. Its policies were deeply affected by the domestic political calculations of South American ruling elites, and South American ideological preferences for “national security doctrines”. The RSC that evolved was surely not liberal and neither was it realist. In creating an environment in which peripheral tails could wag the hegemonic dog, the South American RSC was simply criminal.

Conclusion and Future Research This chapter has offered a view into the workings of regional hegemony in practice. By focusing on the formation, evolution, and death of a US-led regional social compact in Cold War South America, it has highlighted the ways in which the social power amassed by regionalism can be put to use in the pursuit of political violence against rebellious societies. RSCs underscore the ways in which the domestic constraints confronting incumbents in the hegemonic state and the secondary states are interconnected and shape the patterns of regional ordering, and the mechanisms through which dynamics occurring at the level of the periphery come to affect the ability of preponderant power to effectively exercise influence beyond its own borders. The study of RSCs also expands our understanding of inter-state interaction in hierarchical systems, and helps explain why strategic interaction makes it so hard for major powers to implement their grand strategies of choice. The study of repressive regionalism in South America can in the future help move Global IR forward in three distinctive ways. First, recent declassifications of key documents now make it possible to run a counterfactual exercise, comparing the story I tell in this chapter to a hypothetical South American environment in which there was no RSC. Second, the focus on repressive cooperation among regional autocrats should be complemented by a study of networked collaboration among dissenters. To date, this has been the sole remit of historians, but there is much that IR’s recent dive into the functioning of networks could offer in terms of specifying mechanisms and causal arrows. Finally, a major contribution to the field would result from work that seeks to specify the micro-foundations of regional hegemony. Given the fact that the historical experience of repression in the 1960s and 1970s still shapes political identities in South America, survey experiments could go a long way in helping us understand how memory of repression constrains regional public opinion on regional hegemony today.

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———. 2018. “Economic Neutrality during the Cold War: The World Bank, the United States, and Pinochet’s Chile, 1973–1977,” Cold War History 18/2: 149–167. DOI: 10.1080/14682745.2017.1420056. Kelly, Patrick William. 2018. Sovereign Emergencies: Latin America and the Making of Global Human Rights Politics. Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/9781316678749. Keohane, Robert. 1984. After Hegemony: Cooperation and Discord in the World Political Economy. Princeton University Press. Keys, Barbara. 2010. “Congress, Kissinger, and the Origins of Human Rights Diplomacy,” Diplomatic History 34/5: 823–851. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467–7709.2010. 00897.x. Koremenos, Barbara, Charles Lipson and Duncan Snidal. 2001. “The Rational Design of International Institutions,” International Organization, 55/4: 761–799. DOI: 10.1162/002081801317193592. Kornbluh, Peter. 2013. The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. The New Press. Krebs, R. Ronald and Patrick Thaddeus Jackson. 2007. “Twisting Tongues and Twisting Arms: The Power of Political Rhetoric.” European Journal of International Relations, 13/1: 35–66. DOI: 10.1177/1354066107074284. Lessa, Francesca. 2013. Memory and Transitional Justice in Argentina and Uruguay: Against Impunity. Palgrave Macmillan. López, Fernando. 2016. The Feathers of Condor. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. MacDonald, Paul K. 2014. Networks of Domination: The Social Foundations of Peripheral Conquest in International Politics. Oxford University Press. ———. 2018. “Embedded Authority: A Relational Network Approach to Hierarchy in World Politics,” Review of International Studies, 44/1: 128–150. DOI: 10.1017/ S0260210517000213. MacKay, Joseph. 2019. “Legitimation Strategies in International Hierarchies,” International Studies Quarterly, 63/3: 717–725. DOI: 10.1093/isq/sqz038. Marchesi, Aldo. 2018. Latin America’s Radical Left: Rebellion and Cold War in the Global 1960s. Cambridge University Press. Mariani, Ruy Mauro. 1969. Subdesenvolvimento e Revolução. Editora Insular. ———. 1977. “La acumulación capitalista mundial y el subimperialismo,” Cuadernos Políticos, 12: 183–217. Mattern, Janice Bially and Ayşe Zarakol. 2016. “Hierarchies in World Politics,” International Organization, 70/3: 623–654. DOI: 10.1017/S0020818316000126. McConaughey, Meghan, Paul Musgrave and Daniel H. Nexon. 2018. “Beyond Anarchy: Logics of Political Organization, Hierarchy, and International Structure,” International Theory, 10/2: 181–281. DOI: 10.1017/S1752971918000040. McSherry, J. Patrice. 2005. Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Mearsheimer, John J. 1994. “The False Promise of International Institutions.” International Security, 3: 5–49. DOI: 10.2307/2539078. Mearsheimer, John J. 2019. “Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order,” International Security, 43/4: 7–50. DOI: 10.1162/ISEC_a_00342. Menjívar, Cecilia and Néstor Rodríguez, orgs. 2005. When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S., and Technologies of Terror. University of Texas Press. Moravcsik, Andrew. 1998. Centralization or Fragmentation?: Europe before the Challenges of Deepening, Diversity, and Democracy. Council on Foreign Relations Press.

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Mulich, Jeppe. 2018. “Transformation at the Margins: Imperial Expansion and Systemic Change in World Politics,” Review of International Studies, 44/4: 694–716. DOI: 10.1017/S0260210518000074. Musgrave, Paul and Daniel Nexon. 2018. “Defending Hierarchy from the Moon to the Indian Ocean: Symbolic Capital and Political Dominance in Early Modern China and the Cold War,” International Organization, 72/3: 591–626. DOI: 10.1017/ S0020818318000139. Nexon, Daniel H. and Iver B. Neumann. 2018. “Hegemonic-Order Theory: A Field-Theoretic Account,” European Journal of International Relations, 24/3: 662–686. DOI: 10.1177/1354066117716524. O’Donnell, Guillermo. 1973. Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics. University of California Press. Oelsner, Andrea. 2005. International Relations in Latin America: Peace and Security in the Southern Cone. Routledge. Pereira, Anthony. 2018. “The U.S. Role in the 1964 Coup in Brazil: A Reassessment,” Bulletin of Latin American Research, 37/1: 5–17. DOI: 10.1111/blar.12518. Poggio, Teixeira and Carlos Gustavo. 2014. Brazil, the United States, and the South American Subsystem: Regional Politics and the Absent Empire. Lexington Books. Rabe, Stephen G. 1999. The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America. University of North Carolina Press. ———. 2012. The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America, 2nd ed. Oxford University Press. Riggirozzi, Pía and Diana Tussie. 2012. The Rise of Post-hegemonic Regionalism: The Case of Latin America. Springer. Santa-Cruz, Arturo. 2019. U.S. Hegemony and the Americas: Power and Economic Statecraft in International Relations. Routledge. Schilling, Paulo. 1981. O Expansionismo Brasileiro. Editora Global. Schmitz, David F. and e Vanessa Walker. 2004. “Jimmy Carter and the Foreign Policy of Human Rights: The Development of a Post-Cold War Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic History 28/1: 113–143. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467–7709.2004.00400.x. Schoultz, Lars. 1998. Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America. Harvard University Press. Sikkink, Kathryn. 2004. Mixed Signals: U.S. Human Rights Policy and Latin America. A Century Foundation Book. Cornell University Press. Solingen, Etel. 1999. Regional Orders at Century’s Dawn: Global and Domestic Influences on Grand Strategy. Princeton University Press. Spektor, Matias. 2009. Kissinger e o Brasil. ZaharEditores. Suri, Jeremy. 2003. Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente. Harvard University Press. Walker, Vanessa. 2011. “At the End of Influence: The Letelier Assassination, Human Rights, and Rethinking Intervention in US-Latin American Relations,” Journal of Contemporary History 46/1: 109–135. DOI: 10.1177/0022009410383295. Weyland, Kurt. 2019. Revolution and Reaction: The Diffusion of Authoritarianism in Latin America. Cambridge University Press. Zarakol, Ayşe. 2011. After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West. Cambridge University Press.

5 BIG IDEAS FROM SMALL PLACES Caribbean Thought for International Relations Kristina Hinds

Introduction The Caribbean1 is not generally a part of the world that springs to mind when thinking of either the discipline of International Relations (IR) or the activities that those immersed in the discipline study. It is hardly worth repeating that the discipline variously known as International Relations, International Politics and International Studies has been dominated by “Western” theory and philosophical underpinnings and has tended to focus on the concerns and activities of the powerful states in the world. Although, IR has evolved over the last 100 years to become a somewhat more heterogeneous field of study, key theories, concepts and thinkers, generally from the “West” or employing a Western-centric scope, still feature prominently in the disciplinary landscape. Thinking from small places, and in the context of the Caribbean, hardly registers on the radar of theoretical or conceptual framings in the field of IR. As these small places are of limited influence in world affairs, their lack of significance is perhaps unsurprising. Yet, a survey of the ideas that have been expressed and developed within Caribbean scholarship shows that this has been a region full of “big ideas” that have travelled the world and that contribute to our understanding of the world. Shedding light on these ideas is consistent with Acharya and Buzan’s call to move towards “thinking about ir from cultures and histories…” and taking “…a broad view of what counts as theory” (Acharya & Buzan, 2019, p. 6). In this chapter I propose that what has come to be termed the “Caribbean intellectual tradition” has been unable to escape having theoretical applicability for understanding world affairs. As a region that has experienced multiple migrations, including mass forced migrations of Africans during the

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trans-Atlantic slave trade, and that has contributed to the building of empire around which important elements of the world system have been built, it seems less than startling that Caribbean scholarship would be imbued with globally aware analysis. Caribbean theorising generally speaks of and to the world even as it seeks to speak of, to and for the region. The theoretical insights and works from this region tend to provide analytical frames for comprehending world politics that spring from specifically “Global South”2 or developing country vantage points. Therefore, Caribbean thought is relevant not just for Caribbean IR but for Global South IR. What is more, these perspectives also hold theoretical significance for broader IR, especially if one agrees with moving towards constructing a more Global IR. In this piece, I argue that the theoretical insights that Caribbean intellectual contributions provide are important, even if the politics of knowledge production within IR and of the application of scholarship to the field of IR may cause the discipline to be blind to these contributions. Moreover, constructing a Global IR requires that attention be paid to diverse ideas and places. Even those places with little visibility, as a result of their small size and their limits to international influence, can produce big and important ideas for understanding the world.

Acknowledging a Caribbean Intellectual Tradition Several scholars across the Caribbean have gone to lengths to document significant strands of thought that constitute a Caribbean intellectual tradition, painstakingly emphasising works coming particularly from the Anglophone, Francophone and Hispanophone sub-sections of the region.3 These works, though hardly exhaustive, have compiled and assessed historical, philosophical, anthropological, sociological, political, economic, literary and other works that are too cross-disciplinary to fit neatly into established disciplinary categories. Such compilations and assessments highlight that Caribbean scholarship may often be characterised by being activist and practice based. Beyond works that attempt to compile and document a Caribbean thought tradition, the works of Caribbean scholarship found in various scholarly and other publications have continually participated in building the recognition of a Caribbean scholarly tradition complete with its own canon. Within this Caribbean tradition of scholarship one can identify many strands and disciplinary approaches that can be applied to IR and which can be useful for thinking and theorising the field in more expansive and global ways. Generally, coverage of Caribbean scholarship and theorising has emphasised seminal 20th-century thinkers of which C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and Walter Rodney may be among some of the best known. Yet, the scholarship of these individuals does not fit squarely into IR. This is nothing that is strange to IR, however. IR is a field that has drawn theoretical insights from many thinkers who would have been unable to identify

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themselves as doing IR. Here one can easily point to the role of the ideas of Immanuel Kant, John Locke, Niccolo Machiavelli or Thomas Hobbes for providing some of the grounding for the liberal and realist theoretical approaches to IR. Similarly, the thoughts of Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci have contributed to Critical Theory in IR. So, even while Caribbean scholars have conducted extensive work in efforts to document the existence of a distinctly Caribbean thought tradition and to present the insights that this tradition offers about the world, they have tended not to connect the ideas emerging from the region to IR nor do they frame these ideas as either informing or helping to build IR theory. This may have more to do with the disciplinary locations of the scholars who have reflected on the Caribbean thought tradition (emerging variously from Literature, Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science and inter-disciplinary backgrounds) than it has to do with the relevance of such thought to IR theory. All the same, Caribbean scholarship has often expressed reflections and analyses of the functioning of the world and of the role and location of the Caribbean and its people in the world. This Caribbean intellectual tradition has generally started from Caribbean frames of reference to present radical, historically grounded, anticolonial/de-colonial thinking that has focussed on the injustices in the world and on strategies for overcoming these. These perspectives provide explanatory, normative and liberating views for IR that can supplement other similar IR theoretical offerings. Paget Henry has pulled together notable strands in Caribbean thought and presents them as Caribbean Philosophy. He states that although prominent thinkers in the region such as C.L.R James, Frantz Fanon and Wilson Harris have created works of philosophical value, paradoxically this type of thought has not been presented to the region as Caribbean Philosophy. He masterfully illustrates how Caribbean intellectual production has created a canon of Caribbean Philosophy, “hidden by clouds of racist invisibility” (Henry, 2000, pp. xi–xii). One can argue similarly that Caribbean intellectual production is very much IR and offers theoretical insights, but the IR theory within such thought requires “excavation”, to quote Henry (Henry, 2000, p. xii). Don Marshall’s characterisation of Caribbean thought is also instructive for helping us to reflect on both the canon of Caribbean thought and its applicability to IR theorising. He notes that The work emanating from George Lamming, Sylvia Wynter, Kamau Brathwaite, Jacqui Alexander, Peter Tosh, CLR James, Shake Keane, Olive Senior and others alongside subterranean grammars that capture anticolonial expressions in art, speech, song, style and sketches of memory of the ‘body’ and ‘order’ all supply philosophical openings, images and metaphors for reimagining a humane and just world order. (Marshall, 2016, p. 171)

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Marshall’s assertion that these thinkers all provide insights into the building of a just and humane world order is a key component of what Caribbean thought has to offer IR theorising. Here Marshall illuminates the IR applicability of these works in ways consistent with Acharya and Buzan’s views about taking seriously thinking that falls outside of accepted IR scholarship and about building understanding of “civilisations” by drawing on other types of sources including cultural and spiritual ones (Acharya & Buzan, 2019, pp. 310–313). However, it is both the “otherness” and the defiant content of these Caribbean works that partially help to explain how and why they can be left out of IR. On the one hand, the emphasis on a world order and on a world system places this type of work within the field of IR as system type analyses are quite loved in IR. On the other hand, the works of the individuals to whom Marshall refers allude to injustice in the world wrought by a racialised system that was spread through European colonial adventures. This system has violated many people in many locations. This system endures and it must be overcome. The normative and status quo upsetting element of these perspectives may leave them outside the field of vision of IR; this and their emphasis on a world system in which states are less important than (racialised) global injustice. Silvio Torres-Saillant appraises “…that the cluster of societies that formed in the Caribbean in the course of the colonial transaction has actively thought about itself and the rest of the world for over five centuries…” (Torres-Saillant, 2006, p. 5). The very nature of the Caribbean as we know it today was significantly shaped by European adventures, conquest, indigenous genocide and multiple voluntary and forced migrations, which combined have almost forced intellectual reflections on the small “island” spaces that constitute it to be international in focus. Bolland contends that Caribbean thought tends to share the common analytical focus on understanding “…the political, cultural and psychological impact of colonialism, slavery and racism” (Bolland, 2004, p. xxiv). I would extend this perspective to assert that the smallness of Caribbean states and territories and their limits in power within world politics have necessitated the international and often systemic emphasis of these analyses, in ways that might be less important in the American context where similar experiences are shared by some African-American scholarship. In addition to Caribbean thought being simultaneously about specific Caribbean states/territories, the region and the world, this scholarship has also tended to be internationalist. Rhoda Reddock has noted the significance of the “transnational” in informing Caribbean social thought, both in light of the migrations that constituted the region as a consequence of colonial contact and in light of the outward migrations of Caribbean thinkers who, though diasporic themselves, formed new and fluid diasporas (Reddock, 2014, p. 4). Let us consider some of the noted 20th-century Caribbean thinkers who tend to be seen as sources of Caribbean big ideas. Here I also consider the

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tendencies in Caribbean thought that these authors present as a starting point to help us to apply Caribbean scholarly reflections to IR theorising.

Tying the 20th-Century Caribbean Intellectual Tradition to IR Theorising The work of C.L.R. James4 is perhaps some of the best known and likely the most extensively analysed in the area of Caribbean thought. So influential is James’ thinking that there is even a C.L.R James Journal that is published by the Caribbean Philosophical Association. To be sure, James’ ideas cannot be neatly fit into any one accepted academic disciplinary tradition. In a 2001 article, Caryl Phillips labelled James “The Most Noteworthy Caribbean Mind of the Twentieth Century”. The author opens the piece by stating the following: The difficulty with C.L.R. James has always been location, both in the literal sense (his life being a testament to compulsive itinerancy), and in terms of the many categories under which he is acknowledged to have achieved. He broke ground in the fields of literature, literary criticism, cultural studies, political theory, history and philosophy, and in more than one of these areas he can be looked upon as a pioneer. (Phillips, 2001, p. 118) The difficulty in placing James’ work is a facet of his intellectual contribution that he shares in common with many Caribbean intellectuals and with much of Caribbean thought. This “un-disciplined” nature of Caribbean scholarly analysis is itself worthy of further discussion as it reveals much about both IR as a discipline and about the disciplining of the study of the world within this academic tradition. This is a point to which I will return later. For now, let us return to the example of James and the insights that his works offer IR theory. James’ The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Santo Domingo Revolution is renowned as a masterpiece for its discussion of the dynamics of the Haitian Revolution, and for presenting both the forces at work within the world in which this revolution took place and the possibilities that this revolution offered for the world ( James, 1963). This work is significant for IR in particular for dispelling a myth about the exclusively European origins of liberal revolutions that helped to constitute modernity. Indeed, the Haitian Revolution can only be disconnected from and viewed as lesser than its American and French counterparts if a racialised hierarchy, that would view this as an uncivilised rebellion, is used. James’ extensive analysis of the Haitian Revolution is significant both because of the analytical insights it offers and because of the invisibility of this revolution in narratives about the development of a state system. Michel-Rolph Trouillot reiterates this point, noting that the Haitian Revolution was significant to the “Age of Revolution”, but states that “the silencing of the Haitian

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Revolution”, through its continual exclusion from French and wider European historiography, constitutes a mis-telling of the history of the West (Trouillot, 1995 cited in Mills, 2010, p. 179). That a slave society could defeat a world power, invoking equality and freedom, and then could be punished for such provides a telling insight into the racialised way in which the world system has developed. This theoretical insight, which James offers in his gem of a book, is one worth considering within IR. Further, the proposition that the world is ordered around racialised exclusions is a common thread that runs through many Caribbean analyses. Those more specialised in his work than I have essayed James’ thought at length, unearthing and keeping alive the powerful ideas that he presented during the 20th century. Aaron Kamugisha, for instance, notes that James’ A History of a Negro Revolt presents the enslaved of San Domingo as “… closer to a modern proletariat than any group of workers in existence at that time” ( James cited in Kamugisha, 2019, p. 17). As such, James presents enslaved people in the Caribbean as part of an international class of workers, rather than an isolated pocket of backward slaves. Kamugisha further asserts that History of a Negro Revolt introduces the formerly enslaved Haitians “as a revolutionary force in the world politics of the age”. He goes on to note the way in which this work skilfully connects the British abolition of slavery with capitalism’s ascent and contends that James’ work positions plantation slavery at the heart of modernity (Kamugisha, 2019, p. 17). Therefore, James’ analysis both locates Caribbean plantation slavery as critical to the development of the world system and places the forced labourers of these plantations within an international class of workers. However, as Paget Henry indicates, slavery allowed for the insertion of Africans within European capitalism in a way that legitimated their subjugation on racialised grounds (Henry, 2000, p. 55). James’ framing of the world system as capitalist, modern and constructed in this way ( both capitalist and modern) on the basis of a racialised system of plantation slavery is significant. This provides a corrective for racially neutral framings of the evolution of the modern state system which characterise IR. Rather than conceiving of the 20th-century world as emerging as modern and characterised by the Westphalian state system, the insights that James’ works provide offer fruitful ground for theorising the world as based on a capitalist exploitative system. Indeed, James was a Marxist, but his contribution diverged in viewing capitalism as a system that was not built on industrialisation in Europe, at least not alone. Instead plantation slavery and colonisation have been key to crafting this system. In James’ work, one can see both the analytical potentials for theorising about the functioning of the world and also his view that revolutionary actions of the oppressed could overturn the system in favour of a more just, non-racist order. Henry frames James’ analytical offering as historicism, which Henry asserts is key to the Caribbean philosophical tradition. Henry classifies this historicist tendency as having a Marxist and a pan-African

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branch, even if the branches may not be cleanly separated (Henry, 2000, pp. 6, 51–55). I would extend this to assert that this historicist approach is key to the theoretical contribution that Caribbean thought makes to IR as well. The concentration on (re)telling history so that it reflects Caribbean realities and the sources of these realities in the international, as well as the influences of these realities on the international, is essential to the contribution that Caribbean scholarship offers to Third World scholarship and broader IR scholarship. We can glean that power relations across the state system cannot be separated from oppressive and racialised histories, as the history of the Caribbean–European relationship exemplifies. Twentieth-century historian Elsa Goveia’s5 work could be very easily placed within this historicist tradition too. Her assessment offers a rich discussion of the tensions regarding the abolition of the slave trade and slavery within West Indian societies which were (and are) stratified by race and colour all the way through as part of the imperialist system. She indicates that the demolition of facets of this system resulted from the rise of a human rights movement during the 19th century. However, this movement and its tenets were resisted by beneficiaries of the plantation system who were repaid for their “losses” with the abolition of slavery even while the introduction of wage labour provided a more efficient labour allocation system by this time (Goveia, [1965] 2004). Goveia also connects the abolition of slavery to an international human rights movement, which has generated international human rights norms today. Still, she asserts that the superimposition of human rights onto the West Indies has been awkward since social, economic and political stratification in the region has perpetuated gross inequality even after the demise of colonisation. Even while providing a historical evaluation of the demise of slavery and its consequences, this work provides an analysis of the effects of system level factors, namely imperialism on the region. Further, it provides international context in consideration of the abolition of slavery as part of a worldwide human rights movement and norms which still continue in ways that are compatible and incompatible with Caribbean societal structures. Both this compatibility and incompatibility can be linked to the lingering effects of colonisation on the region which has squarely inserted the Caribbean within international (or global) processes and forces (Goveia, [1965] 2004). Goveia’s work advances a useful way of understanding the difficulties that Caribbean states, as well as other developing countries, face in fully living up to international human rights expectations. Although their historical struggles for the recognition of rights and freedoms have been essential elements of developing human rights norms, the violations that Caribbean people faced during colonisation have systematically ingrained and normalised rights violations. While not taking the Marxist analytical line, one can see in Goveia’s historical work a tendency that holds some likeness in terms of its theoretical implications to James’. We see her assessment of the determinate nature of

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colonisation and its partner, plantation slavery. Her work reveals the criticality of colonisation and the racialisation that accompanied it for undergirding the world as we know it. Moreover, she places the enslaved person within an international community, with the abolition of slavery forming part of a wider human rights movement, that is, a movement to counter injustices perpetuated by the structure of the world system. We have a system, again, characterised by injustice, built in no small part on the back of colonisation in which the Caribbean and its inhabitants have been key. This system perpetuates racialised injustices which must be overturned. However, Goveia problematises overturning of such due to the internal complexities of Caribbean locations that have been so affected by colonisation. This insight bears striking resemblance to the notion of “coloniality”.6 Let us move now, following Henry’s assertion that pan-Africanism is a significant branch of the Caribbean historicist tradition, to assess pan-Africanist thought as systemic analysis of how the world functions. Pan-Africanism generally assesses the world system as one characterised by racialised injustice and which must be overcome by means of Africans. Reddock notes the significance of pan-Africanism as a strain of radical Caribbean social thought throughout the 20th century as conceptualised by Henry Sylvester-Williams of Trinidad and popularly advanced by Marcus Mosiah Garvey. Despite the common emphasis on American W.E.B. Du Bois, Caribbean thinkers and activists were key to advancing this international movement. Rupert Lewis also extends this point noting that Walter Rodney formed part of West Indian tradition of scholar–activist–practitioner exemplified by J.J. Thomas in the 19th century, and Eric Williams and C.L.R. James during the 20th century. Further, Lewis links Rodney’s pan-Africanism to a wider Caribbean scholar–activist tradition that included George Padmore, C.L.R. James and Frantz Fanon (Lewis, 1998, pp. 69, 167). Reddock also documents the importance of Amy Ashwood Garvey and other less known pan-Africanist thinkers from the Caribbean, specifically John Jacob Thomas (Trinidad), Edward Blyden (St. Thomas), Theophilus Scholes ( Jamaica), Norman Cameron (Guyana) and Robert Love (Bahamian born but resided in Jamaica), and further states that Otto Huiswood and Hermia Dumont-Huiswood (both from Suriname) were of critical influence within the Harlem Renaissance (Reddock, 2014, p. 5). I note their names here, following Reddock, to highlight the people whose contributions were important to this internationalist movement, that itself holds but minor place within IR. It is also important to note that pan-Africanism was activist and internationalist in bringing together like-minded people in international congresses. George Padmore and Amy Ashwood Garvey were the principal organisers of the 1945 Pan-African Congress, which could be viewed as significant to the independence movements across Africa, as several emerging African political

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leaders participated in this congress (Reddock, 2014, p. 5). What we see in panAfricanism is an internationalist movement in which people came together to collectively theorise about the world. This movement was heavily influenced by Caribbean activists and thinkers. Indeed, Marcus Garvey influenced African political leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah; first governor general of sovereign Nigeria Nnamdi Azikiwe; and the African National Congress in South Africa (Reddock, 2014, p. 5). Along the trajectory of pan-Africanism, Walter Rodney’s7 treatment of the Black Power as a movement against global imperialism cannot help but be viewed as of importance for understanding international politics from a Caribbean vista. Rodney proposed that in the international system, the state is less important than the racialised character of this system which is based on white supremacy. The relative insignificance of the state and, in contrast, the omnipotence of race to this system are visible both in the treatment of former white colonies versus that of former “non-white” colonies, and in the discriminatory treatment meted out towards black Americans in the USA. Thus, the international system is one of stratification and unequal power relations, not on the basis of statehood but on the basis of race, and this can be seen in the way in which enrichment and benefits tend to flow to some groups of people, while poverty tends to characterise the lived circumstances of others. Interestingly, Rodney also predicted the ability of China to break this highly racialised imperialist system, foretelling current-day IR preoccupations with the rise of China as a world power. What is more, Rodney’s points regarding the need for reparations as correctives to the destructive racialised system remain important points of discussion within IR of non-Western states (Rodney, [1969] 2004). Speaking specifically of Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rupert Lewis opines that “Rodney tried to do for Africa what the dependency theorists…had done for Latin America” (Lewis, 1998, p. 69). Rupert Lewis’ appraisal also aptly captures that Rodney’s analysis of the relationship between Europe and Africa provides a cutting analysis of the world system. Rodney’s analysis exposes that the world system has been fashioned through colonisation so that production is achieved using cross-territorial social production, mediated by technology. However, Rodney indicates that this production system benefits only a small class of the world’s population who are racially characterised as “white” and spatially located in Europe and North America (Lewis, 1998, p. 73; Rodney, [1972] 2001). Although How Europe Underdeveloped Africa concentrates on the relationship between Europe and Africa, this relationship is couched in system-focussed analysis in Rodney’s treatment of the international economy and of capitalism, which he terms “international capitalism” or “the capitalist/imperialist system” (Rodney, [1972] 2001, pp. 24–25). This system focus can be paralleled with much of IR analyses of a supposed international system. In the fifth chapter of

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this book, Rodney clearly paints the Africa–Europe–system linkage that produced and produces the “North” and “South” in stating the following: Colonial Africa fell within that part of the international capitalist economy from which surplus was drawn to feed the metropolitan sector… Colonialism was not merely a system of exploitation, but one whose essential purpose was to repatriate the profits to the so-called ‘mother country’. From an African view-point, that amounted to consistent expatriation of surplus produced by African labour out of African resources. It meant the development of Europe as part of the same dialectical process in which Africa was underdeveloped. (Rodney, [1972] 2001, p. 149) Once again, the theoretical contribution that Rodney’s historicist work can provide to IR follows a similar general trail as those thinkers that I have already presented. To be clear, Rodney’s work shares with the previously noted thinkers the idea that the world system is a racialised capitalist one which colonisation was critical to constructing and which needs to be corrected. Of course, there are other writers that I could emphasise here, Frantz Fanon8 being another seminal 20th-century Caribbean thinker, to whom I have only briefly alluded so far. Again, the disciplinary diversity of the Caribbean scholastic tradition is clear. Fanon was a psychiatrist who used psycho-analysis to think about the effects of colonisation and its concomitant racialisation along blackwhite lines, its effects on the black person and its contribution to constructing an imperialist system based on white supremacy that must be overturned (Fanon, 1963, 1967; Marshall, 2016, pp. 174–175). Fanon’s contribution of negritude has been critical to wider Black Power and pan-African movements. Fanon can also be viewed as a founding father of the post-colonial tradition (Persaud & Sajed, 2018, p. 3). We cannot easily disentangle the insights that Fanon provided from either James’ or Rodney’s thinking. Nor can one easily divorce these lines of anti-colonial thinking from the more extensive trajectory of Caribbean thinking, even within the Caribbean feminist tradition, which I will discuss a bit later. For example, Kemala Kepmadoo notes that Fanon’s ideas have been important to her work, along with the ideas of C.L.R James and Walter Rodney. She contends that she is among the contemporary social theorists who continue their legacies but “complicate these analyses due to recognition of gender and the persistence of neo-colonial relations in the postcolonial, twenty-first century Caribbean…” (Kempadoo, 2004, p. 11). Michelle Rowley also notably engages Fanon, through interrogation of his privileging of race in a way that is void of gender (Rowley, 2010). The influence of Fanon, and the thought of other 20th-century Caribbean analyses, within the Caribbean is undeniable, but we also should not underestimate their appeal to oppressed people of the world as persuasive and powerful perspectives for understanding

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how the world works. Clearly, the analytical offering for IR that Fanon’s insights present are important.

Caribbean Thought as Theory for International Political Economy In the area of International Political Economy, Caribbean scholars have also provided systemic theorising about the nature of underdevelopment in the region and in the world. The best known of such thinkers is Sir W. Arthur Lewis,9 St. Lucian Economist and Nobel Laureate W. Arthur Lewis’s work in the field of development economics provided economic strategies for overcoming underdevelopment. In the Caribbean, Lewis is best known for what has come to be called the “Lewis Model” of “industrialisation by invitation”, which addresses the need for Caribbean industrialisation to be built by employing surplus labour in industry which would be developed using foreign investment. W. Arthur Lewis’ work on “the dual economy model” is widely known for providing general analyses of the problems of underdevelopment being linked to the common existence across the Third World of underdeveloped capitalist sectors and overdeveloped agrarian sectors combined with underemployed (or surplus) labour. As Girvan notes, this work builds on W. Arthur Lewis’ analysis of the Caribbean but expands this by examining other countries (Girvan, 2005, p. 203). Similarly, Joseph asserts that W. Arthur Lewis’ work placed the Caribbean experience within broader global context and as such focussed on “…demonstrating West Indian commonality as distinct from West Indian particularity” ( Joseph, 2009, p. 38). Consequently, in W. Arthur Lewis’ scholarship, we see work of immense value for analysing underdevelopment in a global context. Girvan further asserts that W. Arthur Lewis’ work on trade and development in the 19th century provides even broader global context in helping to situate elements of continued underdevelopment in developing countries in their trade relationships with “core” countries, which is somewhat similar to Latin American structuralist thought. Here W. Arthur Lewis’ “The Evolution of the International Economic Order” stands out as an important piece (Girvan, 2005, pp. 199–203; Lewis, 1982). Although W. Arthur Lewis’ work is world renowned and can offer insights into development of value to International Political Economy, particularly in the field of Development Studies (which may or may not be viewed as IR). His emphasis on development as growth and the prominence that he placed on foreign investment for industrialisation have generally led to his exclusion from appraisals of the Caribbean scholarly tradition of the 20th century. For example, Joseph notes that Caribbeanists who have chronicled Caribbean thought have placed Lewis’ ideas outside of the tradition of Caribbean intellectualism. W. Arthur Lewis’ ideas are seen variously as focussed on the concerns of Europe, Britain and the bourgeoisie as espoused by an Anglophile

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with hegemony-affirming leanings ( Joseph, 2009, pp. 32–35). Although Lewis wrote to the British Colonial Office in the 1940s to contest their negative view of industrialisation in the West Indian colonies which was presented in the 1938 Moyne Report; although he participated in the socialist, anti-colonial and pan-Africanist movements in the UK in the 1950s; and although he viewed his contributions to knowledge building as anti-imperialist, his moderate approach has resulted in his scholarship being viewed as outside of the Caribbean intellectual tradition (Girvan, 2005; Joseph, 2009). W. Arthur Lewis’ moderate (which some might also consider to be conservative) analyses also led to his work being heavily critiqued by Caribbean scholars. Lewis’ recommendations regarding industrialisation through openness to foreign capital were especially singled out for criticism, a fate similar to criticisms of Raul Prebisch’s recommendations in Latin America (Girvan & Girvan, 1973, p. 4). The New World Group constituted a group of Caribbeanists who were particularly critical of W. Arthur Lewis’ ideas. In 1960, the academics and students at the University of the West Indies formed the West Indian Society for the Study of Social Issues. Lloyd Best (Trinidadian Economist) and David de Caires (Guyanese lawyer and publisher) re-established this entity as the New World Group (NWG) in 1962. This wide grouping of diverse thinkers from across the Caribbean sought to develop indigenous thought and to overcome dependence in all of its forms, whether cultural, economic or more broadly structural. Girvan, who belonged to the group during its existence in the 1960s and 1970s, describes the overarching concerns of the group as with epistemic and economic dependence (Girvan, 2006, pp. 331–333). Although the NWG was a diverse collective, the economic thought emerging from it is best known. Here the plantation economy model expounded in the joint works of Lloyd Best and Kari Levitt and in analyses by George Beckford are best known (Beckford, 1972; Best & Levitt, 2009).10 At the core of their ideas is the assessment of the plantation being essential to underdevelopment in the Caribbean and the view that even after colonisation and with the demise of the plantation itself, the plantation economy model of extraction from the region, using external capital, in undiversified economies continues to leave the Caribbean region underdeveloped. The system of extraction and exploitation remains and has been expanded as part of a global system in which the multi-national corporation has become important (Best & Levitt, 2009; Girvan, 2005, pp. 212–213; Girvan, 2006, p. 335; Green, 2001, pp. 43–58). Like the other examples of Caribbean thought that I have provided so far, the Caribbean plantation that characterised colonisation is central to the analysis. The plantation economy was key to building empire, and thus the asymmetrical power relations that characterise the world economy. All the while this system has continually kept the Caribbean in a state of dependency, even after the plantation. The thought of the NWG formed a branch of broader Dependency theory that provided particular insights from Caribbean perspectives.

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This Caribbean thought not only should be viewed as theoretically relevant to IR, but it is indeed an often-overlooked component of Structuralist, Dependency and even World Systems thinking in the discipline. I could go on to present the thinking of several other Caribbean scholars, each of whom makes similarly important contributions, though with different emphases and nuances. Unfortunately, I cannot do any of these scholars sufficient justice in a chapter of this length. Yet, by now the point about a Caribbean thought tradition being able to make valuable theoretical contributions to IR should be clear. I must provide another caveat here, which is that, so far, I have presented a quite unified, mostly Anglophone and very masculinist treatment of Caribbean thought and its offerings for IR theorising. This reveals my biases and limitations as a Caribbean person from the part of the region formerly colonised by Britain. This Anglo-centrism is not only my own bias though; it also reveals much about the over-representation of English language in knowledge dissemination within the world of academia. Even in Caribbean academia, within which the University of the West Indies, one of the premiere institutions of Caribbean knowledge production and dissemination in the region, has also been an English language–dominant institution. As pertains to the field of IR, Acharya and Buzan allude to the gaps in “West- and indeed Anglosphere-centric” IR scholarship which stands as a hurdle to creating a more global field of study (Acharya & Buzan, 2019, p. 6). Regrettably, I have also succumbed to this to some degree, even while acknowledging the problematic nature of such. The masculinist bias of this piece also reveals biases in the existing Caribbean literature that seeks to collate and establish a Caribbean scholarly canon. It also follows a pattern of discounting women’s knowledge production within wider academia. I admit then that my discussion so far simplifies in ways that replicate some of the same problems that this piece seeks to address. I offer the potentials of Caribbean feminist thought as a corrective (though incomplete and still Anglo-dominant).

Caribbean Feminist Thought as IR Theorising The common narrative about Caribbean intellectual thought is that it was at its zenith between the early 20th century and the post–World War II period but met a decline in production by the 1980s with the rise of neo-liberalism and the closure radical, status quo–defying political options in the world. The end of the Cold War short-circuited the (radical) Caribbean scholarly tradition ( Joseph, 2017, p. 100; McCollin, 2012; Meeks, 2001, p. xiv). Yet, it is at this point of alleged decline that we see a shift in knowledge production within the Caribbean intellectual tradition. This shift is in the direction of Caribbean feminist theorising. All the same, those who have set about documenting this glorious legacy of Caribbean thought tend to minimise Caribbean feminist thought within Caribbean scholarship. Tonya Haynes’ assessment of Caribbean

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feminist thought illuminates this blindness. Haynes skilfully presents the diversity of Caribbean feminist scholarship and presents it as firmly within the Caribbean intellectual tradition, despite feminist scholarship often being treated in over-simplified ways by those who attempt to document and represent trajectories in Caribbean theorising (Haynes, 2017). Eudine Barriteau’s efforts to purposefully build Caribbean feminist theory and to present the theoretical implications of analyses of Caribbean women’s lives may be a useful starting point in considering the IR theoretical implications of Caribbean feminist thought. Barriteau appraises social scientific studies of Caribbean women’s lives, particularly within Caribbean families, that began to proliferate between the 1950s and the 1970s. She then combines these studies with a focus on activist work of Caribbean women’s organisations and the important contribution of the Women in the Caribbean Project (1979–1982). As such, Barriteau illustrates continuity in the ways in which the scholar– practitioner–activist connection which characterises Caribbean thought has been important in Caribbean feminism (Barriteau, 1992, pp. 6–8). Similarly, Lynn Bolles, using the lens of Anthropology, discusses the importance of 1970s work that examined Caribbean women’s lives within the context of families and the experiences of debt crises and austerity in the region from the 1970s onwards (Bolles, 1996, p. 106). On the basis of the combined importance of understanding Caribbean women’s lived experiences, Barriteau proposes a Caribbean feminist theoretical approach that focuses on “… recognising difference, working on the immediate environment to achieve political action, and recognising the gendered nature of all social relations” (Barriteau, 1992, p. 14). The approach she proposes challenges universal claims that exclude Caribbean people who have been subjected to the gendered and racialised colonial exclusions that characterise Western knowledge production. This approach places emphasis on analysis that is imbued with acknowledgement of the effects of gender, race, class and sexual identity on the myriad experiences of Caribbean women (Barriteau, 1992). Barriteau does not make specific reference to the theoretical relevance of this approach to IR. However, the type of theoretical approach that she offers advances important understandings of the world from frames outside of the “hegemonic”, with reference to both Western-centric knowledge production in general and feminist knowledge production. Caribbean feminist scholarship helps to make the point that understanding women’s lives and by extension their location in world affairs can be enhanced by Caribbean analyses. Such analyses acknowledge the ways in which Caribbean women have formed important parts of the global workforce since colonisation in the Caribbean, particularly through enslavement. As a result, Caribbean women have long been critically involved as workers within a capitalist system, even while being expected to be responsible for care work. All the while, Caribbean women have been viewed as aberrant for not conforming to

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Western-centric expectations of a “woman”, difficult for them to conform with in light of this very same placement in an internationally gendered division of labour. This contradiction has coloured women’s lives and their experiences of global occurrences that affect the Caribbean (Bolles, 1996; Ho, 1999). Caribbean feminist scholarship embodies global processes by placing women and their experiences within the global. For instance, Kamala Kempadoo uses the Caribbean as a location for revealing the ways in which there is a global division of labour that is gendered and racist but that also includes, and has long included, sexual labour (Kempadoo, 2004). Scholars such as Patricia Mohammed and Verene Shepherd who look at Indian, and more broadly Asian, women in the Caribbean also provide revealing analyses about global migrations that have exhibited themselves in the Caribbean through a group often omitted from analyses of the Caribbean, its history and its relationship to empire and the world (Mohammed, 2009; Shepherd, 2002). Caribbean feminist thought helps to lay out the gendered ways in which the world has been structured by placing women in the Caribbean within global processes and by illuminating how the construction of the world as it exists metes out and reproduces injustice that one can observe in the experiences of Caribbean women. Caribbean women’s experiences are specific but also illustrative of wider forces, as such, Caribbean feminist thought can provide worthwhile conceptual power for IR theorising. Barriteau, for instance, notes both the specific nature of Caribbean experience and the wider applicability (Barriteau, 1998, p. 157). Though beginning from the Caribbean experience, she discusses the ways in which the application of her Caribbean feminist approach can offer insights into the workings of the world, especially the world as experienced by people living in post-colonial spaces. Even if not easily generalisable, the suggestion that what Barriteau terms “gender systems” frame and influence interactions with the world, and are indeed characteristic of the functioning of the world, can be viewed as a useful theoretical contribution to Feminist IR theorising and to the universe of IR theorising more generally. Of course, Barriteau is but one Caribbean feminist thinker and Caribbean feminist thought is far from monolithic. While Barriteau’s approach is post-modern, Jacqui Alexander’s examination of the contradictions of citizenship in the Caribbean uses post-colonial framings to interrogate the racialised, gendered and hetero-normative failings, exclusions and gaps that characterise Westphalian sovereignty (Alexander, 1994). Although Alexander uses Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas as her reference points, the implications of her insights into thinking about the unjustly structured and maintained state, and by extension the state system, are of relevance from an IR theoretical perspective. Despite their differences, both approaches ask that we embody our analytical frames in thinking about the world, rather than functioning on the basis of supposedly neutral, disembodied abstractions, that are neither neutral nor disembodied both in their creation and in their consequences. These works illustrate, using the Caribbean feminist

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vantage point, that philosophical and practical moorings of interactions in the world are influenced by relations of power that are hetero-normative, gendered and racialised in ways that are inseparable from the cross-border processes of European colonisation. Despite the powerful understandings that Caribbean feminists have provided to the corpus of Caribbean thought, noteworthy Caribbean analysts have treated Caribbean feminist scholarship as derivative and somewhat peripheral. For instance, Haynes notes that works by Hilary Beckles (2004) and Denis Benn (2004) separately treat Caribbean feminist thought as being too parochial in its focus and this undermines its ability to analyse the vagaries of the colonial enslavement that dehumanised Caribbean men. Haynes also critiques Meeks (2007) who treats to one feminist thinker (i.e. Barriteau), generalises her ideas to Caribbean feminist thought and then critiques Caribbean feminist thought as incomplete for its treatment of women and gender as primary considerations rather than treating economic matters and “capital” as foundational (Haynes, 2017, pp. 39, 43–44). Yet, even as Caribbean feminist thought breaks with elements of a wider Caribbean intellectual tradition in emphasising the primacy of gender for understanding power relations and social/economic organisation, this thinking is also very consistent with wider Caribbean thought. Caribbean feminist theorising shares with the wider Caribbean scholarly tradition a commitment to unveiling systemic exclusions as they manifest in the Caribbean. Haynes rightly views the disregard of Caribbean feminist scholarship on the basis that this scholarship revolves around the lived experiences of Caribbean women and, thereby, does not fit into established (or mainstream) points of reference for Caribbean thinking, as ironic. The irony lies in the fact that the broad Caribbean intellectual tradition critiques Western-centric analytical vantage points for being blind to or purposely excluding Caribbean realities (Haynes, 2017, p. 48). Caribbean feminism, in all of its diversity, does exactly this but using feminist emphases as the pivots. This last point about reframing our understandings of the world from perspectives and philosophical moorings that challenge accepted “Western” framings is the final one that I wish to briefly present as an important contribution of Caribbean thought to (Global) IR theorising, and more broadly to social and philosophical studies.

The Caribbean Challenge to Western-Centrism as an IR Theoretical Contribution The Caribbean is an intriguing region because of its development as a meeting point (both voluntary and involuntary) of many cultures and peoples. This contact forged via colonisation and thereafter has simultaneously accommodated and suppressed diverse ways of thinking, acting and indeed being.

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As a consequence, scholarly evaluations from the region have challenged Western-centric views while also at times being infused with both the West and varied elements of “the rest”. The use of Marxist ideas in the challenges provided by some of the previously mentioned Caribbean scholars illustrates this, as does the reliance on post-modernism noted in Barriteau’s work and other “Western” framings in Caribbean scholarship. Edourd Glissant11 is well noted for speaking of this experience in the region as of “creolisation”, which is in his words “unpredictable” and “does not produce direct synthesis, but ‘resultants’, results: something else, another way” (Glissant cited in Murdoch, 2013, p. 877). Murdoch assesses that Glissant’s emphasis on the particularities of time, space and location allowed him to escape the “clichés an anti-colonialist theoretical position” (Murdoch, 2013, p. 877), a point which might indicate how Caribbean thought may offer insights into thinking beyond the “West” while not being formulaic in doing so. Although some may disagree with Glissant’s perspective on Caribbean (or Antillean to use his language) other-worldliness, the view that he provides on the hybrid character of Caribbean conceptualisations is helpful. Speaking broadly of Caribbean scholarship, Torres-Saillant notes that what he calls a “Caribbean discourse” has emerged from the thought and writings coming from the region that have contested the “the discursive normalization and defamation by the West” (Torres-Saillant, 2006, p. 8). Like Glissant, Torres-Saillant conceptualises the region as “a world apart” (Torres-Saillant, 2006, p. 5). In noteworthy ways, these approaches bear similarities to Barriteau’s view (previously discussed) that, though the Caribbean can offer insights on the workings of the world and for other Global South locales, the experiences and insights are not easily generalisable. Other Caribbean thinkers have also addressed the contestation of European or Western constructions that the body of Caribbean scholarship offers. Scholars such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Charles Mills, Paget Henry, Sylvia Wynter are among those who contest accepted notions of being human and of thinking “correctly” advanced within the Euro-centric tradition, in their work (Bogues, 2006; Césaire, [1972] 2004; Haynes, 2016; Henry, 2000; Mills, 2010; Fanon, 1967). The challenge to accepted thought systems and ways of being acceptably human (or civilised) are useful points of theoretical contribution that Caribbean scholarship can offer IR theorising, even though, as Torres-Saillant points out, some of the scholars in the region “have echoed Western deprecation in their appraisals of the region” (Torres-Saillant, 2006, p. 8). Indeed, the diversity of the region’s “scholars” and of its thought tradition means that these ideas tend to be misfits for established disciplinary boxes. This lack of fit is indicative of the challenging nature of Caribbean thinking which often does not even attempt to be placed within accepted disciplinary categories. Further, Henry’s emphasis on what he calls a poeticist tradition is notable for highlighting how important Caribbean philosophical contributions come

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from areas and approaches that have been somewhat unusual to “mainstream” social sciences or even scholarship (Henry, 2000). If we return to Marshall’s observation about “[t]he work emanating from George Lamming, Sylvia Wynter, Kamau Brathwaite, Jacqui Alexander, Peter Tosh, CLR James, Shake Keane, Olive Senior and others alongside subterranean grammars…” (Marshall, 2016, p. 171), it becomes apparent that most of the individuals he presents fall outside of the academy and into the arts in the areas of literature (George Lamming, Sylvia Wynter, Kamau Brathwaite, Olive Senior) and music (Peter Tosh and Shake Keane), for instance, but still provide important philosophical and theoretical openings for thinking about the world and challenging its present functioning. These points raise probing questions such as what kinds of thinking are viewed as legitimately contributing to knowledge production? And, what counts as theory? And more specifically for this chapter, what counts as IR theory? Caribbean scholarship taken together in its eclecticism and its status quo–challenging approaches to thinking about the region and its people; in thinking about their placement in the world; in thinking about the functioning of the world; and in thinking about thinking offers a wealth of theoretical insights for IR. In line with calls for making IR global, not just in its coverage of occurrences but in its theoretical and historical vistas, Caribbean thinking provides rich offerings.

Conclusion I have already noted how difficult it is to really do Caribbean thought true justice in a chapter. Indeed, Caribbean compilations that attempt to capture Caribbean thought in book length works also face this challenge. This challenge notwithstanding, I hope that the points that this chapter attempts to make are clear. Let me reiterate this point here by stating that this chapter sought to show that Caribbean discourses exist and constitute an intellectual tradition; and that this intellectual tradition offers worthwhile theoretical contributions for IR, especially if one wishes to build a truly Global IR. Here, Haynes’ criticism of the penchant for privileging individual thinkers in analyses of Caribbean thought is both cutting and fitting, for it is a trap that many of us fall in, myself included. She quite rightly asserts that building Caribbean thought has been and continues to be a collective endeavour. Consequently, valorising key thinkers does the canon a disservice (Haynes, 2017, p. 48). The critical contribution that I suggest that Caribbean thought offers for (Global) IR theorising is the analytical stance which contends that the world (as a system/an order/a series of practices) has been structured on the basis of exploitative, racialised and gendered lines which one can comprehend from a Caribbean vista. Undeniably, the Caribbean region has been important in constructing this system of unequal relations of power across states.

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However, the state need not be the principal unit of analysis for understanding the international or the global. Caribbean “reasonings”, to borrow Anthony Bogues turn of phrase (Bogues, 2006), offer the perspective that the inequity of international or global processes and relationships transcend the state. There is so much in the way of nuance that the rich body of work that has emanated from the region and its diasporic contributors during the 20th century, and which continues to be produced in the 21st century, that my effort in this chapter should only be considered a modest first attempt at presenting a Caribbean theoretical contribution to IR. I am aware of the connections that one could make between this Caribbean theoretical contribution and Dependency thought, Post-Colonial theorising, Feminist IR theories and Critical Theoretical perspectives among others in IR. I contend that Caribbean thought has not only drawn on but also contributed to each of these schools of thought in ways that are often not noted. In truth, and as previously noted, the very essence of Caribbean-ness tends to reflect existence in the middle of multiple spatial, cultural, linguistic and philosophic influences which the Caribbean both has affected and has been affected by. To expect that Caribbean thought could escape the multiple theoretical influences while simultaneously contributing to these would be to misunderstand this region, its people and their location in global processes, all of which inform the very scholarship that I discuss in the chapter. At the end of this exposition, limited as it may be, what is left to consider, is how willing IR scholars, students and practitioners, particularly from the Caribbean and who study the region, will be to apply these Caribbean perspectives to their work. Caribbean scholarship has travelled within Latin America and Africa, again emphasising how IR is not global and likely because of the sorts of “Global South” insights that such work offers and which remain peripheral within the discipline (See: Girvan & Girvan, 1973; Lewis, 1998). The very issues that Caribbean thinking attempts to challenge, it also faces in the discipline of IR since specific theoretical lines have clearly been established through historical processes that are racialised and gendered, that exhibit realworld relations of power and that tend to be reproduced through practices in research and teaching. Even as scholars seek to refashion IR to be more global, insights from very small places, such as those located in the Caribbean and the Pacific, may be overlooked and treated as footnotes while being over-powered and subsumed within larger categories such as Latin America and the Caribbean, Africana/Black Studies or Asia-Pacific, in the case of the Pacific Islands. In working towards sculping Global IR, factors of size and power will remain and can threaten to crowd out big ideas from small places. A Global IR research agenda, then, must be attuned to histories, cultures and ideas less heard of, such as those emanating from the Caribbean.

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Notes 1 The Caribbean is a diverse region that includes small-island sovereign states and non-independent island territories spread across the Caribbean Sea. My use of the term “Caribbean” includes states situated in South America, specifically Guyana, Belize, and Suriname, for their historical and cultural treatment as such. At times I may also use the term “West Indies”, though less common in contemporary usage (See: Hinds, 2019, p. 3). 2 I use the terms Global South, Third World and developing countries interchangeably to refer to countries that identify themselves as and are identified as “developing” rather than to specify geographical location. I use the West and Western to roughly refer to Western European – Anglo-American frames of reference. 3 See for instance: (Benn, 2004; Bolland, 2004; Henry, 2000; Kamugisha, 2013a, 2013b, 2019; Reddock, 2014; Torres-Saillant, 2006). 4 1901–1989, born in Trinidad. 5 1925–1980 born in Guyana (formerly British Guiana). 6 This concept presents colonisation as pervasive in all aspects of life in formerly colonised places even in the aftermath of colonisation. Unlike neo-colonialism that sees new forms of colonization as occurring, “coloniality” sees the influences of colonisation as being continually in process (Quijano, 2000). 7 1945–1980, historian born in Guyana. 8 1925–1961 born in Martinique. 9 1915–1991 10 The following are but a sample of the important works in this vein: Demas, William G. (1965) The Economics of Development in Small Countries with Special Reference to the Caribbean, Montreal: McGill University Press; Girvan, Norman. (1976) Corporate Imperialism, Conflict and Expropriation: Essays in Transnational Corporations and Economic Nationalism in the Third World, New York: Myron E. Sharpe; Thomas, C. Y. (1974). Dependence and Transformation: The Economics of the Transition to Socialism, New York: Monthly Review Press. 11 1928–2011, born in Martinique.

References Acharya, A., & Buzan, B. (2019). The Making of Global International Relations: Origins and Evolutiojn of IR at Its Centenary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alexander, M. J. (1994). Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas. Feminist Review, 48, 5–23. Barriteau, E. (1992). The Construct of a Postmodernist Feminist Theory for Caribbean Social Science Research. Social and Economic Studies, 41(2), 1–43. Barriteau, E. (1998). Theorizing Gender Systems and the Project of Modernity in the Twentieth-Century Caribbean. Feminist Review, 59, 186–210. Beckford, G. L. (1972). Persistent Poverty; Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World. New York: Oxford University Press. Beckles, H. (2004). Black Masculinities in Caribbean Slavery. In R. Reddock (Ed.), Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analyses (pp. 225–243). Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press. Benn, D. M. (2004). The Caribbean an Intellectual History 1774–2003. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers. Best, L., & Levitt, K. P. (2009). Essays on the Theory of Plantation Economy: A Historical and Institutional Approach to Caribbean Economic Development. Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press.

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Bogues, A. (2006). Caribbean Reasonings: After Man, towards the Human: Critical Essays on Sylvia Wynter. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Bolland, O. N. (Ed.). (2004). The Birth of Caribbean Civilisation: A Century of Ideas about Culture and Identity, Nation and Society. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Bolles, A. L. (1996). Paying the Piper Twice: Gender and the Process of Globalization. Caribbean Studies, 29(1), 106–119. Césaire, A. ([1972] 2004). Discourse on Colonialism. In O. N. Bolland (Ed.), The Birth of Civilisation: A Century of Idead about Culture, Identity, Nation and Society (pp. 210– 227). Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Fanon, F. (1963). The Wretched of the Earrth. (C. Farrington, Trans.) New York: Grove Press. Fanon, F. (1967). Black Skin, White Masks. (R. Philcox, Trans.) New York: Grove Press. Girvan, N. (2005). W.A. Lewis, The Plantation School and Dependency: An Interpretation. Social and Economic Studies, 54(3), 198–221. Girvan, N. (2006). Caribbean Dependency Thought Revisited. Canadian Journal of Development Studies/Revue canadienne d’études du développement, 27(3), 328–352. Girvan, N., & Girvan, C. (1973). The Development of Dependency Economics in the Caribbean and Latin America: A Review and Comparison. Social and Economic Studies, 22(1), 1–33. Goveia, E. ([1965] 2004). Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands. In O. N. Bolland (Ed.), The Birth of Caribbean Civilisation: A Century of Ideas about Culture and Identity, Nation and Society (pp. 421–445). Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Green, C. (2001). Caribbean Dependency Theory of the 1970s: A Historical MaterialistFeminist Revision. In B. Meeks & F. Lindahl (Eds.), New Caribbean Thought: A Reader (pp. 40–72). Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press. Haynes, T. (2016). Sylvia Wynter’s Theory of the Human and the Crisis School of Caribbean Heteromasculinity Studies. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 20(1), 92–112. Haynes, T. (2017). Interrogating Approaches to Caibbean Feminist Thought. Journal of Eastern Caribbean Studies, 42(3), 26–58. Henry, P. (2000). Caliban’s Reason: Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy. London: Routledge. Hinds, K. (2019). Civil Society Organisations, Governance and the Caribbean Community. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan. Ho, C. G. (1999). Caribbean Transnationalism as a Gendered Process. Latin American Perspectives, 26(5), 34–54. James, C. L. (1963). The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Santo Domingo Revolution. (Revised, 2nd ed.). New York: Vintage Books. Joseph, T. S. (2009). Reclaiming W. A. Lewis for the Caribbean Political Thought Tradition. Social and Economic Studies, 58(3 & 4), 29–61. Joseph, T. S. (2017). The Intellectual Under Neo-Liberal Hegemony in the English-Speaking Caribbean. Social and Economic Studies, 66(3), 97–122. Kamugisha, A. (Ed.). (2013a). Caribbean Political Thought: The Colonial State to Caribbean Internationalisms. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Kamugisha, A. (Ed.). (2013b). Caribbean Political Thought: Theories of the Post-Colonial State. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers. Kamugisha, A. (2019). Beyond Coloniality: Citizenship and Freedom in the Caribbean intellectual Tradition. Indiana: University of Indiana Press. Kempadoo, K. (2004). Sexing the Caribbean: Gender Race and Sexual Labour. London: Routledge.

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Lewis, R. C. (1998). Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press. Lewis, W. A. (1982). The Evolution of the International Economic Order. In J. Letiche (Ed.) International Economics Policies and Their Theoretical Foundations (pp. 15–37). New York: Academic Press. Marshall, D. D. (2016). Whose and What World Order? Fanon and the Salience of the Caribbean Reparations Endeavour. Journal of Eastern Caribbean Studies, 41(2 & 3), 166–180. McCollin, J. M. (2012). Caribbean Intellectuals at the Crossroads: An Examination on the Ebb and Flow of Intellectual Radicalism at the University of the West Indies. Bridgetown, Baarbados: Thesis (M. Phil.), University of the West Indies, Cave Hill. Meeks, B. (2001). On the Bump of a Revival. In B. Meeks & F. Lindahl (Eds.), New Caribbean Thought: A Reader (pp. vii–xx). Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press. Meeks, B. (2007). Envisioning Caribbean Futures: Jamaican Perspectives. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press. Mills, C. (2010). Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality: Race, Class and Social Domination. Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press. Mohammed, P. (2009). The Asian Other in the Caribbean. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 13(2), 57–71. Murdoch, H. A. (2013). Édouard Glissant’s Creolized World Vision: From Resistance and Relation to Opacité. Callaloo, 36(4), 875–889. Persaud, R. B., & Sajed, A. (2018). Introduction: Race, Gender and Culture in International Relations. In R. B. Persaud & A. Sajed (Eds.), Introduction: Race, Gender and Culture in International Relations: Postcolonial Perspectives (pp. 1–18). New York: Routledge. Phillips, C. (2001). C.L.R. James: The Most Noteworthy Caribbean Mind of the Twentieth Century. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 33, 118–120. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/2678939. Quijano, A. (2000). Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America. International Sociology, 15(2), 215–232. Reddock, R. (2014). Radical Caribbean Social Thought: Race, Class, Identity and the Postcolonial Nation. Current Sociology Mongraph, 2, 1–19. Rodney, W. ([1969] 2004). Black Power. In O. N. Bolland (Ed.), The Birth of Caribbean Civilisation: A Century of Ideas about Culture and Identity, Nation and Society (pp. 474–493). Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle. Rodney, W. ([1972] 2001). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Introduction by Vincent Harding. Revised Edition ed. Nairobi, Kampala, Dar es Salaam: East African Educational Publishers. Rowley, M. V. (2010). Whose Time Is It?: Gender and Humanism in Contemporary Caribbean Feminist Advocacy. Small Axe, 14(1), 1–15. Shepherd, V. A. (2002). Consttructing Visibility: Indian Women in the Jamaican Segment of the Indian Diaspora. In P. Mohammed (Ed.), Gendered Realities: Essays in Caribbean Feminist Thought (pp. 107–128). Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press. Torres-Saillant, S. (2006). An Intellectual History of the Caribbean. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

6 UNSETTLING KNOWLEDGES IN LATIN AMERICA Amaya Querejazu and Arlene B. Tickner

Introduction Debate about the need to pluralize International Relations is practically as old as Stanley Hoffmann’s 1977 portrayal of the field as an “American” social science. However, during the past two decades, attempts to explore geocultural variation within IR, to analyze the links that exist between Western and U.S. dominance and epistemic violence, and to decenter and globalize the study of world politics have grown tremendously.1 Global IR seeks to heed these calls. According to Amitav Acharya (2014, 2016), this project entails expanding the disciplinary canopy – which he likens to a multiplex – to make room for multiple knowledges, both subordinate and dominant ones. One of the goals of Global IR is therefore to show that non-Western concepts and theories may be applicable beyond their original geocultural contexts, including in the West/ North (Acharya 2016: 14). Latin America has produced its fair share of autochthonous concepts and ideas, such as dependence and autonomy, and has developed innovative approaches to study development, integration, foreign policy and security, among others. No less significant, the region’s contributions to areas such as international law, order, regionalism, trade and human rights are garnering increased scholarly interest.2 In this sense, the substance of Latin American thinking on international relations seems to confirm Global IR’s expectation that regions may be valuable sites for creating alternative pictures of the world. Yet for the most part the field operates within disciplinary limits as established in the North and is accepting of them, at least in epistemological and ontological terms. The fact that Latin American IR has been reluctant to embrace theoretical and methodological frameworks that transgress the scholarly

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canon is well illustrated by dependency theory. Notwithstanding its centrality in the social sciences and its widespread use across the globe, the main founders of the field of International Relations in the region deemed it unfit for guiding the study of world politics and, less so, for devising policy-relevant knowledge. Not only were its Marxist variants seen as overly “radical” but the lack of foreseeable options it provided distinct from revolution or delinking from core countries was considered “paralyzing” for a discipline set on providing practical recommendations to decision-makers (Tickner 2008: 739; see also Chapters 11 and 12). In contrast, one of dependency’s precursors, the Economic Commission on Latin America (ECLA) offered a similar reading of Latin American ills within the context of asymmetry and core–periphery logics and a series of measures to overcome the region’s peripheral status that were more easily incorporated by scholars of IR. As Blaney and Tickner (2017: 303) suggest, Global IR exhibits a quandary similar to likeminded (liberal) gestures toward tolerance and inclusion, such as multi-culturalism or global governance. By limiting its consideration of alternatives to contending perspectives about a shared “multiplex” world, it takes the additional and unacknowledged step of assuming that such a common framework exists, when in fact it may not. The purpose of this chapter is therefore not to “do justice” to Latin American contributions to International Relations as conventionally understood.3 We aim instead to uncover alternate ways of thinking about the world that are also present in Latin American thought, that are unrecognizable as “IR proper,” and that are most likely incommensurate with the ways in which we customarily talk about world politics. Admittedly, this is a Herculean task, so for the purpose of developing an invitation to unsettle IR based on Latin American experiences we limit our reflection to only two examples. On the one hand, the interrelated triad of theology, pedagogy and methodology of liberation, more commonly called participatory action research (PAR), and on the other, relational indigenous and Afro-descendent thought, both of which are also key precursors of decolonial theory. The aforementioned traditions of regional thought and practice are unsettling for several reasons. First, they disrupt the categories and assumptions through which IR scholars from Latin America, if not the global field in general, make sense of the world. Second, they take sides with marginal, silenced, oppressed and invisible subjects not usually considered legitimate actors or sources of knowledge, instead of adhering to the positivist fiction of distance, neutrality and objectivity. Third, they invoke other ways of being in and with the world that lend themselves to unfamiliar forms of knowing, oftentimes grounded in lived experience, corporality and feeling. In doing so, they are also knowledges that resist inclusion within a common overarching framework such as that proposed by Global IR. The next section of the chapter is devoted to a brief discussion of Latin American IR that seeks to identify some of the main traits of the field as it has

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evolved in the region. We examine dependency theory in a bit more detail to underscore the “conformist” nature of most International Relations scholarship and to set the stage for our subsequent discussion of liberation theology, pedagogy and methodology, which are largely rooted in dependency’s portrayal of underdevelopment, inequality and injustice in the region. In the third and most extensive section, we analyze indigenous and Afro-descendent thinking from the vantagepoint of relationality, a broad ontological framework that might boost “our ability to engage the variety of political practices that are thriving beneath the surface” (Picq 2013: 127) and offer concrete examples of what the “international” (or more aptly the “global”) may look like in such spaces. The concluding section highlights the specific ways in which these knowledges unsettle dominant ways of being and thinking within IR, as well as laying out potential avenues of future critical inquiry derived from them.

Latin American IR As Arlene B. Tickner (2003, 2008, 2009) has argued elsewhere, the field of International Relations exhibits a number of common traits across Latin America, including state-centrism, favoritism toward practical policy–oriented knowledge, relative disinterest in theory, a view of the international system rooted in hierarchy, asymmetry and core–periphery dynamics, and given the former, sensitivity to the impact of international processes on domestic ones. Many of these are observable within academic communities elsewhere in the world, suggesting that IR exercises a strong disciplining role independent of place (Tickner and Wæver 2009). Latin America’s fixation on the state, which dates back to independence, is rooted in its association with sovereignty, its historical role as the expression of national identities and interests, and its alleged centrality in political, social and economic life. Arguably, scholarship focused on matters of international political economy, including trade, integration and regionalism and on the role of civil society in external affairs (Hinds 2018; Tussie and Casaburi 2000), both of which became fashionable from the 1990s onward, focuses on non-state actors as agents of world politics. Even in such cases, however, the state is never completely set aside as an analytical and a practical concern, reflecting a “postcolonial anxiety” (Krishna 1999) that is similarly observable across the global South.4 That areas such as International Relations and political science in the region were boosted largely by international donors (such as the Ford Foundation) – as they were in many parts of the world – with an eye to encouraging knowledge production that was susceptible to being converted into policy recommendations for state actors, thus strengthening their hand in their domestic undertakings and their international dealings, has only reinforced this tendency. Perhaps because IR was grounded in a state-based mentality from the onset, scholarly authority and relevance is also weighted in terms of whether or not

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academics provide policymakers with practical inputs for developing public policy and eventually expertise that nurtures public debate. In consequence, scholarship tends to gravitate around a given country’s international or foreign policy agenda, and even when the state is not listening, scholars produce knowledge about what they think it needs in order to manage its relations with the world. Tickner and Wæver (2009: 335–336) identify a shortage of theory in most global South contexts and attribute this commonality to an intellectual division of labor that assigns the periphery the role of “raw materials” (data) producer and provider of local expertise. Partiality toward imported theories over those produced locally is another factor at play in Latin America and elsewhere, as is the prevalent perception that pressing “real world” problems experienced region-wide demand solutions for which theorizing is an entertaining but largely futile luxury. Although theory building is not a highly valued activity within regional IR, scholars always make use of theories, explicitly or implicitly. Echoing earlier findings, an exhaustive bibliometric analysis conducted by Medeiros et al. (2016) suggests that liberalism, realism and, to a lesser extent, Wendtian constructivism are the predominant theoretical lenses used in Latin America to examine international issues, and that scholarly production is primarily qualitative and positivist in its scientific orientation. In addition to determining what is and is not “IR proper” in distinct parts of the world, disciplinary limits also operate to keep “outsiders” at bay. Such was the case of discussions about dependence.5 The Latin American dependency school arose from a global context characterized by sociopolitical unrest and intellectual commitment to radical social, political and economic change, and a regional one in which revolution and armed guerrilla activity, U.S. Cold War interventionism and authoritarianism were on the rise. Notwithstanding important differences existing among the distinct strands of this school of thought,6 dependency authors sought to overturn existing knowledge concerning capitalism, modernization, development, social inequality, the state and the elite class, and in doing so, to spark change in regional social structures. Although they shared many arguments developed earlier by ECLA about the unequal nature of international economic exchange and the resulting division of the world into core and periphery, most dependendistas rejected the reformist modernization project espoused by this institution. The main problem that they sought to address was the historical creation of dependence, seen as a condition produced through the interaction between national and international structures of domination, and the resulting alliances and struggles among distinct social groups (Cardoso and Faletto 1969: 167). In tandem with this concern, dependency authors also explored the ways in which asymmetrical capitalist logics truncated state sovereignty and made allies out of Latin American states and elites (see Chapter 11).

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Outside Latin America, particularly in the United States and Europe, scholarly consumption of dependency focused on external dynamics such as U.S. interventionism and the role of multinational corporations in the reproduction of capitalist-based asymmetries and domination, and largely ignored those local issues of most concern to regional social scientists. As Cardoso (1977: 18) notes, this overshadowed one of the central novelties of the literature, which was to create a more holistic understanding of “emerging forms of dependence.” In the case of Latin American IR, dependency offered important insights for thinking about the region’s relations with the world but provided little in the way of “practical” solutions for the difficulties derived from dependence. Therefore, while International Relations thinkers engaged with many similar concerns about core–periphery relations, the state and its lack of sovereignty, the role of elites in reproducing dependence and underdevelopment, and Latin America’s potential for outgrowing its dependent status, they bypassed many of dependency’s key arguments. In its stead, scholars turned largely to the concept of autonomy, described by Russell and Tokatlian (2003: 6) as an “idea-force” driving Latin American intellectual and political approaches to international relations. The autonomy literature sought to identify the sources of external and internal state autonomy and to design effective strategies for achieving its full potential, including non-dependent development and more proactive foreign policies, especially toward the United States (see Chapter 13). In a fashion similar to the dependency school, decolonial thinking originating in Latin America and the Caribbean has sparked growing enthusiasm within academic fields different from International Relations in the region, and among critical IR circles globally, although regional scholars of world politics have yet to join this trend. Two other approaches to worldly matters that also hail from the region, liberation philosophy, pedagogy and methodology, and indigenous and Afro-descendent relationality, which we now turn to, have scarcely made their way onto the disciplinary radar even though they are crucial precursors to discussions about decoloniality (Mignolo and Walsh 2019; Santos 2018).

Thinking and Doing: Liberation Theology/Pedagogy/ Methodology Liberation theology emerged from an international and regional milieu similar to that of dependency, but that also included a radical shift in the vocation and the practices of the Catholic Church. Namely, the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) sparked critical reflection on the need to recover its pastoral and social mission and to prioritize biblical teachings about humility and solidarity with those struggling against hardship and oppression, in particular in those areas of the world such as Latin America whose populations were primarily Catholic (Rowland 2007a: 2). This process paved the way for the adoption of the

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“preferential option for the poor” by the Conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellin (1968) and its reassertion in Puebla (1979), for which the dependency school’s structural analyses of poverty and misery, and the role of international factors in their continuation became an important source of knowledge. The preferential option for the poor embraced Catholic social teachings to their fullest by highlighting the need to prioritize those who are most disadvantaged and vulnerable in the actions of the Church, to view the world from their perspectives and to act in solidarity with them in redressing injustice, human suffering and violence. Therefore, its “defining characteristic” is that it is “a lived praxis” rooted in the everyday experience of marginality (Bennett 2007: 39). In this sense, liberation theology also posed a distinct way of doing theology. Instead of a top-down process of scripture reading initiated from within the seminary or the university and detached from reality, theological reflection was considered to begin from the bottom-up and in conversation with the lives of ordinary people (Rowland 2007a, 2007b: 4). The theological priority given to the marginalized reflected the conviction that god “takes sides” in favor of the oppressed and, thus, that realizing god’s will on earth entailed fighting for justice and equality, and ending human suffering (Gutierrez 2007). But, the preferential option for the poor upheld by liberation theology also cultivated an epistemological “siding with” that is akin to feminist standpoint theory (see Harding 2004). Standpoints result from collective experiences that are historically, culturally and politically situated. Given that all knowledges are social and contingent, including modern Western science, none can legitimately claim a priori epistemic privilege over the others. The invisibility of disadvantaged standpoints and the epistemic violence committed against them as a result of colonialism, racism and patriarchy, among others, leads feminists to argue that these should be prioritized, if only for reasons of fairness, but also as a means of expanding our understanding of distinct problematics (see Chapter 8). The centrality of praxis to liberation theology translated into a “see–judge– act” strategy that was also apparent in liberation pedagogy, as pioneered by Paulo Freire. It consists of “seeing” the situation of the oppressed based upon existing knowledge about poverty and inequality, and their own lived experience; “judging” this experience from within scripture; and “acting” to remediate the situation ( Justaert 2015: 239–240). Freire (2006/1968), one of the best-known authors outside of Latin America, developed a “pedagogy of the oppressed” that begins with the assumption that marginalized social groups are not “objects” to be acted upon but rather “subjects” with the ability to understand and transform their surroundings. This capacity, however, needs to be cultivated, given the poor’s unequal access to material and epistemic resources and their historical treatment as “non-people.” Doing so requires critical consciousness of their own situation as well as problems that are meaningful within the context of their everyday lives.

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The immediate goal of the teaching method developed by Freire (2006/1968) was literacy, but its core motive was to make use of education as a tool for practicing freedom. As suggested above, one of Freire’s concerns, in keeping with dependency and other Marxist thinkers of the time, was that the dominant classes had instrumentalized educational practice to keep the general population docile, naïve, unaware and, more importantly, empty, granting educators the power to fill people’s heads with contents conducive to maintaining inequality and oppression. Such lack of creativity in the pedagogical process, according to the author, created a false illusion of freedom, when in fact it made students subject to the will and the actions of (dominant) others. In keeping with liberation theology’s emphasis on praxis, the liberating role of education thus begins with a dialogical education in which the dichotomy between educator and educated cease to exist (Freire 2006: 83). Therefore, the marginal and poor are not considered objects to be acted upon, but subjects capable of understanding and transforming their own realities. Conscientización was proffered as the means to create the epistemic resources needed to do so, within a socially and politically committed approach to education that viewed empowerment as its ultimate goal. Equally significant, liberation theology also highlights the role of the standpoints of the poor in creating knowledge capable of transforming the world. Orlando Fals Borda (1970) refers to this methodology of liberation – which has been coined participatory action research – as a “rebel” or “guerilla” science. According to this reading, scholarly engagement in and political commitment to real-life situations of misery and violence allow for a more inclusive and emancipatory approach to knowledge building. Echoing Freire’s approach to pedagogy, the author argues that human objects of research be recognized as active subjects of any knowledge-building enterprise, adding similarly that knowing and doing are part of the same dialectical process. In the words of Fals Borda (1991: 4), PAR is philosophy and a technique that combines liberating knowledge derived from the coming together of academic and popular wisdoms, and the political power that results from marginal groups gaining creative and transformative ways of thinking about their own realities in order to change them. Interestingly, this “people-centered” praxis recognizes the importance of the “affective logic of the heart” to offset the “cold-headedness” that is characteristic of those distanced academic practices conducted from offices and laboratories (Fals Borda 1991: 6). As a conceptual and methodology corpus, liberation theology, pedagogy and methodological (or PAR) had a profound effect on the critical social sciences in Latin America and beyond, offering an alternative toolkit for thinking and acting conceived primarily in terms of the emancipation and empowerment of oppressed groups and the promotion of positive social change. Although they shared the dependency school’s concern with underdevelopment, poverty and inequality, and its commitment to combating structural injustice, as

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we have discussed in this section, they take the oppressed as their main point of departure and engage actively with marginal actors as active knowers. In this fashion, their insights about situated knowledge (or standpoints) and their efforts to overcome the divide between subjects and objects, academics and non-academics, and theory and practice paralleled similar moves within critical social theory in the North. Beginning in the 1990s, PAR was also adopted by international agencies involved in activities related to development, lending and structural adjustment, and is now part of the existing canon for developing cooperation policies of numerous types worldwide. Still, instead of liberation thinking’s commitment to empowering oppressed and marginalized peoples, enhancing the tools at their disposal for questioning and changing dominant ideas and practices and fomenting co-participation in diverse areas of research and practice, the main goals pursued by this watered-down version of PAR, described by Banks, Herrington and Carter (2017) as action research in a participatory paradigm, have been to involve civil society actors in policymaking processes and to improve existing solutions to distinct problems by adding the perspectives of some of those experiencing them directly. Notwithstanding PAR’s “mainstreaming,” the need to rethink the purpose of scientific knowledge and to decolonize academic practice continues to resonate within Latin America and in general the South. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2018) argues, the need to resist oppression in its distinct guises has, if anything, grown in recent times, underscoring the importance of an “ecology of knowledges” that maximizes collective struggles by recognizing the coexistence, complementarity and potential contradiction between different ways of knowing. Such versatility is achieved, according to the author, through the experience of struggle itself, not necessarily from academic thought or research (Santos 2018: 78). Among critical IR scholars too, marginalized groups and social movements are seen as crucial for envisioning new approaches to world affairs. According to Walker (1988: 79), it is the very vulnerability of such actors and their refusal to accept intolerable life conditions that help them expand the boundaries of the possible. Conway (2013) similarly examines activist praxis and the importance of knowledges derived from it for reimagining politics. Indeed, as authors such as Arjun Appadurai (1996) have argued, in the current globalized order the role of imagination in social life has grown. As a contested space in which social actors incorporate the global into their everyday experiences, imagination is one of the primary mechanisms through which ordinary people make sense of their worlds (Appadurai 1996: 4). Therefore, an important task still facing scholars, and anticipated by liberation theology, pedagogy and methodology, is to “work up” from such localized collective imaginaries toward transformative ideas of neighborhood, state, nation, security and justice among others.

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Indigeneous and Afro-Descendent Relationality Liberation thinking argues that both equality and justice demand epistemic privilege be given to marginalized groups such as peasants, indigenous communities and Afro-descendents, as subjects whose knowledges are gained through the very experience of oppression and suffering. However, the struggles of oppressed peoples may also be ontological in nature, in that they transcend correcting poverty and inequality, gaining political recognition or cultural acknowledgment, or achieving state inclusion, and touch upon the right to other forms of existence. Such fights, rooted primarily in the legacies of colonialism, appeal to a stolen or hijacked existence (Caicedo Ortiz 2013: 75) whose absence is customarily replaced by a feeling of psychic nonexistence, as described by Frantz Fanon (1963) in The Wretched of the Earth. In other words, such groups have not only been neglected in terms of formal rights, recognition, dignity and justice, but the very possibility to exist on their own terms has repeatedly been denied them. In these life projects, sociopolitical and economic orders that preexisted colonialism or that were imagined during its existence are practically absent from IR’s analysis within and about the region. In this section we focus on such silence by bringing back relationality as the ontological counternarrative from which to uncover alternative and unsettling knowledges. Certainly, significant variation can be observed in the worldviews, lived experiences, cultural practices and historical claims of distinct ancestral peoples. Perhaps most importantly, the physical, spiritual, economic, emotional and collective uprooting experienced by African descendents from the slave trade onward, time and time again, sticks out as compared to all other marginalized groups. Indeed, in keeping with the gender, ethnic and racial hierarchies created through colonial practices, Walsh (2007: 204) suggests that Afros have been subject to a “double subalternatization” by the dominant white mestizo society and by indigenous communities themselves. Even so, the idea of relationality encompasses many commonalities that are also observable within Afro-descendent and indigenous thought in Latin America, if not among ancestral communities around the world. We understand relationality as an ontology7 in which entities (or beings) come into existence and are transformed through relations. In contrast to modern Western metaphysics, which is rooted in an ontology of separation and independence, relationality posits connectivity, correspondence and interdependence as the fundamental features of existence. In other words, everything is related,8 existence is the result of complex relations, and nothing exists on its own as units or essences, but instead exists as the result of constant processes of interaction and change. This leads, among others, to a questioning of the binary mode of existence and thought (subject/object, mind/body, culture/nature, human/ non-human) at the core of modern Western practices (see Trownsell et  al.

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2019), and at the very least gives distinctive meaning to many categories that are customarily assumed to be universal. Within relationality, humans are no different or better than other beings, as their existence too is rooted in relations, which explains why communities that adhere to such an ontology attribute the same qualities to natural and spiritual beings as those possessed by humans, including the capacity to have a spirit, will and political interests (Blaser 2013). Therefore, rivers, mountains, animals and natural forces may all become actors in sociopolitical life, underscoring a more “cosmic” approach to international relations that potentially also includes magic, spirits and rituals. Relationality can thus be considered a thread that ties together ancestral indigenous and African thought in Latin America. In addition to offering a fundamentally different understanding of existence, it is also the source of other shared features that nurture the sociopolitical practices and organization of these communities, therefore also foregrounding contestations of key categories such as the state, sovereignty, rights, territory, land, democracy and participation. Spirituality, ancestrality, territoriality and embodied knowledges are four interrelated features derived from relationality that may help us understand the contributions of indigenous and Afro-descendent 9 forms of being in and with the world for engaging and envisioning it otherwise.

Spirituality and Ancestrality Spirituality should be understood as much more than an institutionalized religious practice, or a set of religious beliefs. It entails connectivity with the cosmos and is an integral part of everyday life within relational forms of being. Maintaining vibrant relations with spirits, including the departed and those pertaining to other-than-human beings, is considered vital to a given community’s fate. When the will of beings such as the departed, or mountains, lakes and rivers is ignored, it is quite likely that life will become unbalanced, and chaos and misfortune will ensue. One result of dispossession and the breaking up of family and communal connections that are characteristic of colonialism and its aftermath, the coloniality of power (Quijiano 2007) is precisely the severing of spiritual ties derived primarily from relations to territory/nature, as we will discuss in brief. For this reason, shamans, healers and other persons skilled in communicating with spirits are important political actors whose authority and recognition are derived from the knowledges shared with them by natural or animal beings and deities. Their main task is to contribute to the balance of interests and forces that includes spirits, because the well-being of human communities relies on the well-being of the spirits of other beings as well. There must be channels of communication that guarantee that one’s actions will not affect the others. Relationality thus opens space for a deeper

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understanding of political practice that includes other-than-human beings and their role in spheres of activity such as social protest and diplomacy (Beier 2009; Blaser 2013; De la Cadena 2010, 2015; Zapata Olivella 2010). By way of illustration, Shilliam’s (2017) reflection on the Haitian revolution, in particular the fundamental role played by spirits, demonstrates the potential for enriching existing narratives about a “known” historical fact by bringing in its spiritual dimension (Shilliam 2017). Along with spirituality, ancestral legacy is crucial for making visible all that colonization and coloniality have ruptured and erased. More than a simple historical register, ancestrality embodies one of the most important sets of relations for indigenous and Afro-descendent communities with past, present and future lineages and heritages, thus constituting a key source of knowledge too. In this fashion, it constitutes a mechanism of sense-making and interpretation, given that the past holds answers to present and future problems. The reverse is also true (the future and present may guide actions in the past) given that within relationality these temporalities are intertwined as time is not linear (Rivera Cusicanqui 2010). Ancestral symbols and rituals have thus articulated and embodied distinct meanings such as freedom in colonial life, equality in republican times and recognition within multicultural national contexts. Together, ancestrality and spirituality have played a fundamental symbolic, emotional and identity role, becoming the repository of African strength to resist the worst of the slave trade but also nurturing the creation of other experiences that took place afterward (Caicedo Ortiz 2013: 71). In the case of the Andean region, Rivera Cusicanqui (2010) explores the ways in which ancestral memories are reinterpreted in the present and the future to illustrate time’s circular and spiraling nature.

Territoriality Within relationality, communal links to the land are fundamental to being. Indigenous, Afro-descendent and peasant struggles in Latin America have all been associated historically with problems of reform, ownership and distribution, given that the region is the most unequal in the world in terms of land. In the case of ancestral peoples, territory is not just a site of material sustenance to be possessed and exploited, but, more crucially, it is a source of spirituality, ancestrality and cosmic balance (Walsh 2018: 35), and a living being that needs nurturing and care. Such ontological claims, present in “land-based” struggles throughout the region, from the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Mapuches in Argentina and Chile, or the Movimiento Sin Tierra in Brazil, challenge traditional categories of space and territory. Mina Rojas et al. (2015: 173, 179), referring to the Colombian Afro community, maintain that territory “is the space for being, in communion and continuity with nature, with water,” and “the place where memory of the

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ancestors and biodiverse species coexist in intimate relations with humans and the movements of the river.” In other words, more than land, it is the very foundation of existence, freedom to be, collective well-being and connectivity between past, present and future. Among the different rituals that exist to maintain this balanced relation, the burying of a baby’s umbilical cord once she is born is a widespread practice throughout Latin America (and the world). Caring relations with territory too have materialized in the Ecuadorian and Bolivian constitutions’ recognition of nature’s right to be respected integrally, and in decisions to grant rivers political personhood, as has occurred with the Atrato river in Colombia (and in India and New Zealand). In light of the above, uprootedness, a material and an existential condition produced historically through distinct routines of colonial erasure, necessarily demands addressing the issue of territoriality (Vergara-Figueroa 2018). Although it “does not pose as the opposite of uprootedness nor as its solution, but rather as a reminder of the fundamental importance for living organisms of… the ‘space of places’” (Fox 2006: 25), the ruptures created through the “loss” of territory are often irreversible and irreparable (Vergara-Figueroa 2018: 18–19).

Embodied Knowledges As hinted at above, relationality sows embodied knowledges that result similarly from relations, and that in consequence mean something very different. According to some Afro narratives, Latin America, the place of slavery, also became a site of freedom and redemption precisely because of its unspeakable horrors (see Zapata Olivella 2010/1983). In no small measure, this was due to the symbolism and praxis of cimorranaje or maroonage. Through their enactment of autonomy and emancipation, the “fugitive” slaves or cimarrones recovered a sense of collective existence and personhood that allowed past suffering to be transformed into present and future dreams and political aspirations (Caicedo Ortiz 2013). In doing so, Walsh (2018: 43) suggests that cimarronaje laid the foundations for an “insurgent knowledge” rooted in spirituality and ancestrality. The resulting standpoint, to return to a term used in our discussion of liberation thinking, reflects a conscience or attitude that links past, future and present by cultivating a collective memory of ancestral wisdom, suffering and resistance. The experience of slavery, of fleeing, of living in clandestine palenques and of building stable (but outlawed and hidden) social and political orders within them – all under the shadow of uprootedness – underwrote another kind of knowledge described by Fox (2006) as improvisation. “Attesting to the importance of territory and belligerence in the face of uprootedness, improvisation invites participants to feel ‘back home’” (Fox 2006: 52). Precisely due to historical negation and erasure, it thus presents itself as a way of adapting to difficult circumstances, of creating one’s own places of community and of getting on

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“good terms with life” (Fox 2006: 53). The main characteristics of such sites are that they are purposeful in their attempts to address and eventually overcome the emptied or non-spaces occupied by Afro-descendent communities, they make use of convention and play, and they recognize and bring together distinct communal pieces broken apart through oppression. Improvisation is expressed regularly through the body. As Caicedo Ortiz argues (2013), Afro male and female corporalities became vehicles for reinvention and encounter with spiritualties as a result of coming together with one’s interior (ancestral) self. Although not limited to music or oral practices, the alabaos (or chants) that accompany the death rituals for adults in the Colombian Pacific region constitute one possible example (Pinilla Bahamón 2017). Although alabar means “to praise” in Spanish, and is customarily associated with the act of praying to god for the souls of those who have passed, the alabaos are believed to have been passed down from the communities’ ancestors, either those born and raised in Africa or those who arrived on the slave ships. It is therefore not surprising that in addition to references to Christianity and the bible, they also contain not-so-hidden tributes to African deities and to ancestrality, considered key to a soul’s passing to the other world and a source of well-being in the world of the living. As an existential condition then, uprootedness or placelessness translate into forms of being, doing and knowing that could be explored as IR. This is essential to understand the nature of relational knowledges, because they, like liberation thinking, are also the result of context. As suggested previously, there is no abstract thought that separates the observer from the observed and that maintains itself fixed in time, for knowledge is acquired through the interaction between context, experience and emotion. In this sense, knowledge relates and is a relation that constantly changes both the context and itself. Within Andean relational philosophy too, knowledge is not primarily a human activity conducted in the mind, but is associated with the heart and feeling, is rooted in “nature” or “territory,” and is understood in spiritual and ancestral terms (Estermann 2009). Plants, animals and spirits all partake in this process, referred to increasingly as sentipensar, by passing on wisdom that ancestral communities have learned to discern and utilize (Caicedo Oritz 2013, Estermann 2009, Rivera Cusicanqui 2010). One of the main knowledge-related roles of humans residing in this world is thus to receive and interpret the teachings of the past and to ensure that they are communicated to future generations, primarily through collective oral history. Here too, orality also acquires another shade. It is not only a form of communication but also a performative way of worlding, as in the case of the alabaos. Through stories and narratives, indigenous and Afro-descendent communities not only remember their past and their ancestors but also create and transform their realities in the present-future. Orality is thus the means to connect different times and beings, while also updating, transforming and creating knowledges through the stories it tells.

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The features described reflect embodied, feeling and spiritual know-hows that do not sit well with modern, Western conceptions of science, leading them to be regularly demoted to the status of myth, superstition or belief. This is particularly important for the purposes of our argument in this chapter, as it underscores the difficulties of including knowledges that operate within fundamentally distinct ontological claims about reality and our relation to and with it under a single overarching canopy without committing ontological capture or erasure (Trownsell et al. 2019). Namely, within relationality knowledge is and does something different. It derives from cosmic relations and it relates, leading it to generate new relations too. In addition to accounting for truths or facts, it also creates worlds. And as a standpoint, it is a collective being that links past–future–present.

Conclusion: Unsettling IR Alongside dependency, Latin America has been the site of other alternative knowledges that have nurtured scholarly reflection in areas such as anthropology, sociology and history. However, along with decolonial theory, liberation theology, pedagogy and methodology, and indigenous and Afro-descendent thought rooted in relationality have all gone relatively unnoticed by most scholars of International Relations. In this concluding section, we discuss the potential of the latter two for unsettling established ways of thinking about global politics and for envisioning the world otherwise. Participatory action research, inspired by liberation thinking, is anchored in the conviction that knowledge-building enterprises should be done “with” and “for” marginalized peoples, not “on” them (Fals Borda 1991: 148). This proposition disrupts the asymmetrical subject/object binary that customarily accompanies scientific research and converts relations between researcher and researched into a subject/subject one, a goal that is also shared by theoretical schools such as feminism, postcolonialism and decolonialism. The “people’s science” that results from PAR, which is derived first and foremost from feeling and affect, is also seen as a corrective to some dominant forms of science that are distanced from realities on the ground as they are experienced by many communities. This kind of research is customarily eschewed by the social sciences, including within IR, mainly because it is considered not “scientific” enough. And yet, authors such as Fals Borda (1991: 4) see the coming together of academic and popular knowledge as the source of a “total scientific knowledge of a revolutionary nature.” The co-production of knowledge and theory also means that the “products of such research are rarely journal articles, exclusively, but documents of use to the community” (Rappaport 2008: 3). Similarly, indigenous and Afro-relational knowledges arise from unexpected places, including sentipensar, oral storytelling and, more loosely, sites of coexistence with different worlds, beings and times, which we have referred

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to above in terms of spirituality, ancestrality and territoriality. As knowledges derived from ancestral peoples’ particular ways of being in and with the world, they are also cosmic performances. As a result, the realities that such knowledges produce are relevant not only because they are political and worldly but also because they are cosmic and therefore plural by nature. What they offer to IR are other possible readings that can be more meaningful not only for understanding the dynamics of relational communities in Latin America and beyond but also for expanding the way we approach long-settled and supposedly singular, universal categories such as territory, personhood, democracy, sovereignty, political participation and accountability. Alternative meanings for such naturalized categories abound, and could be further analyzed as regional categories or concepts of an (plural) IR. For example, the Zapatistas’ caracoles, small community governance structures premised on the idea that community be built with patience and tranquility in the face of rapid globalization, also connect the Zapatista present to its ancestral Mayan past through the symbol of the snail. Similarly, autonomous communities organized under the principle of mandar obedeciendo (lead by obeying) reflect a traditional Mayan way of conceiving political authority. In the Andean ayllus different forms of power distribution and democracy are observable in the thaki (path) and the mandatory one-time rotation idea of muyu,10 which means that authorities only exercise power once, without reelection until rotation is complete among the members of the community. In these examples, reciprocal relations with the cosmos are required (territory, natural and spiritual beings) (Querejazu 2017). The qhatu (market) of the Andes is another instance of ontological parallel order, in this case an economic one ruled by principles of ayni (reciprocity) and cosmic equilibrium between the action of purchasing and bartering (Yampara Huarachi 2011). Sovereignty, one of the keystones of conventional International Relations, acquires different shades when approached from Afro and indigenous experiences and relationality. Suffice it to say that “indigeneity is a strategic site to rethink sovereignty,” precisely because the political experience of these peoples preexists the state and so becomes a positionality from which to contest hegemonic conceptions (Picq 2013: 121). Western approaches to sovereignty are fixated on the exercise of a monopoly over a certain extension of territory, which is also presumed to be continuous piece of land. As we have seen, this notion means little to populations that have not only been constituted through experiences of uprootedness and exile, but whose relation to territory is conceived in a dramatically distinct way. Interestingly, such knowledges and ways of being in and with the world otherwise have begun to resonate internationally, as suggested by the Universal Declaration of Mother Earth Rights or the now popular idea of vivir bien/buen vivir. Both of these cases suggest that ontological struggles have begun to make themselves visible globally, and are starting to enter the register of development programs and United Nations institutions. Even though they continue to be largely

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miscomprehended and even subsumed within preexisting analytical frameworks, they provide strong evidence of the existence of relevant international knowledges with the purpose of opening spaces for ontological discussions. In short, observing the world from the vantagepoint of relationality provides a distinct optics from which to understand territorial conflicts, environmental activism, political participation, autonomy processes and, ultimately, difference, and the different – yet restrictive – ways in which IR has grown accustomed to addressing plurality. Relationality points to the (as of yet) unsettling possibility that difference can and should be approached via a more active embrace of ontological plurality. Beyond the question of where to look for a better comprehension of world politics, of equal concern (to us) is that a restrictive understanding of scholarly relevance seems to prevail in the field of International Relations, crowding out alternative understandings that may help us rethink the entire problem of scholarly practice. J. Ann Tickner (2006) suggests that the standard for relevant scholarship cannot simply be the provision of knowledge that aims at problem-solving, is policy-oriented and thus takes place within existing power structures instead of challenging the status quo. Edward Said (1994: 76–78) refers to this kind of scholarship as professionalism, characterized by politically correct behavior, properly certified expertise, specialization, and proximity to power and authority. Instead, both authors point to the importance of intellectual non-conformity in practicing “responsible” scholarship that is relevant to society at large (not just the state). Many IR scholars might shy away from the transformative and potentially uncomfortable knowledges offered by liberation thinking and indigenous and Afro-descendent relationality, given their apparent incomprehensibility and their incommensurability when viewed from within the singular ontologicalepistemological framework suggested by projects such as Global IR. However, by refusing to subscribe to customary analytical frameworks or categories, the alternatives they offer for decentering and reframing International Relations in a fashion that is better equipped to address the complexities and the existential angst of our time make them well worth considering. At the very least, the unsettling Latin American knowledges that we explore in this chapter draw attention to the not-so-controversial idea that relevant and meaningful knowledge may mean something quite different than is regularly presumed by dominant approaches to academic practice.

Acknowledgements Amaya wishes to thank the British Academy. This chapter was finished during her fellowship at Aberystwyth University and some thoughts are related to her research project NIFBA19\190793 “Making kin with other worlds. Relationality as methodology to build a pluriversal IR” funded by the Newton Fund.

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Notes 1 See Wemheuer-Vogelaar and Peters (2016) for a more comprehensive discussion of these literatures. 2 By way of illustration, see Deciancio (2016), Fawcett (2012), Helleiner and Rosales (2017), Obregón (2006), Scarfi (2017), Sikkink (2017), Tussie and Riggirozzi (2012). 3 Conventional IR refers to scholarship that centers on specific research agendas, prioritizes certain actors, reflects shared assumptions about what the “international” is and defends a positivist idea of science in which empirical observation of the world “out there” is the main source of knowledge. 4 According to Krishna (1999), state and society-building processes in the non-West/ South are often characterized by postcolonial elites mimicking those logics and categories that have been practiced by the West/North. 5 As Diana Tussie suggests in her chapter in this volume, international political economy, which is arguably at the root of Latin American approaches to world politics via the core–periphery lens employed by most scholars, has oftentimes been ignored or marginalized as a result of similar dynamics. 6 We refer to a “school” in order to emphasize the multiplicity of theoretical positions included within dependency, ranging from orthodox Marxist to heterodox and non-Marxist approaches. 7 Ontology here refers to “basic assumptions about the nature of existence that are operative within any given tradition of living and thinking” (Trownsell et al. 2019). In this sense, it speaks simultaneously to the question of what exists (or is real) and to our conditions of being. 8 Mignolo and Walsh(2019: 1–2) refer to this condition as vincularidad. 9 Amerindian cosmologies are considered to be relational (Viveiros de Castro 2004), but as we suggest here, relationality is also present in Afro cosmologies, as evidenced in the cosmopraxis of Muntu o Bantu. Literary expressions of relationality are also visible in Zapata Olivella`s 1983 novel Changó, el gran putas, which traces the evolution of the Afro-descendent communities in the Americas from the slave trade onward. These include ritmo-agua (69), hombres-bosques (71), hijos-luceros (82), pájaronoche (136), caraluz (139), nochedías (139), dedosríos (141), and in Cuban santería and Brazilian candomblé, Tambor de Mina, and Macumba, the Janusaspect deities such as Changó-Santa Barbara (Fox 2006: 25). Similarly, Garifuna thinking and practices in the Central American context are based on relations of coexistence with other spiritual, natural and animal beings. 10 This muyu is a form or democratic participation based not on popular election but on the rotating designation of responsibilities that guarantees that members of the community will be incumbent in different positions until they have fulfilled all duties according to the escalated path (thaki).

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Sikkink, Kathryn (2017) “Timing and Sequencing in International Politics: Latin America’s Contributions to Human Rights,” in Orfeo Fioretos (ed.), International Politics and Institutions in Time, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 231–250. Tickner, Arlene B. (2003) “Hearing Latin American Voices in International Relaitons Studies,” International Studies Perspectives, 4 (4): 325–350. DOI: 10.1111/ 1528-3577.404001. Tickner, Arlene B. (2008) “Latin American IR and the Primacy of lo práctico,” International Studies Review, 10 (4): 735–748. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2486.2008.00829.x. Tickner, Arlene B. (2009) “Latin America: Still Policy Dependent After all These Years?” in Arlene B. Tickner and Ole Wæver (eds.), International Relations Scholarship around the World, London: Routledge, pp. 32–52. Tickner, Arlene B. and Ole Wæver (2009), “Conclusion. Worlding Where the West Once Was,” in Arlene B. Tickner and Ole Wæver (eds.), International Relationship around the World, London: Routledge, pp. 328–341. Tickner, J. Ann (2006) “On the Frontlines or Sidelines of Knowledge and Power? Feminist Practices of Responsible Scholarship,” International Studies Review, 8 (3): 383–395. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2486.2006.00599.x. Trownsell, Tamara, Amaya Querejazu, Giorgio Shani, Navnita Behera, Jarrad Reddekop and Arlene B. Tickner (2019) “Recrafting International Relations through Relationality.” E-International Relations, https://www.e-ir.info/2019/01/08/ recrafting-international-relations-through-relationality/. Tussie, Diana and Gabriel Casaburi (2000) “From Global to Local Governance: Civil Society and the Multilateral Development Banks,” Global Governance (special issue), 6 (4): 399–403. DOI: 10.1163/19426720-00604002. Tussie, Diana and Pia Riggirozzi (eds.) (2012) The Rise of Post-Hegemonic Regionalism, Amsterdam: Springer Netherlands. Vergara-Figueroa, Aurora (2018) Afrodescendent Resistance to Deracination in Colombia, New York: Palgrave MacMillan. Viveiros de Castro, E. (2004) “Perspectivismo e multinaturalismo na América indígena,” O o Que Nos Faz Pensar, 18: 1–30. Walker, R.B.J. (1988) One World, Many Worlds: Struggles for a Just World Peace, Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Walsh, Catherine E. (2007) “Lo Afro en América andina: reflexiones en torno a las luchas actuales de (in)visibilidad, (re)existencia y pensamiento,” Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthtropology 12 (1): 200–212. Walsh, Catherine E. (2018) “Decoloniality in/As Praxis,” in Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh (eds.), On Decoloniality, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 15–104. DOI: 10.1525/jlaca.2007.12.1.200. Wemheuer-Vogelaar, Wiebke and Ingo Peters (eds.) (2016) Globalizing International Relations: Scholarship Amidst Divides and Diversity, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Yampara, Simón (2011) “Cosmovivencia andina: vivir y convivir en armonía integral— Suma Qamaña,” Revista de Estudios Bolivianos, 18: 1–22, DOI: 10.5195/bsj.2011.42. Zapata Olivella, Manuel (2010/1983). Changó, El Gran Putas. Ministerio de Cultura, Bogotá. DOI: 10.1192/bjp.112.483.211-a.

7 THE RISE CHINA AND THE POST-WESTERN WORLD IN LATIN AMERICA What Is in Store? Oliver Stuenkel

Latin America’s Defensive Posture When the Cold War ended and a tense bipolar standoff gave way to unipolarity, the general mood in Latin America was not one of celebration but of wariness. At first sight, this may seem surprising. After all, the region was in the midst of a historic process of redemocratization since the 1980s, so the victory of liberal democracy and capitalism over a socialist dictatorship should have been welcomed (Farer, 1996). Yet while few Latin Americans felt nostalgia for the Soviet Union, there was concern about the consequences of a global hegemon unrestrained by other great powers. Unipolarity, many feared, could produce a return to the days of the Monroe Doctrine, the guiding principle behind a long and traumatic history of US interventions in Latin America, policy makers feared– reviving long-standing fears that contributed to the emergence of sophisticated normative principles articulated through the Calvo Doctrine of 1896 and the Drago Doctrine of 1902 among others (see Chapter 3).1 It was therefore no surprise that most US initiatives for the region were not embraced whole-heartedly by governments in Latin America, even by leaders often seen as friendly toward the United States, such as Brazil’s President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The most ambitious economic initiative, the Free Trade Areas of the Americas (FTAA), presented at the Summit of the Americas in Miami in 1994, was given a polite but lukewarm reception in the region and was ultimately mothballed due to Latin American resistance; part of a strategy Tussie refers to as “defensive regionalism” (Tussie, 2009).2 The most important US-led security initiative in Latin America, Plan Colombia, was widely rejected in the region and contributed to Colombia’s isolation in the region (Spektor, 2012). Despite the United States’ remarkable soft power and cultural

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attraction across Latin America, the policy makers in Latin America generally considered Washington as the biggest threat to international peace and security. While many Latin American scholars and diplomats largely viewed a rules- and norms-based order positively, the United States was often seen not only as an important promoter but also as the main violator of those very rules (see Chapter 4) producing a cautious ambiguity typical for the region that often has been on the hard end of liberal order. After all, the history of US–Latin American relations has been, above all, shaped by the vast power asymmetry between the two, US–American dominance over its weaker neighbors in the South and attempts by Latin American leaders to reduce the influence of the “Colossus of the North” (Long, 2015). That explains why, for example, Latin American notions of the US-led order often diverge strongly from those in Western Europe, which was one of the greatest beneficiaries of global US leadership. One of Latin America’s greatest frustrations in the post-war years was that even after Brazil’s President Juscelino Kubitschek (1955–1961) worked together with other South American heads of state to obtain more development aid from the United States under Eisenhower – a remarkable and often overlooked example of regional cooperation at a time when ties between Brazil and its neighbors were still incipient – the US government decided against a “Marshall Plan” for the Western Hemisphere. President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress was helpful but did not change the overall perception that the United States had been ungrateful after South American troops had fought against fascism in Europe during World War II. Views still common among numerous Western academics that emerging powers can be described as “irresponsible stakeholders” that need to be “integrated” into global order did not, according to Latin American scholars, take into consideration that the United States broke international rules and norms far more often than countries such as Brazil or South Africa (Patrick, 2010).3 The debate about humanitarian intervention in Libya provides a useful example about such concerns. When the Brazilian government, after much hesitation, decided to abstain from Resolution 1973 as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council, thus allowing for the NATO intervention in Libya to go ahead, critics worried that Western powers had been given a carte blanche to do whatever they pleased. And indeed, less than a month after military operations began, the leaders of France, the UK and the United States argued in an op-ed that real and lasting protection of civilians could not be adequately protected as long as Gaddafi remained in power (Obama et al., 2011). What had begun as an operation to protect the citizens of Benghazi had quickly morphed into a mission for regime change. Non-Western powers, including Brazil, felt cheated. several other members of the Security Council suggested NATO had deliberately stretched the UN’s mandate for the purposes of regime change, and at times worked effectively as an air force for Libyan rebels.

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They recalled that peace negotiations had been halted as military operations began and emphasised the great human costs that large-scale military operations inevitably entail. For them, in addition to refusing to share information with the rest of the UN Security Council, NATO went beyond the mandate to enforce a no-fly zone and protect civilians and instead engaged in open warfare, including through the transfer of arms to rebel groups in the country, a violation of the arms embargo. (Tourinho et al., 2016) This episode reflects the disjuncture between the Western template and standard narrative about the US-led liberal order and Latin America’s experience in that order, which has been at the heart of frequent misunderstandings between the United States and Latin American policy makers. It thus comes as no surprise that the concern and pessimism in the United States about end of unipolarity and the transition to a more complex and multipolar “Post-Western World” have not resonated broadly across Latin America; quite to the contrary, the emergence of a new major power – or several new major powers – could help reduce the United States’ capacity to reshape the world in its image, generating instability.4 China’s growing influence in Latin America is thus often seen, somewhat simplistically – given the complexity of the phenomenon – as a positive development that can help reduce the region’s vulnerability to US interference. Latin American governments may have little interest in deepening ties to a geopolitically resurgent Moscow, but policy makers across the region privately recognize that while Russia’s engagement as a great power patron of the Maduro government left the country in a dangerous limbo, it at least reduced the probability of a US military intervention, a scenario even stalwarts such as Jair Bolsonaro rejected for fear of creating a precedent and a permanent presence of US troops in South America. At the same time, developments over the most recent years suggest that the opposite may be true. China’s growing economic influence may lead to more, instead of less, US engagement in Latin America to defend its traditional sphere of influence. In the same way, growing Russian influence in Venezuela may end up provoking the United States to take a more confrontational approach vis-à-vis the oil-rich country. Perhaps more importantly, the differences described above also reveal some of the reasons for Latin America’s marginalization in IR theory: the region’s countries never possessed the power – economic or military – to impose their agenda on others (Deciancio, 2016). When concepts emerged, they were mostly defensive (See Quiliconi and Rivera; Chapter 11) and did not leave a mark on mainstream theory building. Politicians and scholars around the world traditionally had no other choice but to carefully study ideas and norms articulated in the United States – after all, understanding the academic debate there and how it influenced policy was a matter of survival for numerous countries in the developing world. The West, on the other hand, was rarely forced to consider contributions made elsewhere – for a long time, it could have its way,

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if necessary through coercion. Ideas in the Global South were thus often reduced to a binary universe: either they supported previously made observations in the Global North or they contradicted them. Genuine dialogue, however, was rarely seen as necessary or was limited to debates about regional dynamics without any serious systemic impact. This may explain why instances such as Brazil’s engagement on sensitive security-related issues such as nuclear proliferation in Iran or humanitarian intervention in Libya were seen as highly unusual and often received a frosty reaction in the United States. For example, the “Global Brazil and U.S.-Brazil Relations” by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) suggested in 2011 that “Brazil [should] not be involved in security affairs in the Middle East” (Council of Foreign Relations, 2011).5 Yet precisely because of the diverging perspectives described above – perhaps unique due to the combination of Latin America’s geographic proximity, traditional exposure to US power and ambiguous relationship to the entire idea of the “West” – contributions made in the region are crucial, particularly when discussing how to construct a Global IR. Indeed, this example of “situated knowledge” – intellectual contributions which reveal the context within which they emerged and allow a greater understanding of authors’ conditions – may be a key element of what to look for as we are seeking to overcome the limiting Western-centeredness of the discipline. Several authors based in Latin America are already making significant contributions in this regard. Deciancio and Tussie describe what they call a “distinctly Latin American way of understanding global governance”, a topic of relevance beyond the region given the transformation international institutions experience on a global scale (Deciancio & Tussie, 2019). Tussie also points to “the distinctive features of Latin American regionalism from a political economy perspective, pointing at the interaction between states and markets and the re-drawing of their mutual boundaries in the contemporary regional order” (Tussie, 2009). While Latin American theoretical contributions have generally received limited attention on a global scale, there are important exceptions, such as theories about center–periphery political economy, pointing to important obstacles peripheral economies face (See Chapters 9 and 11). As power shifts away from the West toward Asia, the emergence of Global IR is no longer a matter of choice but much rather one of necessity. Even a cursory look at syllabi of IR theory courses at universities from around the world reveals that non-Western perspectives are far too rarely considered – and if so, in the “regionalism section” or to discuss “alternative perspectives”. The same is true vis-à-vis the discipline’s major journals, where great power debates are largely dominated by scholars based in the United States and the United Kingdom. Thinkers embracing different theoretical approaches, including postcolonialism and constructivism, have already helped “globalize” the discipline considerably. And yet, it remains true that the longer the discipline holds on to Western-centrism, the greater its incapacity will be to make sense of global

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events in a world where the West will remain relevant, but much less so than over the past decades. In the next section I aim to analyze how the emergence of a more Asia-centric, multipolar and multiplex world order (Acharya, 2014) offers strategic opportunities for Latin America.

The Rise of China in Latin America Latin America as a whole certainly stands to gain economically from the rise of China in particular, given its compatibility with the Asian country’s massive demand for commodities Latin America can provide. At the same time, it is not lost on policy makers and scholars in the region that the balance of trade with Asia’s largest economy is highly uneven. While countries such as Brazil have a massive trade surplus with China, they tend to export very few value-added goods while importing industrialized and high-tech products from China. In this context, it is also important to point to the continued importance of Chinese loans and investment, which have been crucial to Latin America particularly since the financial crisis of 2008/2009. In 2019, Chinese companies invested US$12.8 billion in the region, up 16.5% on 2018. While lending from the China Development Bank (CBD) and the Import-Export Bank of China (China Exim) decreased to US$1.1 billion in 2019, down from $2.1 in 2018, Chinese overall lending is still larger than that of the World Bank and the IDB taken together (Soutar, 2020). Still, as we assess the data about China’s economic rise in Brazil and elsewhere in the region, we must consider the improbable success of China’s soft power strategy – not establishing a positive reputation but successfully avoiding the emergence of a negative reputation despite its growing footprint across the region. After all, what is perhaps most remarkable – and proof of how sophisticated Beijing’s diplomacy has become – is how China has been able to extend its economic influence without causing any significant reaction or relevant political actors prior to the rise of Bolsonaro, the first Latin American head of state who was elected on an explicitly anti-Chinese platform. When Chinese investors bought, in 2018, a third of Brazil’s electricity sector – a sector of tremendous strategic importance – the news barely made it to the front page of Brazilian newspapers. When the Argentine government signed a deal that established a space observatory station in Patagonia, the Latin American public, or policy analysts, barely noticed. Any comparable agreement with the US armed forces would have caused an outcry. As Benjamin Creutzfeldt pointed out, There could not be a more striking contrast between the anti-China rhetoric prevalent in Washington and the enthusiasm for China that prevails among Latin American governments (…). (Creutzfeldt et al., 2018)

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One possible explanation is that, paradoxically, China’s lack of soft power and visibility in everyday life in Latin America may have long been an advantage in this particular instance, and its under-the-radar approach has helped Beijing avoid or delay the rise of sinophobia witnessed in African or Asian countries that have seen trade ties to China deepen. Contrary to the United States, which inevitably evokes love or hate (or both), the majority of Latin Americans are largely still indifferent when it comes to China or think of it as an abstract phenomenon – a situation that even the emergence of an anti-globalist, anti- Chinese faction within some right-wing governments, such as in Brazil, may only slowly change. During the 2020 pandemic, China intensified its soft power strategy in Latin America by offering financial support to assure access to a future vaccine and by providing medical equipment to numerous national and subnational governments. As the Financial Times observed in August that year, Home to almost half of the world’s new cases of coronavirus, Latin America is a long way from winning the war against Covid-19. But there is already one victor in the region: China. (Stott, 2020) Yet what drives China’s engagement in Latin America? Two issues stand out. First of all, China hopes to diversify its energy imports and access new markets for Chinese products. Dussel Peters has found that Chinese investment is correlated positively with the natural resource wealth of destination countries (Peters & Armony, 2015). For example, China is the world’s largest consumer of iron ore and niobium, both of which are vitally important for the country’s urban development. Latin America is one of the world’s largest sources of iron ore. Similarly, China needs Latin American soybeans and protein to feed its ever-growing population. Consequently, China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corporation (COFCO), a state-owned Chinese food-processing company, has been highly active in the soybean trade with Brazil and Argentina. Second, though less explicit and less visible, China seeks to rally support for international norms of independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity. Latin America, traumatized by their experiences with US unilateral interventionism, is generally inclined to ascribe similar importance and meaning to these norms. China’s charm offensive, evidenced by President Xi’s 2014 Latin America visit, has also aimed to increase support for China’s preferred model of multilateral internet governance (Swaine, 2014). Brazil, along with Argentina, has in recent years joined China in its criticism of US leadership in the global internet governance regime embodied by ICANN (Trinkunas & Wallace, 2015). More broadly speaking, US attempts to generate concern in Latin America about the rise of China do not resonate across the region. Mindful of deep-seated skepticism in Latin America of alliances and a strong interest in maintaining strategic autonomy, China has opted for a very limited

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military engagement in the region, involving consultations, cooperation between military schools in the form of exchanges and short-term visits. Given the region’s geographical proximity to the United States, Chinese policy makers consider Latin America to be part of the United States’ broader sphere of influence, and establishing a military presence in the region at this stage could unnecessarily anticipate a great power conflict. Beijing is well aware that several Latin American governments are facing growing pressure on Washington against projects with security implications, and therefore seek to advance more quietly (Myers, 2019). China is the number one trading partner not only of Brazil but also of Argentina, Chile, Peru and Uruguay. In 2017, 21.8% of Brazilian exports went to China, compared to only 12.5% to the United States. Similarly, Chile (27.5%) and Peru (26.3%) exported well over a quarter of their products to China. Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Mexico had a negative trade balance with China, while Brazil, Chile, Peru and Uruguay had a positive one. Most notably, Brazil had a massive trade surplus of US$ 20.2 billion. Just like most of Latin America, Brazil’s economy is dependent on the export of agricultural and extractive commodities, and since China is the global leading buyer of both, Brazil is structurally compatible with the Middle Kingdom. Particularly given how unlikely it is that Brazil’s economy and its exporters will be able to move up the international value chain the coming years, China is certain to remain Brazil’s key trade partner for years to come; in 2018, bilateral trade between the two countries hit yet another record – as was the case for all of Latin America (Myers, 2019). As a consequence, Chinese demand for Latin American products has been regarded as a boom for the region by policy makers across the ideological spectrum, and building the infrastructure necessary to facilitate the transport of commodities to China is seen as a sine qua non to develop Latin American economies (Creutzfeldt et al., 2018). This explains the relatively widespread support for the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and almost no concern for its potential downsides, such as growing Chinese pressure on Latin America’s voting behavior at multilateral institutions. Chinese diplomatic initiatives in the developing world have been long underestimated by Western observers. Many US analysts questioned to what extent China would be able to project soft power, pointing to its authoritarian nature and numerous domestic problems, ranging from pollution to corruption to systematic repression of its minorities (Nye, 2015). Yet a closer analysis reveals that Chinese diplomatic initiatives do not aim to make Latin Americans seek to live in China or replicate China’s political system. Rather, their goal is more limited yet remarkably effective – Beijing merely seeks to make sure that its engagement in Latin America is seen in a neutral way. In the same way, China understands that the easiest way to project itself positively in Latin America is by emphasizing its policy of non-interference to mark a sharp contrast to the United States.

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Considering the evidence, the strategy is working, and initiatives such as the China–Latin America think tank forum (launched in 2010), the China– CELAC Forum (launched in 2014) and the World Political Parties Dialogue (launched in 2016) are low-cost affairs but give the Chinese government a platform to project its message (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, 2015).6 The second China–CELAC Forum took place in 2018, during which participants agreed to deepen cooperation, as well as issuing a declaration supporting the Belt and Road Initiative (Martina & Lawder, 2019). BRI is quickly gaining visibility in Latin America, and several countries have recently signed bilateral agreements to participate in the initiative.

Latin America in the Post-Western World How, then, do Latin American International Relations scholars think about the rise of the multiplex world order, or “Post-Western World”, and how do policy makers think about strategic options for the continent in a more multipolar, less Western-centric international system? What are the implications for Global IR? These questions are all the more interesting because, as Diana Tussie and Amitav Acharya point out in Chapter 1, Latin America is neither clearly Western nor non-Western, in principle allowing it to articulate a unique perspective or course of action. Indeed, countries such as Brazil are in a rare position in that they can, in theory, play a relevant role within non-Western outfits such as the BRICS grouping or the G77, or Western-led groups such as the OECD, of which it seeks membership. In the same way, leaders such as Chile’s Sebastián Piñera have, so far quite successfully, sought to maintain strong ties with both the United States and China, despite growing tensions between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. Latin America’s role also stands apart from other regions as it has been far less affected from great power competition than the rest of the world. It is, as Michael Reid points out, “the forgotten continent” – with all the advantages and problems this position implies (Reid, 2009). Yet at the same time, a relevant limitation is, until recently, the region’s limited knowledge of and access to Asia and the non-Western world more generally, which has, in the past, hindered the development of a more sophisticated debate across the region. There used to be a near-complete absence of sinologists in Latin America, and so-called country specialists often face strong incentives to produce non-academic analyses to inform the public debate, governments or the private sector. With the private sector offering more competitive salaries than academia, scholars with specialized knowledge often face incentives to migrate to other professions which do not allow them to publish academically. Traditionally, those who sought to train as sinologists almost inevitably pursued their graduate education in the United States, Asia or Europe, and were unlikely to return as they seek professional opportunities

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in institutions that provide a fertile intellectual environment for Asia specialists. The sheer geographic distance between Latin America and China still plays an obvious, though often overlooked, role: no other country in the world is farther away from China than are Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Paraguay and Brazil. The chances for young scholars to conduct research in Asia often remain limited, and it is common even for graduate students at Latin American universities to write about Asia-related topics without having had the chance to conduct on-the-ground research there. Austerity measures adopted by governments across the region – particularly in Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru – and the severe economic crisis in Venezuela further limited options for scholars in those countries to learn about Asia. Important changes, however, are taking place in this regard; there are now numerous groups and publications organized by Latin American scholars studying Asia. Chinese institutions have been granting a growing number of scholarships to Latin Americans, and there is a growing community of former China grantees who have created networks of their own that are highly active. What is more, a younger generation of scholars based in Latin America focusing on China and Asia more generally can be expected to not only make significant intellectual contributions but also engage in the institution building necessary to provide a fertile environment that encourages future scholars to specialize in studying Asia, including the creation of specialized centers for Asian Studies, university chairs to allow scholars to conduct long-term work on Asia, and the identification of institutions willing to financially support such endeavors across the region. And yet, Latin America’s ties to Asia, Africa and the Middle East have been very limited during most of the past two centuries, even though migration from Asia picked up after slave labor was outlawed in the Caribbean in 1834, offering opportunities for migrants from China and other Asian countries. Today, Latin America is home to about 5 million people of Asian descent, more than 2 million living in Brazil alone (Duarte & Freire, 2011). In Peru, the number of Asian Latin Americans reaches 5% of the total population (Government of Taiwan, 2013). In the early 20th century, the focus of Latin American diplomacy began to shift toward the United States, by then the emerging global power – yet Latin American elites continued to entertain close ties to European elites. Brazil, for example, only in the second half of the 20th century decided to stop supporting Portugal diplomatically, and switched sides to support its African colonies’ quest for independence. Despite Latin American countries’ participation in outfits such as the G77 and the Non-Aligned Movement, economic and political ties between Asia and Latin America remained sporadic and played virtually no role in Latin American public debates. Throughout the 20th century, the United States’ cultural influence in Latin America was dominant, even though other regions have had a significant influence on Latin America as well. Both in the political and the cultural contexts, Latin America’s Arab

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diaspora has been highly visible, as Arab names of numerous political leaders such as Michel Temer, Geraldo Alckmin, Carlos Menem, Paulo Maluf reflect. Toward the end of the 20th century, global power was yet again shifting, this time toward Asia, which began to reclaim its central role in the global economy it had lost several centuries before. Starting in the early 2000s, this has led to a massive inflow of Chinese investments in Latin America. At the same time, Latin America–China trade has skyrocketed. China became Brazil’s largest trading partner in 2009, and its economic importance for all of Latin America is set to increase in the coming years. In 2018, nearly half of Brazil’s commodity exports and more than one quarter of its total exports went to the Middle Kingdom. The United States, by comparison, buys about half as much as China. After initially focusing on investments in agriculture, China’s economic presence now spans Latin America’s entire economy, with key investments in transport, energy, manufacturing and banking. Starting in the early 2000s, Latin American governments adapted to changing circumstances. Presidents and foreign ministers visited Asia more frequently and hosted Asian heads of state. Brazil embraced both the IBSA grouping, consisting of India, Brazil and South Africa, and, more notably, the BRICS grouping, which also includes China and Russia. In 2012, Brazil’s Foreign Minister Antonio Patriota argued that Brazil’s rapprochement to the BRICS countries was a strategic adjustment just like the one led by Brazil’s former top diplomat the Baron of Rio Branco roughly a century earlier, when he shifted the country’s diplomatic focus from Europe to the United States (Spektor, 2012). And yet, such deep economic ties have only slowly translated into greater cultural ties or greater Latin American public interest in Asia. Despite Asia’s rise in Latin America, US cultural influence stands unchallenged in the region. Paradoxically, this may be in China’s interest and bring important advantages, some of which may be of greater strategic relevance in the long term. That is because, in a region traditionally concerned about US intervention, strong cultural influence tends to inflate the perceived political and economic influence. While Latin American governments have, for the past years, attempted to maintain friendly ties to both Washington and Beijing, such a passive and neutral strategy will be increasingly difficult to implement. There is already clear evidence that tensions between China and the United States generate profound uncertainty for Latin America, given how the United States and Latin America directly compete for access to the Chinese market (Canuto, 2019). Yet while most observers focus on the ongoing trade war between the United States and China, it is the incipient tech war and the emergence of separate geopolitical tech spheres of influence that have far broader consequences for the future of global order and pose a difficult challenge for Latin America. Rapid technological change, symbolized by the arrival of 5G mobile technology, artificial intelligence and quantum computing, is likely to be the defining element in the emerging great power standoff, marked by the battle for supremacy in

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cyberspace between the United States and China. This coming era will most likely be shaped no longer of trade liberalization and open competition, but by the “geopoliticization” of the world economy and the race toward technological self-reliance. This new dynamic is already shaping contemporary politics in Latin America, where governments are subject to US pressure to refrain from embracing the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei as the provider of 5G technology – a step that policy makers in Washington regard as a first and as potentially irreversible in Beijing’s efforts to establish political influence around the world. In response, the Trump administration has taken active steps to exclude China from US–American technological know-how, a move that is set to change the basic rules of globalization (Waters et al., 2019). A significant part of the global economy will be intimately tied to new technologies – ranging from autonomous cars and drones used for transport and warfare, to communication and global finance – and all of them will be subject to the new geopolitical logic of the emerging tech cold war. Whoever controls these new technologies is expected to have a massive strategic advantage in global affairs over the next 10–15 years. 5G technology, as The Economist puts it, has become “become a proxy for superpowerdom” (The Economist, 2019). While the global tech industry will be most exposed – which plays only a very limited role in Latin America – the coming tech-split will most likely accelerate and deepen the overall trend of “decoupling”, the declining economic interdependence between the world’s two largest economies, and Western companies’ growing aversion to being exposed to geopolitical risk that operating in China implies. This development risks the emergence of two separate economic camps, reverting the tremendous economic globalization that has been the hallmark global order over the past decades. Cooperation between China and the United States is already declining in many other areas, such as academia, and obtaining Chinese student and conference visas for US scholars and vice versa has become far more difficult. In regions such as Latin America, such a cold war–like dynamic risks becoming the organizing principle of domestic politics, a situation with risks introducing a degree of paranoia almost certainty unhelpful when seeking to articulate a foreign policy strategy. While Latin American governments will all seek to maintain strong ties with both Washington and Beijing, the technological split between the two countries (and their respective blocs) will reduce overall interoperability and make maintaining a neutral stance more difficult. For example, when Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro visited Donald Trump in February 2019, the US President made clear that a strong partnership would depend on Brazil’s efforts to limit Chinese influence in Latin America, specifically asking the Brazilian leader not to allow Huawei to be part of the 5G network’s rollout. US officials have threatened to suspend intelligence sharing if the Brazilian government does not exclude the Chinese company from the bidding process, even though

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there has been no evidence of Chinese state cyber activity through Huawei so far (Campos Mello, 2019).7 Washington employs a similar strategy when dealing with its key allies around the world. The crisis in Venezuela, one of the world’s most oil-rich countries, provides an interesting – and alarming – case study of how Latin America has struggled to address the new dynamics the return of geopolitics and the emergence of genuine multipolarity is producing – and clear evidence that, as Deciancio writes, “there is a perceptible decline in the ability of the United States to shape re-gional orders and institutions” (Deciancio, 2016). The Venezuelan crisis is largely the product of a regional vacuum of power, and the incapacity by any Latin American actor to play a constructive role over the past two decades, a time during which Venezuela’s collapse was slowly progressing yet entirely predictable and, at least in its early stages, preventable. Despite some regional coordination over the past years, such as the Lima Group, which recognized Juan Guaidó as president, South America has long stopped playing a significant role in the Venezuelan crisis. Maduro and Guaidó both know that the only external actors that really matter are the United States, China and Russia. Any relevant political change in Venezuela will be the product of decisions made in Washington, Beijing and Moscow, generating complex dynamics that Latin American policy makers are struggling to comprehend or anticipate. This is a profoundly humiliating turn of events for most Latin American governments, which since the region’s transition to democracy in the 1980s made reducing interference from outside the region a paramount foreign policy goal (see Chapter 13). For Brazil, in particular, such impotence in the face of a geopolitical crisis at its border symbolizes the unmitigated failure of decades of Brazilian foreign policy, in which Brasília sought to position itself into the region’s diplomatic and political leader and arbiter, projecting stability in the neighborhood. As the crisis in Venezuela shows, Latin America has once more become vulnerable to foreign major powers. Yet while a combination of strategic short-sightedness and diplomatic mistakes is responsible for the region’s inability to mitigate the crisis in Venezuela, that alone does not fully explain the constellation in the Caribbean country. After all, if a similar situation had occurred in the unipolar context of the 1990s, the United States alone would have filled the vacuum of power in Latin America. In today’s multipolar system, however, three major powers – the United States, China and Russia – are all playing a crucial role in the country, making overcoming the crisis far more complex. Three major outside powers vying for influence in a Latin American country is indeed unprecedented since the era of state formation in the 19th century. Since the region’s transition to democracy in the 1980s, governments have sought to protect both their sovereignty and democracy by developing intra-regional mechanisms to address one of South America’s major historical challenges: democratic backsliding and the political crises that often derived from it. These mechanisms have included democracy clauses (such as the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Democratic Charter (IADC)

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or Mercosur’s Ushuaia Protocol), or joint commitments to punish those who violate democratic norms, as well as the use of concrete measures, such as suspension from regional organizations such as the Southern Common Market (or Mercosur), in response to democratic ruptures. Governments in the region have failed to prevent certain instances of democratic backsliding – Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, for example, was removed in a coup in 2009, and Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo was ousted in a controversial impeachment in 2012. In both cases, however, these countries suffered temporary diplomatic isolation in response to what regional leaders considered to be a break from normal constitutional practice. Between the 1990s and 2000, governments in Brasília played a key role in setting and enforcing these norms – part of a conscious attempt by the country’s democratic rulers to position Brazil as the major diplomatic player in South America and actively engage in moments of crisis. In 1996, Brazil helped convince a coup-plotting Paraguayan general, Lino Oviedo, not to stage a coup against President Juan Carlos Wasmosy, the country’s first democratically elected civilian in decades. Three years later, it again helped solve a political crisis in Paraguay by granting asylum and organizing the swift departure of the beleaguered President Raúl Cubas Grau after the assassination of Vice President Luis Maria Argaña. In the aftermath of a failed coup against Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in 2002, Brazil coordinated the “Friends of Venezuela” group, which included the United States, Portugal and Spain alongside several Latin American governments, to mediate between the embattled president and the Venezuelan opposition. Yet by embracing a slow, long-term strategy to undermine democracy from within, Hugo Chávez was able to avoid falling foul of the region’s network of rules and norms. In addition, oil subsidies to ideologically friendly governments allowed the government in Caracas to delay the emergence of a united front against Venezuela in the region for many years. Yet more importantly, domestic political and economic crises in countries such as Brazil and Argentina complicated any attempts to coordinate regional action. The lack of regional leadership created a power vacuum in the region that not only allowed the situation in Venezuela to fester, but it opened a space for outside powers, such as China and Russia, to play a far more important political role in the region – above all as power-brokers in the oil-rich state. This new scenario will remain valid even if Maduro left power prior to the end of his second presidential term, in 2025. After all, irrespective of the ideological orientation of the next government, Venezuela’s strong dependence on Chinese credits, investments and demand for oil will persist, and shape Latin American politics for a long time to come. The challenges listed above point, above all, to the crisis of “post-hegemonic” regionalism that saw the rise and fall of organizations such as ALBA and UNASUR, which disintegrated after the hegemony of center-left governments in the region ended (Deciancio, 2016). After several waves of regionalism, what is the next chapter for regional integration in Latin America in the context of

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a Post-Western World? That question may be of even greater urgency given the multiple set of crises that are set to shape the early period of the 2020s, aggravated by a profound economic crisis caused by the pandemic, a migration crisis in Venezuela and Central America, and a severe environmental crisis in Brazil. Adding the complex challenge of transnational crime, which can only be solved by better regional cooperation, one perceives the urgent need to embrace new regional approaches in the context of a global shift of power – yet given the profound ideological fragmentation that can shape the region, it is unlikely that the main impulses from come from governments. Having said that, however, there are several reasons to believe that Latin America’s long search for geography and strategic autonomy in the context of the arrival of a Post-Western World may also help provide important contributions to the making of Global IR. First of all, as shown above, Latin America’s reaction to the rise of China and the end of a Western-centric international system is unique, and despite having taken a while to adapt, a new generation of IR scholars in the region is more knowledgeable about Asia that at any previous moment. While growing tensions between Washington and Beijing are likely to make academic cooperation more difficult all over the world, the negative consequences in Latin America may be less severe than in the United States, where the government is seeing the presence of Chinese scholars through the prism of geopolitics, thus disincentivizing academic cooperation between US and Chinese institutions. The closure of Confucius Institutes at US universities and the US government’s decision to block a growing number of Chinese companies or force their sale – such as, most recently, the US operation of Bytedance’s app TikTok – are merely first steps that will strongly affect the bilateral relationship. Compared to the Cold War, Latin American scholars today possess far more global networks and better access to debates both in the US and in China, but also to those in other academic centers around the world. While Latin American universities will surely suffer pressure as geopolitical tensions between the United States and China increase, they are unlikely to be as exposed as Chinese or US institutions, offering an opportunity to provide highly relevant analyses. In the same way, despite the tendences described above and the growing difficulty to maintain a neutral stance as the so-called new tech war, Latin America is unlikely to be fully absorbed into a sphere of influence, continuously seeking to hedge its bets and actively participating in institutions dominated by Western institutions and those led by China. Finally, despite the severe crisis of regional cooperation on the governmental level, there is evidence to believe that regional cooperation between IR scholars has not been negatively affected. Indeed, joint publications such as this one, involving scholars from across the region who think about Latin America and its theoretical contributions, are an important step to promoting the debate to deepen joint discussions about Global IR and the region’s role in it.

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Conclusion The rise of China in Latin America and the emergence of a multiplex world order, or “Post-Western World” produces a series of unprecedented challenges for Latin America. A key factor that limits Latin American agency and increases its vulnerability in this moment is a toxic combination of economic crisis – no other region has shown such a lackluster economic performance even prior to the pandemic – and domestic political instability, which forces the region to take a more defensive posture and focus on domestic challenges, a situation which has limited the region’s contributions to Global IR. Given domestic instability across the region, debates about how to react to the rise of China in Latin America and the return of great power politics in a Post-Western World have struggled to gain the visibility they deserve. And yet, as mentioned above, particularly the growing number of scholars across Latin America studying China and Asia more broadly, better regional coordination among scholars as well as Latin America’s unique geographic position in 21st-century geopolitics undoubtedly contribute to generating a fertile academic discussion that has the potential to strengthen the region’s role in the construction of a Global IR.

Notes 1 It is telling that, nearly three decades later, the Trump administration would indeed express their fondness for the Monroe Doctrine. 2 In this context, Tussie describes the origins of regionalism in Latin America as “multiple; Bolivarian solidarisitic instincts; US drive and the fear of US drive”, and that “a strategic competition between these regional projects, a competition which is at times adversarial and at other times mere sidelining of US interests” (Tussie, 2009). 3 See also, for example “Humanitarian interventionism, Brazilian style” (Spektor, 2012). 4 The term “Post-Western World” here refers to a world in which the West is no longer economically and politically dominant, and where non-Western actors such as China possess system-shaping capacity and significant agenda-setting power, transforming the Western-led liberal order into a less Western-centric, more multipolar international system. “Post-Western”, thus, does not refer to the total subversion of the values, rules and norms commonly – if erroneously – associated exclusively with the West, but with a situation in which the system will no longer be centered solely on Western actors. While “Post-Western World” focuses largely on a shift of power away from the West, it is closely related to Amitav Acharya’s concept of the “multiplex world order” in which elements of the liberal order survive, but where order is produced by a much larger number of actors, including great powers, emerging powers and non-state actors, who can use both material and ideational resources, and who establish different kinds of partnerships with each other (Acharya, 2014). 5 In the report’s annex, some authors of the report described this suggestion for Brazil not to engage in the Middle East as “inappropriate”. 6 See also “Working together key to shared future” (AnBaijie, 2017). 7 See also “Who’s afraid of Huawei? Understanding the 5G security concerns” (Taylor, 2019).

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References Acharya, A. (2014). The End of the American World Order. Cambridge, UK: Polity. AnBaijie, X. (2017, December 21). Working together key to shared future. The Telegraph. Retrieved from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/world/china-watch/ politics/chinese-president-xi-speech/. Canuto, O. (2019, September 16). Latin America is not benefiting from the U.S.-China trade war. Americas Quarterly. Retrieved from https://www.americasquarterly.org/ content/latin-america-not-benefiting-us-china-trade-war. Council on Foreign Relations. (2011). Global Brazil and U.S.-Brazil relations. Retrieved from https://www.cfr.org/report/global-brazil-and-us-brazil-relations. Creutzfeldt, B., Ray, R., Cote-Muñoz, N., Myers, M., Duarte, L., Stuenkel, O., … Cui, S. (2018, December 19). China’s growing footprint in Latin America. China File. Retrieved from http://www.chinafile.com/conversation/chinas-growingfootprint-latin-america. Deciancio, M. (2016). International relations from the south: A regional research agenda for global IR. International Studies Review, 18(1), 106–119. doi: 10.1093/isr/viv020. Deciancio, M., & Tussie, D. (2019). Globalizing global governance: Peripheral thoughts from Latin America. Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 13, 23–44. doi: 10.1007/s40647-019-00263-5. Duarte, A., & Freire, F. (2011, April 30). População asiática aumentou 173% no Brasil, segundo o Censo de 2010. O Globo. Retrieved from https://oglobo.globo.com/politica/ populacao-asiatica-aumentou-173-no-brasil-segundo-o-censo-de-2010-2789813. Farer, T. (1996). Beyond Sovereignty. Collectively Defending Democracy in the Americas. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Government of Taiwan. (2013). The ranking of ethnic Chinese population. Overseas community affairs statistics. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/ web/20131123193905/http://www.ocac.gov.tw/english/public/public.asp?selno= 1163&no=1163&level=B. Long, T. (2015). Latin America Confronts the United States. Asymmetry and Influence. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Martina, M., & Lawder, D. (2019, January 8). In Beijing talks, U.S. seeks details on Chinese goods purchases, trade promises. Reuters. Retrieved from https://www. reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china/inbeijing-talks-u-s-seeks-details-onchinese-goods-purchases-trade-promises-idUSKCN1P300T. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China. (2015, July 6). Forum of interchange between China-Latin America and the Caribbean think tanks. Retrieved from http://www.chinacelacforum.org/eng/zyjz_1/zylyflt/zlzkjllt/ t1278803.htm. Myers, M. (2019, April 23). The reasons for China’s cooling interest in Latin America. Americas Quarterly. Retrieved from https://www.americasquarterly.org/content/ how-beijing-sees-it?utm_source=meio&utm_medium=email. Nye, J. (2015, July 10). The limits of Chinese soft power. Project Syndicate. Retrieved from https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/china-civil-societynationalism-soft-power-by-joseph-s--nye-2015-07. Obama, B., Cameron, D., & Sarkozy, N. (2011, April 14). Libya’s pathway to peace. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/15/ opinion/15iht-edlibya15.html.

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Patrick, S. (2010, November/December). Irresponsible stakeholders? The difficulty of integrating rising powers. Foreign Affairs. Retrieved from https://www. foreignaffairs.com/articles/south-africa/2010-11-01/irresponsible-stakeholders. Peters, E. & Armony, A. (2015) Beyond raw materials: Who are the actors in the Latin America and Caribbean-China relationship? Red Académica de América Latina y el Caribe sobre China, 59. Retrieved from http://www.redalc-china.org/v21/images/ docs/Dussel_Armony_BeyondRawMaterials.pdf. Reid, M. (2009). Forgotten continent: The battle for Latin America’s soul. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Soutar, R. (2020, April 3). China continues to cut back Latin America loans. Dialogo Chino. Retrieved from https://dialogochino.net/en/trade-investment/chineseinvestment-latin-america-cut-back. Spektor, M. (2012, July 22). Usos e abusos do barão. Folha de São Paulo. Retrieved from https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/ilustrissima/55782-usos-e-abusos-do-barao. shtml. Spektor, M. (2012, October 17). Colombianas. Folha de São Paulo. Retrieved from https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/colunas/matiasspektor/1170442-colombianas. shtml. Spektor, M. (2012, Summer). Humanitarian interventionism, Brazilian style. Americas Quarterly. Retrieved from https://www.americasquarterly.org/humanitarianinterventionism-brazilian-style. Stott, M. (2020, August 9). China cleans up in Latin America as US flounders over coronavirus. Financial Times. Retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/741e72ede1db-4609-b389-969318f170e8. Swaine, M. (2014). Xi Jinping’s trip to Latin America. China Leadership Monitor, 45. Retrieved from https://carnegieendowment.org/files/Xi_ Jinpings_ July_2014_Trip_ to_Latin_America.pdf. Taylor, E. (2019, September 9). Who’s afraid of Huawei? Understanding the 5G security concerns. Chatham House. Retrieved from https://www.chathamhouse.org/expert/ comment/who-s-afraid-huawei-understanding-5g-security-concerns. The Economist. (2019, September 12). Ren Zhengfei may sell Huawei’s 5G technology to a western buyer. Retrieved from https://www.economist.com/business/2019/09/12/ ren-zhengfei-may-sell-huaweis-5g-technology-to-a-western-buyer. Tourinho, M., Stuenkel, O., & Brockmeier, S. (2016). Responsibility while protecting: Reforming R2P implementation. Global Society, 30(1), 134–150. doi: 10.1080/13600826.2015.1094452. Trinkunas, H., & Wallace, I. (2015, July) Converging on the future of global internet governance the United States and Brazil. Foreign Policy at Brookings. Retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/USBrazil-GlobalInternet-Governance-web-final.pdf. Tussie, D. (2009). Latin America: Contrasting motivations for regional projects. Review of International Studies, (35), 169–188. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/ stable/20542782. Waters, R., Hille, K., & Lucas, L. (2019, May 24). Huawei v the US: Trump risks a tech cold war. Financial Times. Retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/ 78ff bf36-7e0a-11e9-81d2-f 785092ab560.

8 LATIN AMERICAN FEMINISM AS A CONTRIBUTION TO A GLOBAL IR AGENDA FROM THE SOUTH Jorgelina Loza

Introduction1 Feminist theoretical development was responsible for an undeniable epistemic turn in the different disciplines of the Social Sciences. In International Relations (IR), feminist theories first had a strong impact within the discipline’s third debate in hand with constructivism, post-positivism, post-structuralism and postcolonial approaches (Salomón Gonzalez, 2001). Yet in Latin American IR the mark first came from development studies, a long-standing field of massive proportions in the region (Icaza, 2013a, 2013b). The Women/Gender and Development Paradigm was a turning point (Benería et  al., 2016). The paradigm opened the box of gender hierarchies and identified the structures of economic and political, social inequalities based on sex and gender. The care economy and unpaid work were brought to light, and in the process, it showed how power operates, not only in terms of material capabilities (Morgenthau, 1986; Waltz, 1959; Wendt, 2005) but also in symbolic terms. Gender thus became an enlightening analytical category to shed light on the silences and invisibilities of mainstream IR as a Western discipline that operates as a supposedly disembodied, hence universal and unrooted thinking over the “international”. In the last decades of the 20th century, feminism predicated an epistemic revision of IR theories making an effort to turn inside out the patriarchal approach on which the field was underpinned. Thus, knowledge that was traditionally presented as an absolute or as gender neutral responded to the actions of Western hegemonic scholars, mostly men. In this way, feminist theories introduced the discussion about the values and ideological frameworks within which knowledge about nation-states and the international system is built. One

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of the most important contributions of feminist theories to IR has been to broaden horizons toward new issues or, at least, toward new dimensions of traditionally addressed issues. A genuine making of Global International Relations (as proposed by Acharya, 2014) must by force become gender sensitive and gender inclusive. As relevant as this is, it remains work in progress despite the pioneering work of Ann Tickner (1992) and Cynthia Enloe (1983). Both authors brought to light how women’s lives and experiences were part of the multilayered politics of the global – be it security, militarism, crisis or development. To broaden the IR agenda into a more global and inclusive one, the features of the LA agenda on gender should be at the center of a GIR project. The effort of reviewing the patriarchal foundations upon which nations and the international system are built is long standing. In Anglo-Saxon IR, we find the contributions of seminal works such as Cynthia Enloe (2014) and Ann Tickner’s (2011) articles in which they also engaged with postcolonial theory. What both share at the core is a drive to emancipatory goals to bring about social change. Despite early works, it was the end of the Cold War that exposed the limitations of the (neo)realism/(neo)liberalism debate and enabled new perspectives. The space was opened for constructivism to bring out the relevance of ideational factors, norms, values, identities and cultures. Like much of postcolonial and poststructural criticism, gender came to the fore as global restructuring advanced. Gender became a subject in security studies when rape as a weapon of war became too obvious for the discipline to ignore and when major global events on gender were mobilizing minds, such as the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. These debates have already been systematized by many IR scholars by virtue of understanding the impact of feminist theories on the discipline. However, little has been said on the nexus between IR theories and approaches and Latin American views on it, a missing link especially given the long-standing embeddedness of development studies in Latin American IR. This means that gender studies do not necessarily focus on the politics of the state system and the diplomatic community, but it also analyzes the world through a mixture of theories and epistemologies to which IR as a discipline seems averse so far. Intersectionality and the combination of labor, racial, ethnic, socioeconomic factors occupied the core of feminist debates. This allowed a better understanding of the complex scenario of devaluation to which women are historically relegated within a patriarchal system. Although this concept is not exclusive to Latin American feminist theorists, those scholars had been developing the question about domination and the amalgamation of several factors that intersect to create and support a system of power. The question that arises here is about the participation of Latin American women in the international arena or, at least, what is the impact of international processes on their lives. This is why the enterprise of GIR is so welcome and so ripe for the inclusion of gender – and a diversity of voices within gender studies –

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that can bring out the international that exists in the peripheries of the world. It is important to put forward the question about the scope and capacity of Latin American feminist theories to penetrate IR field in the region. In this chapter, we are interested in reviewing the contributions of Latin American feminist perspectives to IR field in order to bring their voices and perspectives into broader debates and approaches. We intend to deepen the epistemological review that drove feminism within IR thinking about the emergence of new forms of knowledge construction emerging from the Global South. In dialogue – although not always in coincidence – with postcolonial theory, Latin American feminism has made important contributions to the construction of IR and a GIR project. First, we will present a periodization of traditional feminist theorization, rescuing its influence on IR discipline as well as in the Latin American political field. Second, we will present some contributions for this discussion, coming from postcolonial theory and decolonial theory. Mainly, we will focus at the epistemological and political proposal of intersectionality and the multidisciplinary perspective. Last but not least, conclusions will follow.

Feminist Theories as an Analytical Perspective for Political Action Social theory that brings a gender perspective or that sustains a feminist stance in the historical processes can be periodized to understand the evolution of the main debates within the paradigms in force in each discipline at different historical moments. In the case of the theoretical diversity that we will call feminist theories, academic debates have run in parallel with political actions of activists, groups and thinkers who fought for equal opportunities and rights for men and women. So, in this sense, feminist theories carry out a double condition. While they build a solid theoretical framework from which to understand the future of international societies, they also consolidate a political program of deconstruction and reflection on power relations. In this section we will briefly review the central debates within Western IR feminist theories to later on continue with a revision of Latin American feminist contributions. Western feminist theoretical approaches agreed in reviewing gender categorizations and the social relationships built around these ideas. As a result they questioned the historic domination of male over female. These relations of domination are based on symbolic constructions that operate at various levels: social, cultural, economic and political among others. Since the end of the 20th century, feminist theories permeated IR discipline mainly reviewing the epistemological and ontological foundations of the field, the realist approach (Barbé, 1987; Morgenthau, 1986). They argued that IR is a discipline with a state-centric origin and was founded around the reflections of men in power positions mainly from the West (Enloe, 2014; Tickner, 2011). Feminist theories

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also criticize the existence of gender biases inside IR traditional perspectives, as power struggles in realism. As a result, the main IR concepts – international system, state, power, politics, security, conflict and global governance – have come under siege. In conceptual terms, and without this being its most important achievement, we emphasize that Western IR feminist theories have managed to introduce the gender category to the analysis of the international. Previously, at its best, the gender issue seemed to have been confined to the domestic or national realm. This analytical narrowness is linked to the distinction between the public and private spheres that were strongly installed with the development of modern capitalism and that have been fundamental for the analysis of social processes or phenomena (Pateman, 1988). Thus, each sphere was loaded with its own characteristics, expectations and roles, which coincided with those granted to binary gender constructions: the domestic or private sphere was reserved for social reproduction, by women; while the political or public sphere was the one that concentrated the discussions on power, the nation and the state reserved for men Haraway. Enloe’s studies on sex work and trafficking in persons in areas of armed conflict show that there are particular conceptions of the private sector that impact the way in which states carry out mutual arrangements (Enloe, 1983, 2014). The separation of areas of action between genders proposes a barrier for women’s access to the political field and, also, to the international scene. But even more serious, it installs academic myopia regarding the issues concerning the discipline. From this perspective, the idea that the different spheres of action – local, national, international – should not be understood as separate but, rather, in constant interaction is reinforced. They are not only interactive scales (as Jelín, 2003, would say) but also interdependent ones as International Political Economy has held (see Quiliconi and Rivera in this volume). Locher reminds us that the individual and international levels are interdependent. This crossing of the levels and the referentiality between the public and the private is also clearly shown in human rights as women’s rights. Private violence, sexual violence against women, is linked to patriarchal relations between the sexes. Being a taboo for a long time, such homemade (sexual) violence little by little becomes an international issue and is perceived as an integral part of human rights. (Locher, 1988) The idea of the interdependence of the spheres of social action also allows us to think about the influence of gender categories in different fields. Thus, a feminist perspective is included in the international economy, reflecting the sexual division of labor and its impact on the configuration of forces of the international system, an issue that acquires special relevance in developing countries

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and regions such as Latin America. Gender transforms knowledge as an independent variable opening space for analysis of multiple approaches and dimensions that remain out of sight. Epistemologically, it challenges the traditional understanding of IR knowledge.

Western IR Approaches: What Does Latin America Have to Say Within Western IR feminist theories, we can identify three large groups of contributions: the liberal feminist theories, the more radical feminist theories, and a third perspective that Villarroel Peña (2007) has called “critical feminism”. Although we will adopt this categorization in the following pages, it is worth highlighting that there are other ways of ordering feminist contributions within IR: Trujillo López takes up the classification of Sandra Harding, which starts from an epistemological criterion. Thus, it distinguishes between feminist empiricism, which highlights IR androcentric nature of knowledge; a “point of view feminism”, which states that male bias in science is founded on female subordination; and feminist postmodernism, which questions Western scientific assumptions. On the other hand, authors such as Ann Tickner (2011) and Laura Sjoberg et al. (2016) will observe feminist theories from their link with a gender perspective, especially post-positivists (Trujillo López, 2014). Liberal feminism maintains, as a central idea, equality between the sexes. Its first claims focused on the economic and political emancipation of women, in order to achieve equal opportunities between sexes. As we have already mentioned, the distinction between the public sphere, intended for political action corresponding to men, and the private sphere, where women engaged in reproductive work were confined, resulted in preventing the latter from accessing the basic principles of liberalism: freedom, equality and justice. According to liberal feminists, the origin of this discrimination against women was rooted in an androcentric perspective of society, which despised the feminine. Feminist political currents focused on claims such as the right of women to vote, the right to private property, the possibility of participating in politics and their insertion in the labor market. It has been associated with the first feminist wave,2 that of the suffragists’ initiatives in the early to mid-20th century. Liberal feminist theorists focused on two fields of research in IR: on the one hand, the underrepresentation of women in traditional areas of the international system, such as the Armed Forces or as heads of states. The process of breaking the crystal ceiling and the arrival of female figures to hierarchical positions have also been observed. On the other hand, the other space where liberal feminist theorists have concentrated efforts is that of international politics. These contributions claimed that women have always been prominent historical figures. Cynthia Enloe’s work is paradigmatic, pointing out the roles that women occupied in situations of international conflict: members of military

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hospitals, workers in the arms industry and members of the army corps. It is important to note here that women’s participation in the international arena, namely in international organizations and international negotiation spaces, still remains a field poorly studied. The field of studies on transnational collective action seems to remedy this absence in part, with the already traditional contributions of Keck and Sikkink (1998), Sonia Alvarez (2000), Sikkink (2003), Vargas Valente (2005) for the Latin America feminisms. Women in collective action contribute to the building of a political region (Loza, 2018). Centrally, the work of Latin American scholars contributes to highlight the importance of the participation of women in international politics to achieve change at the national level and even for solidifying regional projects and senses of belonging (Chen, 2004; Icaza, 2018). We will return to these contributions in the next section. Subsequently Marxists and critical feminisms responded to liberal theories given that they do not consider to overthrow the modern capitalist structure or, at least, reformulate the foundations on which IR discipline has been built. Legal equality seems to be the ultimate goal of that tradition of thought. This implies a marked optimism in the conditions of the patriarchal system that organizes relations between genders and their possibility of equating opportunities for participation based on equal rights. But that equality does not seem to be a reflection of what is legally recognized, nor is legal equality as universal as it seems. These were some of the theoretical foundations of postcolonial and subaltern, that we will address in the next session. In addition, the approach of liberal feminism bears the assumption of the need for women to adapt to the masculine pattern of organization of political or public life, without reviewing the foundations on which this area has been built. In that sense, an epistemological critique of the International Relations paradigms does not seem to be central to its theorists. These reflections underline the aforementioned interconnection between the private and public spheres, highlighting the need to extend these feminine features of the private sector to the public sphere. It is not sought to overcome this dichotomy or its association with a specific gender but to reconsider the interdependence between both domains. Ann Tickner, considered an exponent of the empiricist school of thought also known as from the point of view (Trujillo López, 2014), has thought of feminine power as the ability to act collectively. She highlighted the feminine capacity to build organizations in opposition to the masculine model of the exercise of power, in which the sense of mandate and the individual vision predominate. These masculine characteristics are what have shaped the traditional approaches to the discipline of International Relations. Radical feminism, then, focuses on demonstrating the differences between the male and female sexes. The most recurrent themes have been studies on conflict and peace. The conceptualization of the patriarchal system has been

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central to this perspective. Masculine domination is affirmed as a phenomenon of universal historicity, which has permeated all areas of life. In this systemic construction, women seem destined to occupy subordinate positions at all levels. The radical approach proposes an assessment of male and female traits that perpetuates the distinction between two well-marked subjective forms. From a critique of the masculine form of political leadership, traits that are understood as feminine are promoted. Women appear associated with rather pacifist traits, with empathic and sensitive attitudes. International Relations, as an academic discipline, is a product of the male worldview. That is why the field of studies on war, defense and militarism occupies a central and traditional space. Against this model, they propose to build an approach with feminine features, which demonstrates the aptitudes of women for pacification. There is then an ethical superiority associated with the feminine, which makes the participation of women in the political sphere necessary in order to achieve positive change. In Latin America, Colombian studies on transition to democracy have pointed to the impacts of war in women and other sexual identities (Céspedes Báez, 2014; Ibarra Melo, 2011). The central problem with radical feminism is that it proposes a revitalization of “the feminine” that solidifies a dual vision, in which gender inequality is not questioned. In terms of reviewing the hierarchy of gender constructions, this perspective is not enough. It holds a rather biological view of women, to which it assigns expected and idealized characteristics, which it then transfers to the international system. This perspective prevents us from contemplating the diversity within women’s identity, consolidating the hegemonic stereotype. This prevents the construction of a global analysis that considers the existing complexity and that recognizes contributions from diverse centers of knowledge creation, such as South epistemologies and postcolonial studies. Critical feminism in contrast has set out to observe the construction of male hegemony in the international arena. They have analyzed the emergence of ideas that sustain the actions of those involved in the international arena, and how those ideas are preserved over time. Undoubtedly, this trend is indebted to the discussions raised by constructivism in IR, focusing on the processes of consolidation of meanings underlying the theoretical analysis. Thus, researches from a critical feminism framework – Cynthia Enloe’s works on sex work in areas of armed conflict, for example – have shown the ability to reformulate and revise theoretical concepts and categories through experimental studies. A distinction that appears as problematic for this perspective is that of foreign policy versus domestic politics. It is a traditional distinction within IR from which a very narrow thematic perspective has been developed (Locher, 1988). This analytical myopia did nothing but legitimize the exclusion of women from foreign policy circles, as an extension of the public sphere reserved for men. To break this analytical distinction, it is important to question the centrality of the state and include other civil society actors in the analysis. Latin American

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researcher Manuela Picq emphasizes the state-centrism of IR among other critiques, as a strong positivist bias and a radical Westphalian perspective.

Latin American Contributions to IR Feminism: Insights from Postcolonial and Decolonial Theories The feminist theories that gained space in Social Sciences in the 1980s and the productions of the Group of Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Theory coincide in distancing themselves from Western traditional feminist perspectives and in the aim to show omissions and absences in hegemonic approaches. They are the reflection of a specific period of time within the academy, which allowed us to review the epistemic or logical foundations of knowledge production. IR has already been discussing the centrality of actors such as the state, in the face of an international space that evidenced their constitutive interdependence (Salomon González, 2001). From this paradigm shift, new methodologies that focus on the interpretation and recovery of subordinate testimonies are also postulated. These two schools of thought followed the process initiated by critical theory, post-structuralism and contemporary readings of Marxism. Subaltern Studies were born in India in the 1980s with the revision of the national literatures. The lack of female voices and other subaltern groups was revealed, as well as – in many cases – oral or transmitted stories in non-traditional formats. In addition, the postcolonial perspective strongly questioned contemporary national constructions and proposed rescuing subaltern perspectives. Assuming that there is no single version of nationalism implies assuming that subaltern sectors actively participate in the construction of national ideas (Mallón, 2003). It is the history of that national formation that delineates which discourses or alliances become hegemonic and manage to install those particular senses (Chatterjee, 2008), anchored in the distribution of the assets of the national economy (Anderson, 2012). In Latin America, the decolonial school of thought has taken as reference the conquest of America as a starting point for the construction of modernity and the dissemination of capitalism. The conquest gave rise to Latin America, constituted it as a region and gave it a start as a political project. The decolonial theoretical perspective allowed the conceptualization of nations as particular historical formations, which represent a matrix of specific differences, to be extended to their territorial reach or even to the regional framework (Bidaseca, 2010; Segato, 2007). Thus, Latin American feminism within IR cannot be understood separately from theories that reveal the persistence of colonialism in the international sphere as well as in colonial societies. That is why Latin American feminist contributions often function as a critique of global or hegemonic feminism, which can adopt imperialist practices or overtones. Manuela Picq understands

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feminist criticism, in that sense, as a great question about positionality (2013). In the debates on foreign policy, gender views of power have been recognized as a pillar to discuss the idea of national autonomy (Russell and Tokatlian, 2002; and Miguez in this volume). These currents of thought challenged the modular analysis projects on regions, the nation and identities, expanding the approach to subaltern constructions and alternative experiences to Western ones. They gave space to historically marginalized actors, thinking critically about the differences that founded domination. Among these reflections, we find explorations about the place of women and the construction of gender categories in the modern international system and inside nation-states. These theoretical frameworks demonstrated the persistence of the power resorts of colonialism and the strategies of domination that sustain them, but they also predicted new community forms that incorporate heterogeneity. But the concept of internal colonialism was not new in Latin America. A strong debate during the 1970s served to explain the persistence of relations of ethnic subordination involved in class relations (Stavenhagen, 2001). For Bolivian sociologist Rivera Cusicanqui (2004), internal colonialism functions as a structuring matrix that operates up to the present and is responsible for the loss of the material and symbolic bases on which women sustained their autonomy. From there it could be affirmed that the relations of subordination based on race, class or gender were not eliminated with the independence processes, and that they still influence societies and identities (Marchand and Meza Rodríguez, 2016). Latin American feminists such as Maria Lugones (2008) would affirm that intersectionality between those dimensions of social domination was crucial to understanding the situation of women and other subaltern groups. Postcolonial feminism, then, not only questions the construction of gender categories and the power relations that political organizations hide but also reflects on gender as a determinant of identities and as a colonial heritage marked in them. In nations that have gone through the experience of colonialism, identities are also marked by the categories of ethnicity, class and race. The specific universe built under modernity, based on the dissemination of capitalism and the extension of coloniality, was organized around a Euro-centered cosmogony (Querajazu and Tickner in this volume). Modernity installed a much deeper categorization between those who were considered human and those who were mired in animality, the lack of culture. That colonialist categorization would serve as the foundation for the civilizing mission of colonialism (Segato, 2013). This definition questions the conventional historical account, defined in masculine terms and omitting the participation of women. We should discuss the idea of a universal man, in which the human and the masculine seem to be the same, determining not only the national historical account but also the ways of studying it. A new epistemology,

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enabled by these currents of thought, will lead to non-dichotomous visions that include diversity and recognize hierarchies between categories. Postcolonial and decolonial feminisms place their critiques in a context of colonialism. From there they enable an intersectional approach in both methodological approach and political stance. They claim to Western feminist theories the inclusion of diversity, in response to the construction of homogeneous and universal categories for women, especially for non-Western women (Anthias, 2012). The construction of a new otherness from the Western feminist perspective reproduces a new form of colonialism (Mohanty, 1984). To underline the heterogeneity of forms of oppression that weigh on women (and sexual diversities) in the former colonies is a way of pointing out and discussing the Euro-centric nature of knowledge. It shows that in these communities, colonization consolidated a racial inferiorization along with gender subordination (Oyewumi, 2002). Postcolonial feminist theories have been able to complement the approach of power relations based on gender with the revision of racial hierarchies. From these symbolic frameworks, subaltern groups have historically been feminized in contrast to a masculinized European identity (Chowdhry and Nair, 2004). The postcolonial perspective reinforces, in addition, the inter-relational feature of the ideas of the nation, already highlighted by Anderson (2012). No nation thinks of itself in solitude, all nations imagine themselves as finite and in a world made up of other nations. Postcolonial studies hold that the construction processes of nations that have a past of subordination to transatlantic empires are themselves a confirmation of this idea, because such imperial expansion was only possible if the colonial-type domination had a global extension. The nations that were built after independence periods sustained certain spaces of sovereignty (Chatterjee, 2008), although they reproduced the previous dynamics of domination. Emerging nation ideas are a product of a historical process in which an interdependent international system is consolidated. This intersection between different dimensions of analysis and the strengthening of an intersectional approach proposes a more comprehensive approach to IR, which considers the material dimension, the ideological or symbolic dimension of the phenomena and their impact on the construction of subjectivity or identity. Thus, far from naturalizing them, relations of power and domination can be problematized. This new epistemological proposal seems to be summed up in Cynthia Enloe’s rephrase of the radical feminist slogan, stating that the personal is also international, and the international is personal. Silvia Walby refers to ways of categorizing genders and sexes in a national context as a specific gender regime that works at the macro level, which is susceptible to historical changes but must also be analyzed by appreciating differences and giving space to transformations (Walby, 2000). On the particular ways that each nation develops regimes to deal with diversity, Argentinian researcher Rita Segato has also made a seminal contribution. Under the concept

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of national forms of otherness, Segato (2007) describes nations and regions as historical formations of social network construction in which diversity is contained in specific forms. Following this argument, each nation organizes its internal diversities differently. That organization is clearly hierarchical and not exempt from conflicting processes. The conceptualizations of the other and their experience change from one side of the border to the other. The senses in which identity terms are organized also change across nations. This idea has some coincidence with the concept of Walby’s gender regime, since for Segato each nation or region develops a particular way of dealing with this heterogeneity, and builds representations and hierarchies that have a historical origin. The analysis about masculinity has also contributed to discuss the homogeneity imposed for gender categorization, enriching the analysis of armed conflicts, international security, violence, etc. in IR (Trujillo López, 2014). In the analysis of the imposition of sexual patterns in Islamic nations, Nagel states (citing Mosse) that there is a duality between the responsibility that is attributed to men and the responsibility that is imprinted on the bodies of women – as such these do not enter in the framework of cultural identities outside this heteropatriarchal binomial, clearly. While for men the honor of the nation is something to gain and protect, women can only lose it (Nagel, 1998). Women must maintain sexual behaviors linked to reproduction, since free sexuality threatens to discredit that community. Female sexuality is available to populate the nation, it is available to the masculinity that bears the task of building that community. Much has been analyzed in IR about rape as a war tactic, evidencing gender differences in situations of armed conflict (Enloe, [1990] 2014; Trujillo López, 2014). For Walby, this enumeration obliterates the existence of conflicts between different hierarchical forms for the gender and sex categories, which could vary between ethnic groups. That is why, picking up Cynthia Enloe, Walby will say that International Relations show that colonial domination disseminated specific ideas about the correct forms of gender and gender relations. These ideas were contained in the civilization projects, thus legitimizing the forms of conquest and colonization (Walby, 2012), and also colonized the heterogeneity of women’s lives, building a homogenizing image of the “Third World Woman” (Mohanty, 1984). Reviewing that framework would allow us to see the underlying logic of the international division of labor – which assumes that female labor in postcolonial nations is cheap – and connect nationalisms with experiences of feminist political mobilization (Marchand, 2013). Therefore, Brazilian studies on black women studies and on women’s mobilizations have shown the connection between international and national agendas (Gonzalez, n.d.; Pitanguy, 2002, Pons Cardoso, 2014). As nations and nationalism are generally understood as part of the political sphere (the public), the exclusion of women from that sphere has implied their exclusion from the discourse on the national. This location of each gender in a

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different sphere has explained much of the oppression of women (Yuval Davis, 1997). It has also been the axis of claims both in Latin America and in the rest of the world: for example, the slogan of the Chilean Julieta Kirkwood, who claimed “Democracy in the country, in the house and in bed”, denouncing the oppression and denial of women and their bodies as political subjects. In this same line we can think of the claims for the appearance of the disappeared in times of dictatorships, sustained by women’s organizations such as Grandmothers and Mothers of Plaza de Mayo in Argentina among others. Private life, family pain in the face of forced disappearance, is stated as a public issue and, hence, political and national (Lamus Canavate, 2007). The 1990s showed an increase in feminist organizations that intervened in national and international political processes. The opening of international organizations to the participation of civil society was fundamental for the deepening of organizations’ access to the regional scenario, as well as for the construction of new advocacy strategies and the strengthening of transnational ties. From then on, “feminists began to be fundamental actors in the construction of democratic spaces of civil, regional and global societies” (Vargas Valente, 2005: 138), with the consequent professionalization of some of the fields traditionally linked to the claims of women’s movements, such as sexual and reproductive rights. One of the characteristics of the Latin American feminist mobilization has been a marked anti-imperialism and a strong effort of articulation with other claims such us housing, working conditions, environment, etc. (Lamus Canavate, 2007). Anti-imperialism also appears, although in more subtle ways, in the feminist theoretical proposals of Latin American IR. The double condition of the feminist theoretical framework, in both epistemological position and political demand at the same time, explains this coincidence. Thus, the calls for recognition of the particularity and respect for diversity are observed, proposing a challenge to the disciplinary limits of IRs. The recognition of the diversity of experiences inhabited by peripheral countries and, therefore, the need to think on novel methods and frameworks for approximation to these narratives are called to pluralize the discipline beyond the theoretical framework of European roots (Picq, 2013). In this way, reflection is only possible when it is loaded with a commitment to the object of study. But the public–private dichotomy, already mentioned a few pages above, is not the only one valid to explain these segregations. The dichotomy between nature and civilization, which Anthropology has long discussed as it refers to the West’s view of new conquered peoples, and the identification of women with the natural also explains their exclusion from the “civilized” public sphere politician. From the postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, precisely, it has been possible to review the idea of a unity between state and nation, as well as the dissemination of the nation as a single political model from Europe to the rest of

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the world. That universalism attributed to Euro-centric knowledge is what has produced unequal global structures, establishing subordinate relations between central and peripheral nations (Marchand and Meza Rodríguez, 2016). Western feminism allowed, then, to denounce the relations of oppression based on hierarchies between gender categories, and the way that situation shaped the modern international system. The Latin American feminist authors who integrate the IR discipline added the emphasis on the intersectionality of different hierarchies – gender, sex, race, ethnicity, class – constructed from categories installed at the origin of the modernity project (Tickner and Arreaza, 2002). It is the modern project that installs the famous dichotomy between nature and culture or civilization, which moves to the two sexual categories that were recognized, consolidating a static and androcentric vision of the world. The hegemony that certain feminism exercises installs a biased idea of the universality of women’s claims, without taking into account the diversity that this group contains. It is what Acharya (2014) has called a “neo-marginalization in IR”, in reference to the leadership or hegemony that Western feminists continue to exercise in spaces that recognize the diversity of the international system. At the same time, as the postcolonial authors mentioned, global feminism constructs an idea of the Third World woman as a homogeneous group, suppressing contexts and reproducing contemporary forms of colonial domination. A precisely located knowledge and awareness of that situation is required to overcome these forms of exclusion and exclusivity. Studies on women in Latin America have worked hard around the long tradition of collective action in the region. The fervent transnational collective action starring women, in fact, contributes greatly to the consolidation of the regional space. In the experiences of reaching transnational collective action, we find the possibility for local social movements to reconstruct or affirm subordinate identity ties and establish links with other movements. In addition, the international level is understood as more flexible than national scenarios, allowing collective actors to expose demands that wouldn’t be heard directly by their states. For Vargas Valente (2005), the regionalization of feminism began in 1981 with the creation of the Latin American Feminist Encounters. These meetings arose from previous contacts between women activists, and were an important element in the regionalization of the political processes that feminism led. Sonia Alvarez will say that they helped build an idea of an “imagined” Latin American feminist community, whose borders are constantly being negotiated (Alvarez, 2000). That imagined community also built strong ideas about who are legitimate members of it and who are not, and what are the principles that define them. Speaking of regional women’s movement in Latin America, Chen (2004) wonders about the fictional dimension of the regional sense of belonging, as there is a diversity of women who come from countries and trajectories so heterogeneous. The author relies on the historical construction of

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Latin America as a European project, excessively romanticized. The problem with the deconstructivist perspective that reviews the process of building Latin America as a cultural region is that it forgets the impact that process has had on those who sustain that identity. To sign the irrelevance of identification with the Latin American region dismisses the story of the popular sectors that gather around an idea of the regional.

Conclusions In this chapter we have offered a tour d’horizon of feminist currents and their impact on IR. Initially, the gender perspective served to include a new dimension of analysis. Eventually, that theoretical framework gave way to discuss and explain the fundamentals of gender relations, finding links with the way in which power is distributed internationally. More importantly still, these reflections allowed to look at the way the relationships of domination and subordination are approached from the discipline of IR. The description of oppression allows us to think of ways to overcome it, as well as to reflect on the processes to follow in order to build a more egalitarian international order. Hence the relevance of considering the contributions of feminist theories to International Relations. Postcolonial and decolonial theories, meanwhile, have added to that epistemic revision the question about subalternity and its capacity for action, emphasizing a problem that Western feminist theories did not pay attention to: the centrality of European knowledge in approaches of scientists. From that reflection it has been possible to inquire about the construction of otherness that proposes a discipline centered on and stemming from the West, such as IR (Deciancio, 2016). Thanks to the contribution of postcolonial and, specially, Latin American theorists, intersectionality has also been consolidated as a methodological approach for the analysis of the persistent relations of subordination between nations and other actors of the international system. The theoretical contributions that we analyze in these pages allow us to review the construction of imperial forces as well as the historical mechanisms through which these relations of domination and subordination are legitimized. Thinking about how the subalternity, the Global South, has been conceptualized and studied will allow us to understand in greater depth the form that the global structure takes today and its impact on contemporary historical processes such as migration and global care chains. That is why Latin American feminist theories of IR call to listen to women and giving space to the gender perspective in the analysis of global processes. It is in the experience of Latin American women that the intersections between empire, nation and the history of collective mobilization appear (Chowdhry and Nair, 2004). From that experience we can attend to the relations of power and subordination of a world no longer centered on the West but on the heterogeneity and power of the fragment.

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Feminist theoretical practice has developed great questions and also strategies based on political commitment to the object of study. Latin American feminisms within IR have advocated to expand the boundaries of the discipline in order to demonstrate the plurality and diversity of the international framework. Such a way of knowing and analyzing the world could contribute to transcend the disciplinary boundaries that distinguish between the West and the rest of the world, distinctions that have been extensively reviewed and discussed. Feminisms in Latin American IR propose tools to recognize themes, actors, actions that happen in spaces outside the West (Acharya, 2011, 2014), in an attempt to overcome ethnocentrism and the consequent exclusion that have characterized the discipline. Overcoming these conditions and embracing proposals for epistemological renewal requires a strong introspection process, promoted by a strong commitment to new ways of observing the international.

Notes 1 This chapter was enriched by the detailed comments and generous editing made by Melisa Deciancio and Diana Tussie. To them, my love and gratitude. 2 The periodization of feminist theories in “waves” has been widely criticized, given that it focuses on the history of Western feminism. Although this article proposes a view that breaks with that hegemonic scheme and highlights Latin American or third-world feminist contributions to International Relations, that reference is a worthy way of organizing schools of thought.

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9 THE LATIN AMERICAN SCHOOL OF IPE A Road from Development to Regionalism Cintia Quiliconi and Renato Rivera Rhon

Introduction The authors would like to thank the generous comments from Melisa Deciancio and Diana Tussie that have enriched this chapter. The contributions of Latin American theories of International Political Economy (IPE) have been left aside by the mainstream of the field. However, since the mid-1950s, even before the IPE field was formally constituted as a field in its own right in the North, Latin American schools of structuralism and heterodox economics adopted a critical view toward the ontological foundation of orthodox trade and International Relations (IR). They argued that knowledge is always partial or fragmentary in origin and that international trade was unequally distributed between developing and developed countries. In this sense, IPE debates and Latin American structuralism have reflected the eternal dilemma of how to improve the countries’ international insertion; a central concept for the expansion of IPE with idiosyncratic characteristics (see Chapter 12). International insertion was key for the regional search for agency spaces within the international system. IPE, as structured in the North, has had a twofold vision of the world divided into positivism versus interpretivism in terms of knowledge, or, more widely, a geopolitical division into North American versus British schools that focus on power politics and economics with different lenses. Although these contributions are highly relevant to understand IR and IPE, this chapter detracts from those visions by recognizing that each region has its own intellectual traditions, and most of all, its agency claims in the case of the Global South can barely fit within mainstream IR Theory (Deciancio and Quiliconi 2020). By adapting Acharya’s dimensions of Global International Relations (GIR), we aim to bring Latin American contributions into a Global Political Economy (GPE) or IPE debate by recognizing the “pluralistic universalism” of IR

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through the explanation of historical events and debates that constitute the core of Latin American thinking (Acharya 2014). Embracing a more diverse and multidisciplinary approach, GPE took distance from the view that regional studies are a consequence of globalization (Gilpin 2001). In Latin America, regional studies have been the main concern of IPE debate by discussing the role of “regional development” as a tool for international insertion. Since late 1940s, Latin America has questioned the pretended universality of growth theories, building a home-grown debate detached from mainstream theories given its own discussions on development and autonomy (see Chapters 11 and 13). In fact, mainstream IPE has peripheralized locally grounded Latin American ideas of structuralism, dependency school and related critical approaches (Margulis 2016), as well as subsequent debates on regionalism considering them as area studies rather than regional contributions to the field (Tussie 2020). These locally grounded theoretical frameworks, concepts and methods contributed to the emergence of a field of study that has an important history and has been rising in the region as well as neglected in the mainstream. This chapter highlights the IPE research agenda in Latin America, analyzing how structuralism and theories of development contributed to the amalgamation of a regional IPE field, but also addressing how the subfield of Regionalism has developed during the last decades offering a way to achieve regional agency in terms of international insertion. Based on this historical analysis, it is possible to compare the main contributions of the most important political and economic events that fostered the creation of a regional field of IPE and highlight how it can contribute to a broader GIR research agenda. In this regard, we aim to discuss the regional contributions by focusing on the roots of Latin American IPE through what we consider constitutes the pillars of the “Latin American School”. In this sense, the chapter contrasts the contributions made by the Prebisch–Singer thesis and structuralism, the theories of development and its dependency claims that followed them and the more recent discussions on Regionalism focusing particularly in the trade dimension. We argue that these contributions can be identified as a particular school mainly built on the implications of the debate on the terms of trade as well as from development studies more generally, but opening up the door to an individual subfield of inquiry in the region that has recently become effervescent. The chapter is divided into three sections tackling the main contributions of Latin American IPE. First, we address the conceptualization of structuralism, dependency theories and the deterioration of the terms of trade as a critique to orthodox economics. Second, we highlight the importance of regional integration and regionalism as central building blocks of the Latin American School of IPE. Finally, we discuss whether the IPE field is global in its nature, or is facing a new stage within the context of Global International Relations in which the contribution and uniqueness of regional debates are being revisited

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and highlighted. Particularly, we argue that Latin American IPE has developed detached from mainstream IPE but in close relation to policy practice (Tickner 2008; Tussie 2020). Thus the creation of regional organizations was conceived as a constant search to encourage agency in the quest to improve the region’s international insertion. The last section concludes with some remarks about the lack of connection of Latin American IPE with mainstream theories and its relevance for a GIR agenda that includes these perspectives.

The Relevance of Development Debates in Latin American IR and IPE The study of international trade offered the first ideas that linked the relevance of economic development in Latin American with IR. It is not possible to understand the international relations of the region without the starting point of the asymmetric trade relations with the world. In fact, since colonial times, Latin America has been a provider of raw materials to world markets. Thus, the first discussion in Latin American IPE highlighted the need to critically evaluate the assumptions of comparative advantage and mutual benefit, by showing that one of the biggest failures of orthodox trade theory is its false sense of universality, especially when free trade and market-led policies intensify dependency for the region within the Global Political Economy. Insertion and decolonization built a distinctive ontology for Latin American IPE (Tussie 2020). In this sense, the study of Latin American political and economic history enables understanding why Latin American agency has been based on the relation between trade and politics and why this relation placed special emphasis on development debates in Latin American IR. Also, in order to understand one of the key Latin American contributions to GIR, “dependency theory” (see Chapter 11), the relation between politics and trade stands out for two reasons. First, even though Latin American states held political and administrative autonomy after the colonization period, the region has always faced a dichotomy between its political autonomy on a discursive level and its trade and political dependency with Europe and subsequently with the United States on a material level. This economic dependency went hand in hand with alliances at the political level with international actors such as Great Britain in the 19th century and the U.S. in the 20th century. In fact, leaders such as “El Libertador” Simón Bolivar considered Britain as a “big brother” of the Latin American independence cause, by recognizing that the independence process relied on European power, not only for weapons but also for commercial necessity (Hidalgo 2013). Political pressures in Latin America became very active when trade policies endangered the elites’ economic interests. For example, during the consolidation of Latin American states, the Criollo decolonization project aimed to protect the economic interests of those linked with agriculture and minerals that intended to increase their political

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and economic status as merchants, landowners or monopolists; legitimizing a process of “internal colonialism” as Stavenhagen and Dos Santos have called it (Martinez 2011). In other words, although decolonization brought with it a certain political-administrative autonomy from the Spanish crown, the international insertion of Latin America would continue the asymmetrical relations with Europe. Moreover, during industrialization in the 20th century, Latin America initiated a critical evaluation process under the discussions of structuralism for which it was evident that the region had a peripheral position in the world economy as a world food and raw materials producer. Development debates in the region criticized the universality of international trade theories analyzing that the division of labor did not bring with it the technical, economic, political and social progress described by Western theories. Put differently, the economic interdependence between the industrialized “center” countries and the less industrialized or “peripheral” countries led to unequal benefits as long as the industrialization process remains uneven. Given that the exported volumes tend to persist stable, the ability of Latin American countries to import goods and services from abroad would be diminished over time (Prebisch 1949 in Bárcena 2016). Therefore, the debates concerning dependency theories focused on understanding the position of the region in the capitalist system, arguing that the root of Latin American underdevelopment “lay in the fact that while in the “center” most of the workers were integrated into the modern world, in the “periphery” this happened only with a small fraction of the population” (Sunkel 1970 in Bielchowsky 1998, 35). Center–periphery became a central concept of Latin American IPE, providing a theoretical and empirical foundation to encourage state-led rather than laissez faire or market-led development (Hirschmann 1958 in Margulis 2016). Latin American structuralism was possibly the first innovative explanation of the reasons for the region’s underdevelopment created from the developing world, pointing out the differences between development in the North Atlantic economies and Latin America, given their different participation in the world economy. They saw foreign trade with negative lenses as it was considered as a zero-sum game enabling advanced countries to grow at the expense of backward economies (Kuntz Ficker, 2005). Given the industrialization of a group of developing countries across the world, the region started to discuss if they can export that model, its relationship with economic and industrial planning and its consequent reevaluation of international trade as an ideal mean to achieve economic growth. By the early 1940s, the relation between the degree of industrialization and economic development was poorly instrumentalized in the regional debate (Bielchowsky 1998). Therefore, regional contributions of economic theories and philosophy to development focused on the premise that the study of underdeveloped economies requires a specific theoretical corpus, differentiated

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from the dominant economic theory, both in its fundamental concepts and in its methodological approach. Structuralism emerged as a critique to the orthodox view of economics presented by modernization theory, that saw development as a “universal, quasi-natural” process divided into five stages, in which industrialized societies were presented as a desirable and accessible model as long as the economies apply appropriate political measures such as the promotion of international trade (Rostow 1960). Based on this assumption, schools of sociology, economics and philosophy in the region focused their attention on understanding the factors by which certain societies achieve different levels of development – taking into account a combination not only of economic elements but also of political, social, cultural, normative and evaluative factors (Nahón Rodríguez and Schorr, 2006). These first theoretical regional contributions to development theories based on modernization theories were systematized in a body of literature with contributions of Raúl Prebisch, Celso Furtado, Osvaldo Sunkel, Anibal Pinto and Aldo Ferrer, which brought together Keynesian heterodox economic studies with sociological studies, seeking to understand the roots of Latin American economic development and its undeniable connection to social and political factors. The concepts of center and periphery laid the foundations of economic sociology and a particular way of theorizing IPE in the region (Deciancio 2018; Tussie 2020), more importantly, that basic “structural inequity in the world economy still holds true today and continue to shape theory and policy on trade and development” (Margulis 2016, 24). Under this historical-critical analysis based on the “peripheral condition”, the region promoted a new way of understanding IR and political economy that examined how the external and internal factors determined the political economy and societal relations in Latin American countries. As Margulis (2016) highlights, “Prebisch’s theory was highly original because it showed that commodity-exporting developing countries experienced declining terms of trade over the long-run, meaning that the economic gap between core and periphery countries would grow rather than narrow over time” (Margulis 2016, 27). Prebisch and ECLAC inaugurated a “structuralist” approach in order to understand the peripherical condition of Latin America in world politics. In fact, Prebisch’s ideas were related to the realist premise in IR that rejects the idea of equality among states, given that countries have different abilities and resources to pursue their interests (Waltz 1979). Similarly, Prebisch conceived international politics as driven by inequalities among the states arguing that given that major states are the key actors, the structure of international politics is unquestionably demarcated in terms of their interests (Rivarola, 2016). Those IPE theories that heavily influenced Latin America are based on the work of the ECLAC that propelled debates of structuralism and development theory.

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ECLAC sparked an intense discussion offering alternative ideas in which the role of the state was to boost internal markets and promote national and regional integration in order to better participate in trade and financial relations abroad (Saggioro et  al., 2016). The objective of this debate was to offer not only new theoretical ideas but also policy recommendations in order to reduce inequalities, fight unemployment and overcome the international division of labor that keep the region in an unequal position as exporters of raw materials since colonial times. Thus, Latin America’s main contribution to GIR is to observe the social, political and economic reality of global politics and especially IPE, and to consider regions – as objects of analysis that exercise agency – through the dynamics of regional integration processes and their consequences on national development. In Latin America, the agency-structure debate has not focused on theory building. With structuralism and dependency theory Latin America showed less concern with state-to-state relations and more with countries’ regional insertion in the international capitalist system, a factor that shapes the social and economic organization of all developing countries. While structuralism was in favor of an inward-directed development policy largely through import-substituting industrialization (ISI), dependency theory suggested the need for a new international economic order and, in one of its strands, a transition to socialism as a way out of underdevelopment. As many dependentistas proposed, the aim was to “reform capitalism nationally and internationally” (Kay 1998, 3). This is why the center–periphery debate fostered the consolidation of regional initiatives and organizations that could reduce asymmetry and enable leapfrogging. Latin America focused on the idea that “underdevelopment” required a specific field of study in which to understand the structural and systemic reasons for their asymmetric and limited international insertion. In this regard, dependency theory contributed to methodological innovation, highlighting the importance to understand the international insertion of Latin America based on the relation between the internal structures “as agents” and the political and economic power of the rest of the world as “the structure”. The advancement of this debate was not smooth in the region, there were tensions between “developmentalists” based on the premises of Prebisch and Furtado and more rupturists dependististas promoting social revolution such as Ruy Marini, Theotonio Dos Santos, Ander Gunder Frank and Samir Amin (Tussie, 2020). These Marxist approaches argued that the world capitalist and industrialization processes that took place in Latin America corresponded only to a new secular exploitation modality, and that imperialism on the workers of the underdeveloped world was imposed in alliance with the local elite. Taken together, such debates shed light on Global IR to explain “how state-building processes became circumscribed by external logics that interfaced with conditions internal to the periphery” (Sunkel 1980, 22). Those logics

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were explained on external influences such as inherited unequal economic interdependence in which the economic and political dependency set the region on an internalized capitalistic logic, “highlighting those mechanisms in the global order that worked to negate sovereign statehood outside the core” (Tickner 2015, 77). In this sense, historically ideas of Latin American regionalism emerged as a way to resist great power interventions or to achieve autonomy (Deciancio 2018). Moreover, the idea of economic integration is also closely related to the structuralist approach that linked industrialization, a high-skilled economy and regional economic integration to the construction of regional markets and as a way to decrease dependency from the core (Briceño Ruíz, 2016). Thus, economic integration and later on Regionalism became key topics in the Latin American School of IPE, underpinning the search for international insertion and autonomy.

Regionalism in the Latin American School of IPE Regionalism has been a cross-cutting issue in the historical evolution of IPE in Latin America as it is a topic that has been embedded in the discussion of international insertion and development. The transdisciplinary nature of “political economy has marked the field of IR through studies on regional integration and regionalism, also constituting one of the main contributions of regional IR discipline at a global level” (Acharya 2014), crafting the discussions on international economic relations as one of the main topics in Latin American IPE. IPE in Latin America and, more specifically, in South America since the 1980s has focused on discussing Regionalism in relation to development. Theoretical debates on Latin American IPE and IR have been primarily built on the numerous approaches to regionalism, pursuing the idea of improving the regional position in global markets and affairs while maintaining their autonomy (see Chapter 13). According to Acharya (2014), Global IR and, more specifically, Latin American IR gives the center stage to regions and area studies (Acharya 2014, 650). In this sense, Regionalism is at the forefront of a GIR agenda and one of the main contributions from Latin America to it. Latin Americans have thought about Regionalism even before Europe, being pioneers on these issues both in terms of ideas and practices (Deciancio 2016). In the region, three waves of regionalism have shaped the debate, first the ISI period closely related to the structural approaches discussed in the previous section that led to Closed Regionalism, second the Open Regionalism stage and, finally, the Post-liberal or Post-hegemonic phase. These three phases marked the discussions about the role that Regionalism plays in Latin American development and, more importantly, encapsulated traditional IR and integration theoretical discussions with empirical studies considered in the development or “underdevelopment” debates. As a result, Regionalism in Latin America

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resulted in one of the most relevant lines of research within the field of IPE (Deciancio 2016). For this reason, development theories and the theoretical approaches to assess Regionalism in Latin America are closely related since structuralist theories encourage regional strategies. Trade preferences promoted in the Latin American Free Trade Association (LAFTA) created in the 1960s and a subsequent proposal to generate joint strategies to industrialize through ISI for which regional markets were key examples of the embedded nature of development and regionalism. Thus, development theories have contributed extensively to the debates on Regionalism particularly during the closed Regionalism phase. Furthermore, Regionalism debates in Latin America have focused on denying the universality of Regional Integration theories, mainly those from the mainstream European approaches, building a research agenda better suited to explain their own realities with regional IPE lenses. Regionalism in Latin America has accepted the value of institutions as the locus of regional orders and as the main object of analysis. In fact, in Latin America, Regionalism has been founded on the belief that “regions need a regional institution” (Acharya and Buzan 2007, 293). Since the 20th century, the formalization of regional initiatives – institutions – has been accepted as the most relevant tool to study the Latin American regional order(s) in close relation to practice. This universality has to do with the fact that in Latin America, “the primacy of the state as the main actor in International Relations is seen as natural, followed by non-state actors such as multinational corporations and international organizations” (Chagas-Bastos 2018, 19). In this sense, Latin American Regionalism is no exception. States have been the main actors in Regionalism debates, while non-state actors are diffuse in theory and practice. The overpowering presence of Regionalism has led to Acharya’s claim that the true pioneers of Regionalism were not European, but Latin American (2014, 655). In this sense, it is not surprising that Regionalism has been part of the core of IR and IPE since the independence of the majority of Latin American countries. The strategy implemented firstly by Simón Bolivar in the 19th century and then by many heads of states has been linked with the fact that Latin America needs to cooperate to reduce its “unfavorable” position in IR and the global economy. Ever since the wars of independence, Latin America was inspired by Simón Bolivar’s ideals and discussed the need to promote a union based on a common “origin, language, traditions and religion” in which a leader was necessary to promote regional protection toward external threats. In 1822 the signature of the Tratado de Alianza y Confederación, that involved Colombia, Chile, Guatemala, Mexico and the River Plate, a Confederation of Nations upheld these ideas. The first initiatives of regional integration in Latin America were born through the proposal of LAFTA that sought to diversify exports through intra-regional trade, expand the market size that was expected to increase the industrial sectors in terms of scale and facilitate the substitution process

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(Bielchowsky 1998). Despite that, LAFTA failed due to different agendas, and during the 1970s the Latin American and the Caribbean Economic System (SELA in Spanish) was born as a response to the international economic scenario of the 1970s, characterized by an oligarchic structure in which the interests of industrialized countries prevailed. It is interesting to notice that SELA’s institutional design based on “voluntary” or intergovernmental agreements was a result of divergent trade strategies, a disappointment with LAFTA results, but most of all, the system was born as a result of ECLAC’s policies promoted by the political leadership of Mexico. It should be noted that, since 1950, a process of fragmentation of agendas is evident in Latin America, which led to the creation and bifurcation of countless institutional initiatives first to facilitate trade and later on extended to foster cooperation in other areas of Regionalism. Although there are several critiques on the role state interests played to limit the successful execution of LAFTA, one of the factors that explained the failure was based on the fact that the trade initiative led to a regional reproduction of asymmetries of the same practices evidenced in world trade. According to Salgado, states planned a mechanism to achieve some sort of “preferential treatment to weaker and smaller economies” (Salgado 1970 in Pareja Cucalón 2017, 24), that marked the beginning of sub-regional initiatives to favor less favored economies, such as the Andean Pact and the Central American Common Market. Another area strongly studied in the Latin American IPE is the reorientation of industrialization to promote exports or ISI. Since the 1950s, ECLAC highlighted industrialization as a long-term solution to the problem of external vulnerability. ISI and selective tariff protection of industries were proposed as a necessary strategy for peripheral countries to expand their benefits of technological progress to their entire economic structure (Briceño Ruíz, 2016) with remarkable successful results (Amsden 2004 in Margulis 2016). Regional Integration was not considered as a tool for trade facilitation, but rather as a platform for planning joint industrial policies at the regional level that would gradually eliminate barriers to reciprocal trade. The idea of maintaining high levels of external protection was to set incentives to industrialization, economic growth and investment (Tussie 2009); also reorienting the policy toward a “careful and selective” tariff trade policy adaptable to world realities (Prebisch 1959). A different institution that put into practice development debates regarding regional integration was the Andean region. Since the Andean Pact institutional creation was in the 1960s, the initiative has been a pioneer process in terms of regional integration based on trade. Centered on the surprisingly hard negotiation process to build the LAFTA, the region witnessed an excessive nationalism and an ideology of extreme market liberalism translated into the interests of the most powerful countries over the weakest (Pareja Cucalón, 2017). In this regard, Latin American integration required defining new directions to rekindle integration initiatives based on ECLAC’s recommendations.

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The Andean Group proposed an automatic and linear relief of the tariff universe, industrial programming to counteract asymmetries among its members and the constitution of a technical and supranational body to manage integration. Thus, grounded on development theories, Andean integration promoted a joint vision based on economic and political homogeneity and contributed with three main ideas to Latin American IPE: (i) integration as a means and not an end in itself to achieve development, which is why an institution must serve as an instrument and not a substitute for a development (Pareja Cucalón 2017); (ii) supranational integration but not assuming a violation of national sovereignty, which is why regional integration requires a dual and mutually beneficial vision; and, (iii) the need to generate joint industrial planning based on community objectives and through the creation of regional multinational companies in order to avoid production exploitation and concentration of market forces. Regional integration was also seen as a way to achieve autonomy (see Chapter 13); this approach started by Juan Carlos Puig and Helio Jaguaribe was more related to a foreign policy debate in which Regionalism was conceived as a more encompassing concept that goes beyond the economic dimension (Deciancio 2018). The knowledge production on Regional Integration in Latin America developed in regional institutions created between 1950s and 1970s and became hubs for regional debates that combined research and policy practice. Among them we highlight ECLAC (1948), the Latin American School of Social Sciences (FLACSO in Spanish, 1957), the Latin American Institution for Integration closely related to the Inter-American Development Bank (INTAL in Spanish, 1965) and Latin American Council for Social Sciences (CLACSO in Spanish, 1967) and SELA (1975) (Perrotta 2018). In the 1990s Latin America pursued a strategy based on the premise that unilateral trade liberalization was the key to enhancing more efficient participation of Latin American countries in the global economy through an exportoriented development strategy (Quiliconi and Salgado 2017). For the Latin American IPE the rise of globalization, the primacy of neoliberal ideas and the return of the orthodox economic views vis-á-vis the unipolar moment were important stimuli for rethinking the role of regions and regional integration. Thus a debate labeled as open regionalism that analyzed the construction of regional integration emerged in a context where states lost centrality in the midst of transnational processes. At this stage, discussions prevailed on whether regionalism acted as a building or stumbling block to achieve full trade liberalization. Technocratic and economist-cut approaches prevailed over the discussion on multilateralism and regionalism also addressing stages of trade integration and its limitations in developing countries from a liberalization perspective. These analyses were particularly encouraged by the creation of Mercosur in the early 1990s (Bouzas 1999; Gómez Mera 2008; Malamud and Gardini 2012; Motta Veiga 1999, among others).

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In Europe a debate about globalization and regionalization started in the late 1990s; this New Regionalist Approach (NRA) (Hettne, 2003; Hettne and Söderbaum 2002) traveled later on to Latin America, particularly through new generations of scholars that study in Europe and addressed those debates applied to the regional realities of Latin American Regionalism (Riggirozzi and Tussie 2012; Prieto 2015; Vivares 2014 among others). As Deciancio and Quiliconi (2020) pointed out, in the 2000s new agendas and approaches on South American Regionalism emerged in response to the creation of new regional organizations such as ALBA, CELAC and UNASUR and the shift in regional organizations such as Mercosur that added social issues to the traditional trade agenda. This debate delineated new conceptualizations and gave rise to what the literature has called regionalism with adjectives (Perrotta 2018) such as postliberal (Sanahuja 2012), post-hegemonic (Legler 2013; Riggirozzi and Tussie 2012), post-commercial (Dabène 2012) and strategic (Aponte 2014; Briceño Ruíz 2013). Another group of authors began to address regional regulatory governance and regime complexity as new debates to analyze the co-existence of various regional organizations with overlapping, new agendas and their interaction (Bianculli 2016, Gómez Mera 2015, Kacowicz 2018 among others). As Regionalism discussions begin to address a rich regional cooperation agenda on issues such as defense, drugs and security (Battaglino 2012; Comini 2015; Quiliconi and Rivera 2019), health and education (Herrero and Tussie 2015; Peixoto and Perrotta 2018; Riggirozzi 2017), migration (Montenegro Braz 2017), infrastructure and environment (Dabène 2012; Palestini and Agostinis 2015), the agenda of IPE issues expanded moving away from traditional approaches on trade. From 2005 to 2015, the regional political view reaffirmed the discourse that development was a regional priority, retaking the criticisms to Open Regionalism by refusing the idea to propose mere economic integration as a platform for regional development. Hand in hand with these discussions, development discussions came back to the regional IPE scene with a decolonial turn (Vivares and Dolcetti Marcolini 2016) that set focal points of critique to the idea of modernity also raising new views about development focused on the damages of reprimarization of regional economies and neo-extractivism (Acosta 2009; Gudynas 2009; Saguier 2014; Svampa 2013) as drivers of asymmetries and inequalities. Related to this debate, the discussion on the relationship between China and Latin America was also addressed by Latin American IPE in terms of development strategy and reprimarization concerns (Dussell Peters 2015; Slipak 2013; Vadell 2011 among others). The following table synthetizes the relation in different phases between development theories and Regionalism debates. Table 9.1 shows that the search for a successful international insertion permeated Latin American IPE in its various forms; the discussions around Regionalism were also framed around this dilemma and, as a consequence, development

Theories of development: Main characteristics

Regionalism debates

Regionalism waves

Positive quantitative studies. Historical-structuralist method (inductive).

Period: 1970–1990

Post-positivist theoretical discussions. Critical inductive studies. Interdisciplinary proposals of qualitative character. Consolidation of the historicalstructuralist method.

Period: 1960–1970

Dependency, productive and distributive structures. Industrialization that combines domestic market with export efforts. Military dictatorships. Serious indebtedness. Adjustments in spending. Renegotiation of debt as a tool for economic growth.

Conceptual approaches to Marxist debates and critical sociology. Economic growth. Consolidation of nationalisms. Theories of dependency (center–periphery). Structural heterogeneity and agrarian reforms.

(Continued)

First wave Reorientation of industrialization to (old regionalism). promote exports (ISI). Regional integration as a platform for joint industrial policies planned at a regional level through regional multinational companies. Regional integration as a communitarian tool aimed to reduce industrialization asymmetries between Latin American countries.

Regional integration as a tool to reduce First wave (old regionalism). global economic dependence. First proposals for joint initiatives of regional industrialization policies through preferential trade agreements.

First wave Quantitative positivist studies that First criticisms of free trade theories First initiatives of regional substitute (old regionalism). industrialization. hypotheses. incorporate deductive elements. First contributions to the Deterioration of the terms of trade; First proposals of regional preferential trade agreements in the context of ISI. structural imbalance. historical-structuralist method.

Period: 1948–1960

Epistemological and methodological debates

TABLE 9.1 Theories of development and the phases of regionalism

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Post-positivist and eclectic discussions. Critical inductive studies. Qualitative analysis. Return of the historicalstructuralist method in some cases.

Period: 2000–2015

Positive quantitative studies. Qualitative analysis.

Period: 1990–2000

Epistemological and methodological debates

High economic growth. Boom of commodities. Selective export industrialization. State action aimed to promote planning development. State investment in infrastructure and promotion of small business investments. Social policies.

Difficulties for production transformation. High rates of poverty and inequality. Privatization policies of the economy as a tool to promote economic growth.

Theories of development: Main characteristics

Second wave (open regionalism).

Regionalism waves

Critique of regional integration strategies Third wave (post- neoliberal; focused on trade. post- hegemonic Return of the importance of regionalism) development and predominance of a political agenda (ideological convergence). Regionalism focused on social and strategic topics rather than trade. Regime complexity and regional governance discussions on overlapping agendas of different regional organizations.

Generation of regional free trade agreements. Regional leadership from regional trade. Export specialization. Vulnerability for the movement of capital.

Regionalism debates

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concerns have always been at the center of these discussions. Even if it is in the form of trade liberalization as a tool for advancing economic growth, or as a strategy for industrialization or social improvement, development standards have always been present in Latin American IPE. Studies of Regionalism have historically dominated the field of Latin American IPE, even though the purpose of it has changed from period to period as a function of political processes, being sometimes an opening passage into globalization and lock-in of economic liberalization and others as a search for regional cooperation and development space.

Toward a Regional Agenda: Is the Latin American IPE a Field under Construction? Theories do not evolve freely. Changes in the object of study are responses to changes in the phenomenon that they attempt to explain. Moreover, in Latin America the preeminence of lo práctico (Tickner 2008) has forged a close link between politics, policy and IPE. Contemporary theoretical contributions of the Latin American IPE are the result of economic, social and, most of all, political interactions, as well as the discussion on international insertion. Thus, the academic production of the Latin American IPE School has been focused on two main areas, development and its social and international inequalities, and those discussions focused on studying the international insertion of the region in terms of Regional Integration and Regionalism. The field of Latin American IPE as such appeared before the “formalization” of the IPE in the North in the 1970s. Moreover, during the creation of the IPE subfield in the United States and Europe, Latin America had already brought to light the debate on declining terms of trade, asymmetrical insertion and dependency. So the main question is whether mainstream IPE has been truly global or has set a strict boundary that only recognizes its own production and knowledge peripheralizing Global South contributions? Based on the need to emphasize a problematization of the political economy from regional and endogenous approaches, the internationalization of the debates around mainstream IPE has lost its universality as they have not been able to explain the economic and political interactions of emerging regions. The applicability of mainstream IR and IPE theories is limited in terms of explanation and replicability in the Global South. In contrast, the Latin American IPE contributions provided privileged ideas in terms of development and international insertion based on its own epistemological and methodological contributions. At the ontological level, Latin American theories broke the acceptance of universality of positivist and orthodox theories by establishing the need to incorporate reflectivist approaches and, especially, the theoretical debates around economy and development contributed to the generation of an innovative methodology based on

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historical-structuralism, which is a fruitful intersection between a historical and inductive method. Latin American IPE has offered a variety of multidisciplinary approaches that, despite being neglected by mainstream IPE, are being reappraised under the GIR discussions. Latin American versions of developmental sociology and development economics were expressions of the ability of social scientists in the region to confront dominant ideas in the international debate questioning conventional wisdom and transforming it (Tussie 2020). Nowadays, Latin American IPE provides a rich discussion based on a variety of theoretical approaches and empirical data in a wide range of topics that encompass regionalism, international insertion, extractivism, debt, and economic global and regional governance with idiosyncratic lens (Tussie 2020). There is a growing sense of an epistemic community of Latin American IPE that gathers regularly at regional conferences anchored in global organizations such as the two conferences organized by the Latin American School of Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Buenos Aires and Quito in joint collaboration with the International Studies Association (ISA). Taking a look at the program of both conferences organized in 2014 and 2018, it is easily appreciated that topics on regional IPE played a prominent role in the number of panels that involved not only local academics but also international scholars that are eager to establish a global conversation on Latin American IR and IPE. In this sense, the idea that IPE is global in its subject study is problematic; because its globalizing scope shows a threat to mask the way different parts of the world approach it. Globalizing regional IPE poses the risk of making the Global South problems more diffuse, blurry and imperceptible, which can imply that the only ones capable of thinking about and developing solutions to those problems are the same ones that cause them. Moreover, the quest for globalizing regional IPE poses the risk of measuring the internationalization of the field with mainstream standards that do not reflect or recognize the regional vastness of contemporary Latin American IPE studies. Nonetheless, discussions of GIR help to empower a more accurate discussion about the role of non-Western IR and IPE ideas and how theories have developed in the Global South but need to be wary of imposing the lens of mainstream standards that are characterized by “universalist pretensions that ignore the periphery” (Prebisch 1986 in Rivarola 2016, 58).

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CLACSO-Argentina. Available at http://biblioteca.clacso.edu.ar/ar/libros/becas/ critica/C06Nahonetal.pdf. Palestini Céspedes, Stefano y Agostinis Giovanni (2015). Constructing regionalism in South America: the cases of transport infrastructure and energy within UNASUR. RSCAS 2014/73 Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies Global Governance Programme-117, 1–23. Pareja Cucalón, Francisco (2017). “El Pensamiento de Germánico Salgado sobre Integración Regional.” In Germánico Salgado (ed.), Integración Económica y Desarrollo en América Latina, Vol. 1. Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional, 11–48. Peixoto, Juliana and Perrotta Daniela (2018). “El Mercosur en el nuevo escenario político regional: más allá de la coyuntura.” Desafios, 30(1), 91–134. Perrotta, Daniela (2018). “El Campo de Estudios de La Integración Regional y Su Aporte a Las Relaciones Internacionales: Una Mirada Desde América Latina.” Relaciones Internacionales, 38, 9–39. Prieto, Germán (2015). “Collective Identity in the Andean Community: An Institutional Account”. Papel Político, 20(2), 585–604. Quiliconi, Cintia and Raúl Salgado (2017). “Latin American Integration: Regionalism a la Carte in a Multipolar World?” Colombia Internacional, (92). DOI:10.7440/ colombiaint92.2017.01. Quiliconi, Cintia and Rivera Renato (2019). “Trends and Policitization Cycles in the South American Regional Cooperation.” Revista Uruguaya de Ciencia Política, 28(1), 219–248. Riggirozzi, Pia and Diana Tussie, eds. (2012). The Rise of Post-hegemonic Regionalism. London: Springer. Riggirozzi, Pia (2017): “Regional Integration and Welfare: Framing and Advocating Pro-poor Norms through Southern Regionalisms”, New Political Economy, 22(6), 661–675. Rivarola, Andrés (2016). “Thinking Big from the Periphery.” In Matias E. Margulis (ed.), The Global Political Economy of Raul Prebisch. London: Taylor & Francis/Routledge, 1–23. Rostow, Walter Whitman (1960). The Process of Economic Growth. 2ª. ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Saggioro Garcia, Ana, Mendonça, M. Luisa and Borba de Sá, Miguel (2016). “International Political Economy in Latin America: Redefining the Periphery.” The Palgrave Handbook of Critical International Political Economy, 431–452. DOI:10.1057/978-1-137–50018-2_22. Saguier, Marcelo (2014). “Minería para el Desarrollo integral en la estrategia de UNASUR.” Revista Conjuntura Austral, 5(21–22), 39–65. Sanahuja, José Antonio (2012). “Post-liberal Regionalism in South America: The Case of Unasur”. Documento de trabajo. EUI Working Paper RSCAS 2012/05, Global Governance Programme 13, Transnational and Global Gobernance. Slipak, Ariel (2013). “Revisitando a Prebisch en el Siglo XXI: Un estudio de la relación sino-argentina.” REBELA-Revista Brasileira de Estudos Latino-Americanos, 2(2), 203–238. Svampa, Maristella (2013). “Consenso de los Commodities y lenguajes de valoración en América Latina.” Nueva Sociedad, 244, 30–46. Sunkel, Osvaldo (1980), “La interacción entre los estilos de desarrollo y el medio ambiente en

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10 REGIONALISM IN LATIN AMERICAN THOUGHT AND PRACTICE Arturo Santa-Cruz

Introduction On the eve of World War II, when the Western Hemisphere maintained variegated positions toward the states of the “Old Continent” that were about to start the second worldwide armed conflict, Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman wrote a short piece questioning the existence of a “Greater America”. As he would elaborate two decades later in The Invention of America, the “New World” features a “Great Divide” between its Anglo and Latin components; for him, Both Americas are the answer to the same longing of realizing in the new continent the new Europe; both, then, are cultural transplants and consequently, both are the historical outcome of an imitative process; but the parallelism ends here, since the imitation in both cases was of a different character, due to the difference between the two modalities of European culture that, respectively, served as a model… It was a case of repetition in the first case [Latin America]; originality in the second one [Anglo-America]. A new Europe, Anglo-Saxon America.1 For O’Gorman, therefore, the two regions lacked a common culture, that is, a meaningful common history.2 Foreshadowing his later argument, in his 1939 article O’Gorman noted that the mere increase of economic intercourse between its two constituent parts was unlikely to make the Western Hemisphere a significant entity. As he put it, it is remotely possible that… the Greater America [i.e., the Western Hemisphere]… gets to embody a historical unity, but for the sake of

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common sense, let’s not try to establish it in the fact that a road cuts across the Continent, from Pole to Pole [in reference to the 1937 Convention on the Pan-American Highway].3 It is therefore not surprising that Latin American states have been keen on organizing themselves separately from the United States—ever since Simon Bolívar summoned the 1826 Panama Congress. However, the liberator’s lofty objective has remained elusive. As Bolívar himself noted shortly after the founding meeting, “The Panama Congress will remain only as a shadow”. In the economic front there is certainly not much to show in the way of integration.4 As Alberto van Klaveren has recently noted, “If there is a Latin American […] supply chain, it lies not within any of the Latin American integration schemes but in Mexico’s de facto integration with the United States”.5 Even there, though, O’Gorman’s observation seems to hold true: close economic intercourse identity does not create. As the Mexican Ambassador to Washington during the negotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that led to the economic integration van Klaveren refers to has noted, The fact is that we [Mexico and the United States] will be neighbors forever, we are partners for the moment, and we will never be friends. For them, we lack the stature to be treated as equals. That is the difference when they look to the north and they find the Canadians [to whom] they offer the respectful treatment friendship requires.6 But Latin American efforts at integration continue, speaking to the value it attaches to thinking regionally. Thus, in other arenas, such as the cultural or political, things look different than in the economic front.7 In them, Latin American states oftentimes seem to indeed constitute a region. The myriad intergovernmental organizations that have sprung up in the last two decades or so clearly attest to this. Integrative attempts certainly follow the region’s countries like a shadow. But, as suggested, another shadow is noticeable in the background of Latin America’s recurrent integration efforts: that of the United States.8 It is telling that Bolívar did not initially intend to invite the North American country to the founding Congress—as it is the reluctance with which Washington accepted the invitation; its leaders noted that the rest of the participants “form one whole family in language, religion, law, historical fortunes, and present political alliance. From this family, as far as the enumerated circumstances go, we are necessarily excluded”.9 Although in the end the US delegates did not attend the event, Washington’s presence was already a fact to be reckoned with. The relationship between the United States and the “family” of Latin American countries has been imbued with the tension springing from a twopronged fact: on the one hand, contra O’Gorman, they do in fact have shared

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certain ideological and political interests by virtue of being part of the Western Hemisphere; on the other hand, as noted, a cultural, political and social frontier from Europe was indeed transplanted to the “New World”.10 That is why the emergence of Latin America has had a lot to do with the other part of the Americas to which it is (implicitly) referring: Anglo-America, mainly the United States.11 This resulting tension is now usually referred to as “Bolívarianism vs Pan-Americanism”. It is important to point out, however, that neither of the labels is necessarily associated with the scale it suggests (the former with the whole of Latin America, the later the whole of the hemisphere). Both have often been instantiated in smaller, more specific geographic areas. But more relevant for the purposes of this chapter is that the driving forces behind Bolivarianism and Pan-Americanism are, indeed, substantially different: while the former stresses an identity-based cultural and political project, the latter emphasizes more abstract values and economic interests. The distinct nature of each project’s engine, I argue, has important consequences for the kind of regionalism each of them can attain—even if in practice such a clearcut difference between interests and ideas, or political programs does not always hold.12 Thus, I contend that in the Latin American efforts at region-building, even when they have an ostensibly economic nature, identity matters, more than interests, are the explanatory factor that has been doing most of the work. Hence the repeated attempts at integration. But when the region is somehow in sync with Washington, identity issues, at least the most conspicuous, recede to the background and interests play a more prominent important role in its collaborative endeavors—as in the already alluded Mexican rapprochement with its northern neighbor, one that would set the stage for the rest of Latin America during the 1990s.13 For reasons of space—and because the idea of this project is to focus on specifically Latin American thought and practice—in this work I will not be dealing with hemispheric-wide integration attempts nor with others that involve the United States in a bilateral or minilateral fashion.14 This chapter is composed of four vignettes: the first one is mostly analytical, serving to set the terms of the empirical cases that follow. It delineates the central concept of this chapter, regionalism; it also provides a brief historical background on Latin America’s regionalist practice in the 20th century. The next three vignettes depict instances of integrative efforts in which Latin American countries have been involved since the 1990s—a decade that came to be known as the one of the “Washington Consensus”, since, as suggested, during it the countries of the region experimented an unusual degree of closeness to the United States: the South American Common Market (Mercosur), the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC). I conclude this chapter with a brief section in which I present a constructivist reading that emphasizes ideational matters in order to help us understand Latin America’s perennial integrationist toils. I will argue that in addition to the well-established regional

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issue-areas the region is known for, some of the more distinctive features of Latin American regionalist thought and practice are the product of the creative tension the interaction of two cultures in the Western Hemisphere has produced. Furthermore, I will argue that far from being a merely idiosyncratic feature, the Latin American experience “travels”, thus illuminating the more general literature on regionalism and the emergent Global International Relations.15

On Latin American Regionalism Regionalism is a multivocal concept. Of the many meanings the term might have—five, by one account16 —I am interested in two: economic interdependence and spatial identity. While both are usually the product of unregulated, bottom-up, social forces, they can arguably also be related to top-down, state decisions. Thus, a bottom-up process of regionalization can give rise to or coexist with a process of regionalism, in which the state creates formal integrative institutions.17 What matters to me is that the logic the two processes follow is different. The former has to do with efficiency and/or prosperity, that is, economic calculations; the latter with cultural, political, and/or social cohesion, that is, with self-perceptions. This is not to suggest that both logics are mutually exclusive (or that one is morally superior to the other, as suggested above); in fact, as I will discuss later, both commonly work together. In the Latin American experience, as noted, integrative efforts started around the time of independence. They were driven by identity matters but included also an economic (mainly trade) component. By the end of the 19th century, with the establishment of the International Union of American Republics (later Pan-American Union), the balance between the two logics seemed to have been inverted—and the identity component reduced to abstract values at the hemispheric level. Thus, while the ideational element was present—as in the assumption that the attending republics formed a more peaceful and representative system than the European one—the emphasis was placed on the economic side: the ostensible purpose of the 1889–1890 hemispheric conference was indeed to promote trade. The blending of the two logics became more evident with the founding, in 1948, of the Organization of American States (OAS), whose constitutive Charter lists economic cooperation as one of its core purposes while requiring the political organization of its member states to be based on “the effective exercise of representative democracy”. In addition to the hemispheric understanding of the mid-20th century, and arguably more for political than for economic reasons, Latin America started its own integration project about a decade later. In order to more clearly highlight the political substratum of the evidently economic integrative efforts, let’s briefly consider two cases: the Latin American Free Trade Association (LAFTA), and the Andean Pact. LAFTA was established in 1960 with the dual objective of lessening the dependence of its member states in the “core”

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countries and bringing about endogenous development. It was largely a product the governments of the region bought from the technocrats of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America.18 The idea made sense: a larger and more interdependent Latin American economy would benefit each of its participants. However, the venture only achieved meager results. Two decades into its creation, LAFTA was replaced by the Latin American Integration Association (LAIA), which fared only slightly better. In the end, both failed in their attempt to create economic integration.19 Ever since LAFTA, though, trade has been a central component of Latin American integration projects.20 A case in point is the Andean Pact, established in 1969 within LAFTA. The Pact’s objective was also twofold: to better the situation of the less developed countries of this sub-region (Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador and Peru; Venezuela joined four years later) vis-à-vis the large players, and to eventually create a common market. Although the trade component figured prominently, the Pact was more a political than an economic project.21 Two decades after the organization had been established, most of the exports of the region were destined to Europe and the United States, while intra-regional trade amounted to 2.5%.22 Thus, Andean economic integration did not go very far. The most ambitious, and visibly political, part of the project did not fare much better: it was not until the treaty establishing the Tribunal of Justice of the Cartagena Accord became effective, in 1983, that the Andean Group gained juridical autonomy23; at this point the Comunidad Andina de Naciones (CAN) replaced the Andean Pact (Chile is no longer a member, as it left in 1976 for political reasons, under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet; Venezuela also left CAN in 2006, for political reasons). Although the formalities of economic and political integration have advanced greatly since that time, making CAN rank second in institutionalization among regional groupings worldwide, its real achievements are modest. Thus, the Andes are still far from being an economically or politically integrated sub-region in Latin America. Both the region-wide LAFTA/LAIA and the sub-regional Pact/CAN show that, as Robert Bond noted long ago, “Weak supranational organizations have been the rule in Latin American regional associations”, as “Latin American states have not displayed much willingness to sacrifice perceived national interests on the regional altar”.24 That is why, as Alberto von Klaveren has observed, “Latin American regionalization, measured in terms of investment and trade links, is less evident that what formal agreements and institutions would suggest”.25 However, Latin American efforts at economic integration have not ceased. Why? I would argue that it is for political and, ultimately, identity-related reasons.26 As suggested, my claim is not that regional identity advances economic integration—I do not see a causal relationship here (nor, following O’Gorman, in the inverse situation of economic integration creating a regional identity). I do not think either that Latin American persistent collaborative efforts are merely cheap talk that can be captured by labels such as “token integration”,27

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“ceremonial regionalism”28 and “integration-fiction”.29 I posit that there has been something underlying Latin American integrationist practice—of whatever kind it might be. That something is social identification. That is why regionalism has been a key concept in Latin American thinking and a “dominant strategy” for political elites; in the region, as Diana Tussie has noted, “Regionalism is both policy and project”.30 This integrative ethos is an important part of the contribution Latin America has been making to the theory and practice of regionalism in international relations.31 The following three vignettes will illustrate, if in a rather impressionistic fashion, the way this feature has been at work since the 1990s.

Mercosur Mercosur was established in March 1991, bringing together four countries: Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. According to the spirit of the time— the Washington Consensus—its founding document (the Treaty of Asunción) focused on economic matters; its declared objective was to become a customs union. The 1994 Protocol of Ouro Preto further institutionalized the partnership of what some of its leaders referred to as “destiny rather than choice”.32 The integration of the four economies was certainly not economic destiny, though. Unlike the process of “silent integration” that had been going on for many years before NAFTA came into effect,33 the economies of the four South American countries did not evince much complementarity or interdependence prior to the announcement of the partnership. Furthermore, there was not even demand from the private sector for such an agreement.34 The birth of Mercosur was a political, state-led decision. It certainly aimed at creating greater economic interdependence among its members, but the main objective was to lock-in the political changes that had just taken place in the region and to maintain a distended relationship in the formerly contentious security arena between its two main members.35 Mercosur’s origins are intimately related to the democratic transitions in Argentina and Brazil. In 1986, within the framework of LAIA, presidents Raúl Alfonsín and José Sarney signed the Program of Economic Integration and Cooperation that would set the foundations for the much more ambitious Treaty of Asunción, to which their successors (Carlos Menem and Fernando Collor) invited Paraguay and Uruguay.36 But the birth of Mercosur is also owed to the wider international environment. The salient role the United States had acquired globally with the end of the Cold War, its association in a trading bloc with Mexico, the unveiling of the Enterprise of the Americas, Europe’s resurgence, as well as the emerging open regionalism, among other factors, led South America’s two largest countries to create a new kind of political and economic bloc37; according to José Briceño, Mercosur originally fitted the “strategic regionalism” model.38

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The bet on the economic front worked at first. Trade among Mercosur members initially raised significantly; seven years after the agreement had come into force, intra-regional exports (as a share of total exports) reached about 20%. There were also some attempts at deepening Mercosur. Thus, for instance, in 2000 the Initiative for the Integration of South American Regional Infrastructure was adopted (and seven years later even a Parliament, “Parlasur”, was created). This apparent success no doubt contributed to the interest other countries in the region showed to join the club. However, what initially looked like a successful trajectory soon changed course. Thus, for instance, by 2005 Brazilian exports to the region represented 10%, down from 17% seven years earlier. The reason, as Bouzas, da Motta Veiga and Rios note, is not new: “South American processes of integration have face a common structural feature, to wit: a relatively low level of economic interdependence”.39 Faced with the stubborn economic reality, Mercosur’s leaders, accordingly, changed their discourse on its main objectives. The political component of the association has become more salient. Furthermore, with the emergence of the pink tide in South America and the attendant passing away of the Washington Consensus, Mercosur became a bulwark against hemispheric free trade. Thus, not only Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez but also the host of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiating meeting that took place in November 2005 in Mar del Plata, President Néstor Kirchner, made their opposition to the continental pact known; it was the “post-hegemonic regionalism” moment—both in the theory and the practice of regionalism in Latin America.40 However, the newfound anti-liberalization zeal was not able to hold the members in synch regarding many other economic and political matters. As a result, Mercosur’s raison d’ être has been increasingly a matter of dispute among its members.41 At bottom, the problem seems to be that, as Karl Kaltenthaler and Frank Mora have put it, “the member states of Mercosur want the maximum economic and political benefits from integration while foregoing as little sovereignty as possible”.42 After some variation in its membership, currently Mercosur has four active members (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay) and one suspended (Venezuela); in addition, the bloc has seven associate members. Paradoxically, while the move to the right in the governments of the member countries suggests a return to the strategic regionalism model,43 it seems that the political motives that originated the bloc (to maintain a distended relationship between Argentina and Brazil, as well as to protect the democratic nature of political regimes of the sub-region) are still the most important assets of this integrative effort.44

ALBA Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez signed the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) constitutive agreement in December 2004—a

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month after the Washington-led negotiations toward the FTAA had collapsed in Mar del Plata. Already in 2001, in the framework of the third Summit of Heads of State of the Caribbean Community, Chávez had made clear his intention to launch an alternative to both the Washington Consensus and the hemispheric trade agreement.45 From the beginning, ALBA included a panoply of objectives: some of economic nature—such as the promotion of trade and investment and the integration the energy sectors of its member states—some of a social one—such as the provision of free education and healthcare—and some political—such as counterbalancing US hegemony and promoting Latin American identity. As Briceño has noted, “ALBA was originally a fuzzy proposal simply aimed at confronting the FTAA”.46 The political goal seemed to be paramount, though. As the signed agreement put it, Only a broad Latin Americanist vision, which acknowledges the impossibility of our countries’ developing and being truly independent in an isolated manner, will be capable of achieving what Bolívar called ‘…to see the formation in the Americas of the greatest nation in the world, not so much for its size and riches as for its freedom and glory,’ and that Martí conceived of as ‘Our America,’ to differentiate it from the other America, the expansionist one with imperialist appetites.47 With the boom in oil prices of the time, Venezuela was from the beginning the paymaster of the integrative effort—mainly by providing subsidized fuel to Cuba and later to other partners. But the social component was also important from the get-go.48 Thus, Caracas and Havana began putting their plans into practice soon; in 2005 Cuba dispatched about 30,000 doctors to Venezuela.49 Bolivia joined the two Caribbean countries in 2006. Its addition came to reinforce ALBA’s economic component, as it integrated President Evo Morales’ proposal for a “People’s Trade Agreement” (TCP; although it continues to be known as ALBA, the organization’s full acronym is now ALBA-TCP). Notably, the rationale of the new agreement was that regional trade integration based on complementarity, solidarity and cooperation and the common motivation to advance to higher levels of development, can meet the needs and aspirations of Latin American and Caribbean countries, and even preserve their independence, sovereignty and identity.50 According to its proponent, the TCP was the “fair trade” alternative to the Washington-backed free trade agreements.51 ALBA now includes eight Latin American and Caribbean countries. Nicaragua joined in 2007, Dominica and Honduras in 2008, Antigua and Barbuda, as well as St. Vincent and the Grenadines followed suit in 2009 (the next year,

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after the coup against President Manuel Zelaya, Honduras left the organization; Ecuador had joined in 2009 but left in 2018). Several other countries, including Dominican Republic, Grenada and Haiti, have become associated in some capacity to ALBA. In addition, ALBA has been endowed with a more robust institutional capacity. In February 2009 a Permanent Commission and an Executive Secretariat were created, and in December of the same year three Ministerial Councils, reflecting the tripartite objectives of the organization, were established: one for political affairs, one for economic affairs and one for social affairs. The group’s main attraction, as suggested, was Venezuelan oil. ALBA’s magnet for many Caribbean countries had been Petrocaribe; created in 2005, it provided soft loans not only for oil but also for food and infrastructure to countries of the region. Furthermore, through its oil resources, Venezuela has also helped other countries develop their own oil-related companies.52 However, with its declining oil production, as well as with the fall in oil prices in the international market, Venezuelan largesse has decreased significantly during Nicolás Maduro’s government. Furthermore, other than oil, trade volumes remain low among ALBA countries—indeed, they have gone down, representing in 2016 a quarter of what they were in 2005.53 Thus, politics remains ALBA’s bread and butter. Years before ALBA’s creation, President Chávez had argued that the extant schemes were “no system of integration”; what was required, he argued, was a new one that placed the politics above the economics.54 Being part of a region with a long tradition of strongmen and state-led projects, to a large extent putting politics at the front has meant that ALBA’s leaders became the protagonists. Thus, since its inception the organization has faithfully replicated the presidentialist nature of Latin American regional mechanisms.55 ALBA gained a political victory in 2009 when, at the OAS General Assembly held in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, its leaders managed to have that organization’s 1962 Resolution suspending Cuba from it left without effect. Consistent with ALBA’s objective of making the OAS obsolete, Cuba has shown no interest in rejoining the Pan-American organization; furthermore, in 2019 Venezuela withdrew from the hemispheric body. However, this has not meant that ALBA’s relative weight has increased; on the contrary, it is a stagnant, much-diminished organization.56 As the last redoubt of the most radical version of post-hegemonic regionalism, ALBA, however, endures.

CELAC The Community of Latin American and Caribbean States was created on February 2010 in Cancún, Mexico. Although its origins can be traced back to the Rio Group, established in 1986 by eight Latin American countries in their efforts to bring peace to Central America, but that remained and expanded

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after its objective was achieved, CELAC is fundamentally the result of Brazilian and Mexican initiatives—with both countries diplomatically competing for the region’s leadership.57 At the 2007 Summit of the Rio Group, Mexican president Felipe Calderón launched the idea of constituting a grouping of Latin American and Caribbean countries. The next year, at Brazil’s request, the Latin American and Caribbean Summit on Development and Integration (CALC) took place on December in Salvador de Bahía. The aim to counterbalance to US hegemony in the region was a driving force in the creation of the new integrative mechanism. For Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, this gathering made clear “the need to articulate the collective action of the Southern countries in order to transform the current state of affairs changing the international norms and pursuing a global balance through the construction of regional power poles”.58 In 2009, as pro-tempore Chair of the Rio Group, Mexico formalized its proposal, suggesting the adoption of CALC’s agenda and the transformation of the Rio Group into the Latin American and Caribbean Union (ULC). Although the Mexican proposal made clear that the new organization “should not be conceived as a mechanism that excludes other fora, but rather as one that complements them”—in reference to the OAS, where Canada and the United States are members—it also noted that “the aim of integration has left an imprint in Latin American and Caribbean history”, and that Mexico, “as a country with a deep Latin American identity… has a solid vocation as a promoter of the integration of the whole of our region”. Thus, in February 2010 in Cancún, in the framework of the Second CALC Summit and the XXI Rio Group Summit, the Summit for the Unity of Latin America and the Caribbean took place; in it, the creation of CELAC “as a common space aimed at deepening the cultural, economic, political, and social integration of the region” was agreed upon by 33 Latin American and Caribbean leaders. CELAC’s constitutive agenda covers a wide range of issues for the member countries to collaborate; among them are the international financial crisis, trade, energy, infrastructure, science and technology, food security, health, education, culture, migration, gender, sustainable development, climate change, natural disasters, human rights, security, narcotics and terrorism. The bar, no doubt, was set quite high for the new regional organization. However, as is customary in the integrative efforts of the region, the level of institutionalization and delegation established was very low, leaving it to high-level summitry to play a central role on its dynamics. The first meeting of CELAC took place in Caracas, in December 2011. There, the leaders of the region reiterated the idea that the new body would serve “as a common space that will guarantee the unity and the integration of our region”. Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega took the opportunity to note: “We are sentencing the Monroe Doctrine to death”. Similarly, Cuban leader Raúl Castro noted at the summit that CELAC’s creation was “the biggest event in 200

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years”.59 Quoting Victor Hugo, and adopting a more moderate position, Chilean president Sebastian Piñeira noted in his assumption speech as pro-tempore president of CELAC that the time for the idea of Latin America and the Caribbean had arrived—a line he reiterated next year, when he hosted both CELAC’s second meeting and the first CELAC-European Union Summit in Santiago. It is thus clear that, from the inception of the organization, not all regional leaders have seen eye to eye. This is no surprise, as not only several states but also several sub-regional groupings coexist in the new forum. Thus, for some, CELAC should also serve as an instantiation of open regionalism—at least in the trade liberalization component. That is why, for instance, President Calderón had noted since his 2008 invitation to create the new forum that, in addition to advance “toward the cultural and political integration” of the region, it should also contribute toward “the economic and commercial [integration] of Latin America and the Caribbean”. Furthermore, leaders of countries such as Chile, Colombia and Mexico have been at pains to emphasize that they do not conceive of CELAC as opposed to the OAS. Thus, for instance, Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos remarked at the inaugural meeting in Caracas, “CELAC isn’t being born to be against anyone”.60 Then OAS Secretary General, José Miguel Insulza, for his part, welcomed the new organization and expressed his hope that it would “enrich dialogue at the Inter-American level”, since the fact that all CELAC members are OAS members as well creates “natural coincidences”. The United States, on the other hand, did not issue any inflammatory statements regarding the emergence of an organization in the hemisphere that excludes it. After CELAC’s Caracas meeting, the State Department put out a statement noting that it was “waiting to see if [CELAC] turns into a responsible and effective regional organization”.61 Effective it has not. A decade after its establishment, CELAC is virtually moribund.62 The two powers that were supposed to be its main engines, Brazil and Mexico, have instead contributed to its feeble existence63; Brazil is not even part of the organization anymore. This recent effort in the long history of Latin American regionalism, however, makes clear that the desire to keep the idea about the region’s common identity and values is very much alive.64

Conclusions There seems to be more continuity than change in Latin American regionalism. For all the changes in the type of regionalism the countries of the area have pursued since the 1990s, and especially since the 2000s, both the integrative efforts and their meager results in terms of increased interdependence do not appear to have changed much. Regionalism still follows Latin America as a shadow. As I hope the preceding vignettes have illustrated, the shadow of the US endures as well in the countries’ integrative attempts.

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A constructivist perspective can make sense of the travails of Latin American regionalist endeavors of the last three decades or so.65 Regarding the increased collaboration among the countries of the hemisphere during the Washington Consensus in the 1990s, it emphasizes the change of identity many Latin American countries had gone through in the previous decade, a change that was related to the wider international system (the end of the Cold War), the regional political economy (the debt crisis) and particular changes in their political regimes (the return of democracy). The change in identity impacted the way the countries of the region conceived of both their interests and their relationship with the United States. Importantly, this relatively sudden revision was possible because there was an important ideational substratum the states of the hemisphere shared, one that had been in the making since the late 19th century: Pan-Americanism. Hence the revival of the OAS during the 1990s.66 With its emphasis on human rights, representative government, and trade, this pre-existing shared understanding made it possible for Latin American countries to more or less abruptly increase their level of cooperation with the hemispheric hegemon, and even alter what had been a core norm of the region: non-intervention. The new normative framework and identity made it possible for Latin American states to stop seeing regional involvement in the protection of democracy as an unwarranted intervention in domestic affairs. Identity matters have played a more salient role in the three integrative processes sketched above being, as they are, if to different extents, variants of Bolivarianism. Hence the repeated references to common culture, history and norms. In Mercosur, once its economic component had run its course and the Washington Consensus had faded, the integrative discourse fell back on familiar ground: the political distinctiveness of the region. ALBA exacerbated such rhetoric, stressing the region’s opposition to the United States and the bonds among Latin American people. Finally, CELAC is also premised on the existence of a region-wide identity—one in whose emergence and consolidation the United States has played an instrumental role. And it is precisely here, at the intersection between the two distinct cultures O’Gorman wrote about, that perhaps the most salient contributions of the region to the theory and practice of regionalism have taken place. For starters, Latin American regionalism, as has been correctly pointed out, is the oldest in the world67; but this is so, I would argue, because of the hemisphere’s Great Divide (per O’Gorman). Absent such cultural fault line, it is unlikely regionalism would have evolved the way it did. True, Latin American states have developed other features, such as the non-intervention principle and others “localizing and expanding sovereignty”,68 but, looking comparatively, those traits are not exclusive to the region; other post-colonial milieus, such as those in Africa and Asia, have also developed them. Alternatively, other of the region’s more significant contributions to the international political economy in terms of norms and ideas have to do with the defense of human rights, democracy and collective security systems at the

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regional level. Those issue-areas have pride of place in the Americas—precisely because it was there that their launching to the international political arena has taken place since around the mid-20th century.69 Now, the italics above are important, as they point to Pan-Americanism or, more broadly, to the Western Hemisphere Idea (WHI). That is, the “New World” evolved its own “constitutional structure” 70 which embodied, in a rather dialectical fashion, the principles of human rights cum representative government and non-intervention71; this is what the WHI is about. No tension between the two component parts of the Americas, no WHI; no WHI, no defense of human rights, democracy and collective security systems at the regional level. To engage in a counterfactual exercise, had the “North American Continent” been such a self-contained entity as John Quincy Adams imagined, “peopled by one nation, speaking one language, professing one general system of religious and political principles, and accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and customs”,72 a landmass composed only of Canada and the United States (if not only by the latter, given Adams’ imperialist leanings), the distinguishing principles of the WHI would have not emerged—the creative tension provided by Latin America would’ve been absent, thus rending mute the creation of a normative structure centered on human rights cum representative government and non-intervention. The countries on the other side of the Great Divide had to contribute their part—a product of both their own Iberian tradition and the political tensions that emerged during their interaction with Anglo-America.73 But what makes the WHI more significative is that it traveled. That is, the normative structure of the Americas has not remained an idiosyncratic trait of the states conforming it; some of its core ideas have been successfully “exported” to other regions— and to the international system as a whole.74 As I hope to have shown, the study of extra-European experiences can contribute to the creation of Global International Relations, an enterprise that is just starting and that should be undertaken putting a premium on the diversity of methodological and theoretical approaches.75

Acknowledgment I would like to thank Christian Cabrera for the excellent research assistance provided.

Notes 1 O’Gorman (1977: 6); my translation. The sentence continues with the following valuable insight that, although not directly related to the argument being made here, I think is worth reproducing: “—and that is, by the way, the difference on which the justification for the claim to the American demonym for the children of Anglo-America, the Americans par excellence (O’Gorman 1977: 6).” 2 On the latter (see O’Gorman 1942a: 234).

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3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

O’Gorman (1939: 15). Bianculli (2016: 164). van Klaveren (2017: 21). Montaño (2004: 71). van Klaveren (2017: 22). Tussie (2009: 169). Dickins and Allen (1858: 901). Whitaker (1954); Elliott (1999: 14); Santa-Cruz (2005); Sullivan (2005: 5); Rojas (2009: 232, 243). Quijada (1998: 612). Rojas (2009: 15, 22, 60, 236); Hale (2000: 24). Jenne et al. (2017: 211); van Klaveren (2017: 13); I am not suggesting that identity is good and interests bad, or vice-versa. Cf. Santa-Cruz (2014), on which I draw here. Acharya (2016: 7); Acharya (2018: 190); Bianculli (2016: 166). Hurrell (1995). Capling and Nosal (2009: 148); Börzel and Risse (2016: 7). Prebisch (1971 [1963]); Prebisch (2012 [1950]); Furtado (1966); Sunkel and Paz (1970). Kaltenthaler and Mora (2002: 72). Bianculli (2016: 164). Avery and Cochrane (2009: 182). Mattli (1999: 64). Malamud and Schmitter (2007: 13). Bond (1978: 404, 406). van Klaveren (1997: 75). Acharya (2017: 78); Acharya (2018: 156). Nye (1968). Montesinos (1996). Peña (1996). Tussie (2009:169). Acharya (2016); Deciancio (2016). In Malamud and Schmitter (2007: 15). Green (2004: 29). Kaltenthaler and Mora (2002: 82). Ibid., 81. Llairó & Díaz (2008: 29); Gómez-Mera (2008: 288, 293). van Klaveren (2017: 10, 12). Briceño-Ruiz (2018: 581). Bouzas, Da Motta Veiga and Rios (2007: 7, 6). Quiliconi and Wise (2009); Riggirozzi and Tussie (2012); Briceño-Ruiz and Morales (2017). But there were also other ways of looking at the phenomenon; cf. Briceño-Ruiz (2018); Neves and Honório (2019). Malamud (2008: 132). Kaltenthaler and Mora (2002: 92). Briceño-Ruiz (2018: 587); Neves and Honório (2019: 1/6). Malamud (2013: 7). Lamrani (2012: 347). Briceño-Ruiz (2018: 583). In Kellogg (2006: 4). Tussie (2009: 193). Erisman (2011: 241). In Linares (2011: 153).

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51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

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Muhr (2011: 105). Girvan (2011: 165). Cusack (2019a: 248). Muhr 2(011: 102). Legler and Santa-Cruz (2011); Toro (2011: 178, note 25). El Economista (2018); Cusack (2019b: 8, 59, 194); Krujit et al. (2019). Shifter (2012: 57). Soares de Lima (2009: 29). Toothaker (2013). In Shifter (2012: 60). EFE (2011). Covarrubias (2020); van Klaveren (2017: 17); Briceño-Ruiz (2018: 586, 588–589). Kennedy and Beaton (2016: 54, 64–65). Ibid., 68; Quiliconi and Salgado (2017: 35). Acharya (2017: 79). Hakim (1993: 40); Corrales and Feinberg (1999: 8). Acharya (2016: 5). Acharya (2018: 190); Bianculli (2016: 166). Acharya (2018: 159–161), 184–185; Bianculli (2016: 166). Reus-Smit (1997). Santa-Cruz (2005). In McCaffrey (1992: 66). Carozza (2003); Rojas (2009). Acharya (2016: 14). Sil and Katzenstein (2010); Acharya (2016: 11).

References Acharya, A. (2016). Advancing Global IR: Challenges, Contentions, and Contributions. International Studies Review, 18(1), 4–15. Acharya, A. (2017). Towards a Global IR? In S. McGlinchey, R. Walters, & C. Scheinpflug (Eds.), International Relations Theory (pp. 76–82). Bristol: E-International Relations Publishing. Acharya, A. (2018). Constructing Global Order: Agency and Change in World Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Avery, W. P., & Cochrane, J. D. (2009). Innovation in Latin American Regionalism: The Andean Common Market. International Organization, 27(2), 181–223. Bianculli, A.C. (2016). Latin America. In T. A. Börzel & T. Risse (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism (pp. 154–177). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bond, R. D. (1978). Regionalism in Latin America: Prospects for the Latin American Economic System (Sela). International Organization, 32(2), 401–23. Börzel, T. A. & Risse, T. (2016). Introduction: Framework of the Handbook and Conceptual Clarifications. In T. A. Börzel & T. Risse (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Regionalism (pp. 4–15). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bouzas, R., da Motta Veiga, P., & Rios, S. (2007). Crisis y Perspectivas en la Integración en América del Sur. Paper presented at the workhop “América Latina: ¿integración o fragmentación?”, Mexico City. Briceño-Ruiz, J. (2018). Times of Change in Latin American Regionalism. Contexto Internacional, 40(3), 573–594.

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Briceño-Ruiz, J., & Morales, I. (2017). Post-Hegemonic Regionalism in the Americas: Toward a Pacific-Atlantic Divide? New York: Routledge. Capling, A., & Nossal, K. R. (2009). The Contradictions of Regionalism in North America. Review of International Studies, 35(S1), 147–167. Carozza, P. G. (2003). From Conquest to Constitutions: Retrieving a Latin American Tradition of the Idea of Human Rights. Human Rights Quarterly, 25, 281–313. Corrales, J., & Feinberg, R. E. (1999). Regimes of Cooperation in the Western Hemisphere: Power, Interests, and Intellectual Traditions. International Studies Quarterly, 43(1), 1–36. Covarrubias, A. (2020, March 12). ¿Unidad en la diversidad? La crisis del multilateralismo en América Latina. El País. Retrieved from: https://elpais.com/elpais/ 2020/03/12/opinion/1583980465_943690.html. Cusack, A. (2019a). ALBA. In R. E. Looney (Ed.), Handbook of International Trade Agreements: Country, Regional and Global Approaches (pp. 241–250). London: Routledge. Cusack, A. K. (2019b). Venezuela, ALBA, and the Limits of Postneoliberal Regionalism in Latin America and the Caribbean. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Deciancio, M. (2016). International Relations from the South: A Regional Research Agenda for Global IR. International Studies Review, 18(1), 106–119. Dickins, A., & Allen, J. (1858). Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States, from the First Session of the First Congress to the Second Session of the Thirty-Fifth Congress, Inclusive: Commencing March 4, 1789, and Ending March 3, 1859. Washington: Gales and Seaton. EFE (2011, December 2). La OEA da la bienvenida a la CELAC y EU evaluará si es “efectiva.” abc.es. El Economista (2018, July 5). El president de Ecuador cree que la sede de UNASUR es “un nuevo elefante blanco.” El Economista. Retrieved from: https://www. eleconom istaamer ica.com/politica-eA m/amp/9256304/El-presidente-deEcuador-cree-que-la-sede-de-UNASUR-es-un-nuevo-elefante-blanco. Elliot, J. H. (1999). ¿Tienen las Américas una historia común? Letras Libres, 1(6), 10–19. Erisman, M, H. (2011). Alba as a Neoliberal Challenge: Prospects and Problems. International Journal of Cuban Studies, 3(2–3), 235–263. Furtado, C. (1966). Subdesarrollo y Estancamiento en América Latina. Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria. Girvan, N. (2011). Is Alba a New Model of Integration? Reflections on the Caricom Experience. Internactional, 3(2–3), 158–264. Gómez-Mera, L. (2008). How ‘New’ Is the ‘New Regionalism’ in the Americas? The Case of Mercosur. Journal of International Relations and Development, 11, 279–308. Green, R. (2004). México en las Américas: Entre un norte económico y un sur político. Foreign Affairs en español, 4(3), 28–41. Hakim, P. (1993). The OAS: Putting Principles into Practice. Journal of Democracy, 4(3), 39–49. Hale, C. A. (2000). Edmundo O´Gorman y la historia nacional. Signos Históricos, 2(3), 11–28. Hurrell, A. (1995). Regionalism in Theoretical Perspective. In L. Fawcett & A. Hurrell (Eds.), Regionalism in World Politics (pp. 37–73). New York: Oxford University Press.

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Jenne, N., Schenoni, L. L., & Urdinez, F. (2017). Or Words and Deeds: Latin American Declaratory Regionalism, 1994–2014. Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 30(2–3), 195–215. Kaltenthaler, K., & Mora, F. O. (2002). Explaining Latin American Economic Integration: The Case of Mercosur. Review of International Political Economy, 9(1), 72–97. Kellog, P. (2006). The Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas: Dawn of an Alternative to Neoliberalism? Paper presented to the 2006 annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association York University, Toronto. Kennedy, D., & Beaton, B. (2016). Two Steps Forward? Assessing Latin American Regionalism through CELAC. Latin American Policy, 7(1), 52–79. Krujit, D., Rey, E., & Martín, A. (2019). A Balance of the Latin American Guerrilla. In D. Krujit, E. Rey, & A. Martin (Eds.), Latin American Guerrilla Movements: Origins, Evolution, Outcomes (pp. 208–226). New York: Routledge. Lamrani, S. (2012). The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America: The Challenges of Social Integration. International Journal of Cuban Studies, 4(3–4), 347–365. Legler, T., & Santa-Cruz, A. (2011). Los Desafíos Del Multilateralismo En América Latina, Pensamiento Propio. Buenos Aires: CRIEES. Linares, R. (2011). The Alba Alliance and the Construction of a New Latin American Regionalism. International Journal of Cuban Studies, 3(2–3), 145–156. Llairó, M. M., & Díaz, M. (2008). De Alfonsín a Menen. Estado Nacional Y Endeudamiento Externo: Transformaciones Económicas, Políticas Y Sociales Entre 1983 Y 1993. Buenos Aires: CEINLADI. Malamud, A. (2008). La Agenda Interna Del Mercosur: Interdependencia, Liderazgo, Institucionalizacion. In G. Jaramillo (Ed.), Los Nuevos Enfoques de la Integracion: Mas Alla Del Nuevo Regionalismo (pp. 115–136). Quito: Flacso-Ministerio de Cultura. Malamud, A. (2013). Overlapping Regionalism, No Integration: Conceptual Issues and the Latin American Experiences. EUI Working Paper, RSCAS 2013/20. Malamud, A., & Schmitter, P. (2007). The Experience of European Integration and the Potential for Integration in South America. IBEI Working Papers, 27, Barcelona. Mattli, W. (1999). The Logic of Regional Integration: Europe and Beyond. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCaffrey, J. (1992). Army of Manifest Destiny: The American Soldier in the Mexican War, 1846–1848. New York: New York University Press. Montaño, J. (2004). Misión en Washington 1993–1995: De la aprobación del TLCAN al préstamo de rescate. México: Planeta. Montesinos, V. (1996). Ceremonial Regionalism, Institutions and Integration in the Americas. Studies in Comparative International Development, 31(2), 110–123. Muhr, T. (2011). Conceptualising the Alba-Tcp: Third Generation Regionalism and Political Economy. International Journal of Cuban Studies, 3(2–3), 98–264. Neves, B. C., & Honório, K. (2019, September 27). Latin American Regionalism under the New Right. E-International Relations Articles. Retrieved from: https://www.e-ir. info/pdf/80118. Nye, J. S. Jr. (1968). International Regionalism. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. O’Gorman, E. (1942a). ¿Tienen las Américas una Historia Común? Filosofía y Letras, 3(6), 215–235. O’Gorman, E. (1942b). Hegel y el moderno panamericanismo. Letras de México, 2(8), 14–15. O’Gorman, E. (1977). La Invención De América. México: FCE.

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Peña, F. (2003). El Mercosur y los acuerdos de integración económica en América Latina: ¿qué lecciones pueden extraerse de la experiencia acumulada?. In F. Peña, Momentos y Perspectivas: La Argentina en el mundo y América Latina (pp. 203–245). Buenos Aires: EDUNTREF. Prebisch, R. (1971[1963]). Hacia una dinámica del desarrollo latinoamericano. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Prebisch, R. (2012[1950]). El Desarrollo económico de la América Latina y algunos de sus principales problemas. Libros y Documentos Institucionales CEPAL. Retrieved from: https://www.cepal.org/es/publicaciones/40010-desarrollo-economico-laamerica-latina-algunos-sus-principales-problemas. Quijada, M. (1998). Sobre El Origen Y Difusión Del Nombre “América Latina” (O Una Variación Heterodoxa En Torno Al Tema De La Construcción Social De La Verdad). Revista de Indias 58, (214), 595–615. Quiliconi, C., & Salgado, R. (2017). Latin American Integration: Regionalism á la Carte in a Multipolar World? Colombia International, (92), 15–41. Quiliconi, C., & Wise, C. (2009). The US as a Bilateral Player: The Impetus for Asymmetric Free Trade Agreements. In M. Solís, B. Stallings, & S. N. Katada (Eds.), Competitive Regionalism. International Political Economy Series (pp. 97–117). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Reus-Smit, C. (1997). The Constitutional Structure of International Society and the Nature of Fundamental Institutions. International Organization, 51(4), 555–589. Riggirozzi, P., & Tussie, D. (2012). The Rise of Post-hegemonic Regionalism in Latin America. In P. Riggirozzi & D. Tussie (Eds.), The Rise of Post-Hegemonic Regionalism (pp. 1–16). Dordrecht: Springer. Rojas, R. (2009). Las repúblicas de aire: Utopía y desencanto en la revolución de Hispanoamérica. México: Taurus. Santa-Cruz, A. (2005). Constitutional Structures, Sovereignty, and the Emergence of Norms: The Case of International Election Monitoring. International Organization, 59(3), 663–693. Santa-Cruz, A. (2014). Liberalism, Constructivism and Latin American Politics Since the 1990s. In J. Dominguez & A. Covarrubias (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Latin America in the World (pp. 97–111). New York: Routledge. Shifter, M. (2012) The Shifting Landscape of Latin American Regionalism. Current History, 111(742), 56–61. Sil, R., & Katzenstein, P. J. (2010). Beyond Paradigms: Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Soares de Lima, M. R. (2009). La política exterior brasileña y los desafíos de la gobernanza global. Foreign Affairs Latinoamérica, 9(2), 25–32. Sullivan, H. W. (2005). The Border That Refused to Go Away: The Río Grande as Replication of the Rhine-Danube Frontier. In R. A. Galoppe & R. Weiner (Eds.), Explorations on Subjectivity, Borders, and Demarcation (pp. 3–22). Lanham: University Press of America. Sunkel, O., & Paz, P. (1970). Subdesarrollo Latinoamericano y la Teoría del Desarrollo. México: Siglo XXI Editores. Toothaker, C. (2011, December 2). CELAC, Community of Latin American And Caribbean States, New Organization Aims to Strengthen Regional Integration. Huffington Post.

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Toro, A. (2011). El Alba Como Instrumento De “Soft Balancing.” Pensamiento Propio, 16(33), 154–184. Tussie, D. (2009), Latin America: Contrasting Motivations for Regional Projects. Review of International Studies, 35, 169–188. Van Klaveren, A. (1997). America Latina: Hacia Un Regionalismo Abierto. Estudios Internacionales, 30(117), 62–78. Van Klaveren, A. (2017). Regionalism in Latin America. Navigating in the Fog. Working Paper No. 25, World Trade Institute. Retrieved from: https://www.wti.org/research/ publications/1151/regionalism-in-latin-america-navigating-in-the-fog/. Whitaker, A. P. (1954). The Western Hemisphere Idea: Its Rise and Decline. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

11 FROM DEPENDENCY THEORIES TO MECHANISMS OF DEPENDENCY The Contribution of Latin American dependentistas to Global IR Stefano Palestini

Introduction Dependency theories are among the most important Latin American contribution to an agenda of Global IR. Their influence cannot be circumscribed to one single discipline. In fact, seminal books such as Dependency and Development in Latin America by F.H. Cardoso and Enzo Faletto continue to be cited across various disciplines, from economics to sociology to political science (Madariaga and Palestini 2021). The specific contribution of dependency theories to Global IR is to provide a perspective on global capitalism from the standpoint of peripheral societies. In fact, the dependentistas – as Latin American students of dependency came to be known – addressed the economic, political, and social problems that affected postcolonial societies when they became integrated into the global capitalist system. In so doing, the theories of dependency not only mirrored but also complemented the theories of capitalism and imperialism that emerged in Europe during the first half of the 20th century (dos Santos 1978: 357; Larrain 1989). The core group of dependentistas was composed of young Latin American social scientists that met and worked in Santiago de Chile between 1965 and 1973, affiliated to research centers such as the Latin American Institute for Economic and Social Planning (ILPES) and the Center for Socioeconomic Studies at the University of Chile (CESO).1 Centers such as ILPES, CESO and the Latin American School of Social Sciences (FLACSO) can be considered the first academic centers on Latin American Studies and Global Studies in the region (Beigel 2009; Cárdenas 2015; Kay 2019). The dependentistas adopted some of the theses advanced by Raúl Prebisch (1950) at the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) and reformulated them within a heterodox Marxist paradigm (Deciancio 2016). Most of those social scientists that met

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in Santiago were émigrés persecuted in their home countries by authoritarian governments; a few were young European and North American researchers attracted by a city that at the time was the hub of social and political change (Cortés 2016). This vibrant academic exchange ended with the overthrow of Allende’s socialist government by the military coup of 1973, creating a diaspora of Latin American dependentistas. The conjuncture of deep social change and the countermovement of authoritarian bureaucratic regimes that characterized the 1960s and 1970s provided the backdrop for dependency theories. Yet the academic output of this generation of young researchers was deeply rooted in an older tradition of Latin American social thought represented by the work of José Carlos Mariátegui (1928), Víctor Haya de la Torre (1936), Pablo González Casanova (1953), Aníbal Pinto (1958), Florestan Fernandes (1960), Gino Germani and Jorge Graciarena (1961), José Medina Echavarría (1962), and Sergio Bagú (1970), among others. As Cardoso (1977b) admits, the merit of dependentistas lay not so much in the novelty of their ideas – since these were firmly anchored in that Latin American social science tradition – but in the fact that they were able to reach new audiences, including governments, UN agencies and the North American academic community.2 Dependency theories influenced research programs from the Global North, such as world-systems theory (Amin 1974; Wallerstein 1974), comparative studies on the developmental state (Evans 1979, 1995; Haggard 1990; Kohli 1994, 2004) and the first studies on global commodity chains (Gereffi 1983; Gereffi and Korzeniewicz 1994). With the global diffusion of dependency theories, many of their Latin American roots were lost, and some of their propositions were simplified, formalized and, in some cases, tested through statistical modeling (see Bollen 1983; Boswell and Dixon 1990; ChaseDunn 1975; Firebaugh 1992; Kaufman et  al. 1975). Prominent dependentistas such as Cardoso (1977a) and dos Santos (1978) regretted these developments. In the 1990s, dependency theories were pushed into the dustbin by a combination of new academic trends (such as neo-institutionalism) and the Washington consensus. In Latin America itself, the word “dependency” was practically expunged from the academic lexicon, ironically when the region was becoming more dependent on foreign capital and global commodity chains (Garcia et al. 2016). Even if not always explicitly cited, the insights of dependency theories continued to be present in the new generation of Latin American IPE scholars when studying the external debt, the asymmetric trade relations, the multilateral financial institutions and conditional lending, the structural reforms, and the new forms of regionalism (Riggirozzi 2011; Tussie 1993, 2020; Tussie and Botzman 1992; Vivares 2013). The latest crises of the global capitalist system, such as the Great Recession (2008–2009) and the European debt crisis (2010 onward), have brought ideas of dependency back to the international academic journals. The idea that inequalities among regions and sectors of the global economy are due to mechanisms of

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dependency embedded in core–periphery relations has once again been taken up by contemporary researchers, not only in Latin America but also in Europe (e.g. Becker et al. 2015; Bruszt and Greskovits 2009), Asia (e.g. Kohli 2009) and Africa (e.g. Agbebi and Virtanen 2017; Mkandawire 2001). Despite this revival, Amitav Acharya (2014: 651) has criticized dependency theories for overlooking alternative forms of agency from the periphery, and thus reinforcing the “marginality” of the Global South. Arguably, this would limit the potential contribution of dependency theories to the agenda of Global IR. I hope to show in this chapter that this criticism is not valid for most Latin American dependency theories. In fact, dependentistas at CESO and CEPAL/ ILPES advocated an approach to dependency that focused on the interaction between external constraints imposed by the global economy, on the one hand, and domestic socio-political processes of agency on the other. What dependentistas lacked was a more explicit conceptualization of the microfoundations of their theory, who and what are the actors, interests and mechanisms that operate in specific situations of dependency. I propose that this shortcoming can be corrected by introducing the concept of the causal mechanism at the center of the study of dependency. This chapter first gives an overview of the different Latin American theories of dependency, underlining their common assumptions as well as their disagreements. Next, I will briefly discuss some of the limits of these theories when applied to contemporary global political economy. Drawing on the epistemological notion of the causal mechanism, I will propose the concept of “mechanisms of dependency” as a way to overcome some of those limits and to enrich the toolkit of the new generation of global dependentistas. Lastly, I will sum up with some closing remarks.

Latin American Dependency Research Program It is common to read in textbooks references to “the” theory of dependency, as if it were one single paradigm (Ferraro 2008; Gachúz 2016; Mahoney and Rodríguez-Franco 2018). But in fact, we observe a number of approaches that share some core assumptions and, at the same time, depart from each other in the theses and propositions they draw from those assumptions. To be more precise, three such assumptions are shared by all Latin American dependency theories constituting a more or less coherent research program: 1 2 3

The global capitalist system is hierarchically structured into core and periphery. Peripheral economies are dependent on core economies, meaning that changes in the former are conditioned by changes in the latter. The external dependence of peripheral economies is reflected in their internal socio-economic structures.

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These are quite radical assumptions when placed against the backdrop of mainstream IR. For instance, the first assumption breaks with the anarchical conception of the international system. The fact that nation-states are formally equal and independent – a starting point both for liberals and realists – is of secondary importance for dependency theories, which underline instead the subordinate position of peripheral nations vis-à-vis core nations (Marini 2018 [1973]: 111). In fact, for dependency theories it is global capitalism, and not the international system, that is the concept of reference. The second assumption, in turn, breaks with the category of interdependence, which is also central in liberal IR theory and its derivatives: liberal intergovernmentalism and rational institutionalism. Whereas interdependence implies mutual shaping, dependency underlines a one-way conditioning. Dependency theories and theories of interdependence give also a different centrality to the concept of power. While for theories of interdependence, power (understood as differences in bargaining power) is a consequence of interdependence, for dependency theories asymmetries of power and domination are constitutive elements of the relationship between peripheral and core economies. Agreements among Latin American dependency theories stop there. They start to drift apart regarding the theses they draw from those premises. Drawing on classifications proposed by Palma (1978) and Larrain (1989), I propose to sort out the different approaches according to two dimensions (see Figure 11.1). The first dimension is the concept of dependency: some approaches emphasize the external constraints that the global capitalist system imposes on the peripheral economies, whereas other approaches give more salience to the internal sociopolitical processes within peripheral economies. The second dimension has to do with the possibilities for development in the periphery: some approaches will outright deny this possibility, whereas others will admit developmental paths under certain situations of dependency. As regards the first dimension, there is a sharp distinction between Latin American dependentistas, who are the focus of this chapter, and the North American scholars that drew on dependency approaches, such as Paul Baran,

FIGURE 11.1

Different approaches to dependency.

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Paul Sweezy and Andre Gunder Frank. These scholars remained closely tied to theories of imperialism, and thus overemphasized the external constraints established by the global capitalist system on peripheral economies, which were more or less taken to be a single, undifferentiated group of countries. In contrast, Latin American scholars such as Cardoso, Faletto, Sunkel and Furtado adopted a concept of dependency in which the interaction between external constraints and internal socio-political processes was preponderant. According to Cardoso (1972b), the concrete expression of dependency in a given economy was not the automatic response to global capitalist constraints, but rather hinged on the way in which local and national interests were historically shaped in that concrete society. In the same vein, Sunkel (1970: 16) contended that the importance attributed to the external conditions does not have to obscure the existence of internal structures, and that structural change is the result of the interaction between both types of conditions. For Cardoso and Faletto, dependency was a “concrete situation” rather than an “abstract determinant” (as it arguably was in the version of Sweezy and, to a lesser extent, Frank). Since different peripheral societies had different historical trajectories (nowadays we would say “path-dependencies”) and social formations, they found themselves in different “situations of dependency” (Cardoso 1972; Cardoso and Faletto 1969; also Bambirra 1974).3 Latin American dependentistas split regarding the second dimension: the possibilities of development in the periphery. A first group made up of the members of the Center of Socio-economic Studies (CESO), and led by Theotonio dos Santos, was influenced by Baran’s (1957) thesis that the underdevelopment of the periphery is rooted in the capitalist development of the imperialist centers, and therefore is the common result of a global process of capital accumulation. André Gunder Frank, an American sociologist who also participated in the CESO, famously grasped this thesis in the title of his Monthly Review article: The Development of Underdevelopment (Frank 1966). According to dos Santos (1970: 231), we shall attempt to show that the relations of dependence to which these countries are subjected conform to a type of international and internal structure which leads them to underdevelopment or more precisely to a dependent structure that deepens and aggravates the fundamental problems of their peoples. The CESO group shared also with Marxist economists Emmanuel (1972) and Amin (1974) the idea that increasing underdevelopment and increasing dependency were a necessary consequence of the expansion of global capitalism, due to the mechanisms of unequal exchange between the core and the peripheries. As a consequence, the only way to break the cycle of increasing development of the core and increasing underdevelopment of the periphery was to overcome

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capitalism altogether through a socialist revolution (Bambirra 1974; Frank 1969); the alternative was an authoritarian backsliding into fascism (dos Santos 1969). In the words of another dependentista of CESO, Ruy Mauro Marini, “the fruit of dependency cannot be but more dependency, and its end necessarily presupposes the abolition of the relations of production that it entails” (Marini 2018 [1973]: 111). At the opposite side we find those dependentistas that were part of CEPAL/ ILPES such as Pinto, Furtado, Sunkel and Cardoso (Kay 1991, 2019; Larrain 1989). Following on from the ideas of Prebisch, Celso Furtado (1966: 48–49, 1970) contended that peripheral societies could develop only if they were able to introduce deep institutional reforms such as redistributive policies that avoid income-concentration, deep regional market integration, and industrial policies to orient technological progress and the modernization of social structures. Similarly, Pinto and Kñakal (1972: 10), in a revision of the CEPAL approach, argued that while “all core nations are obviously developed […] not all developed countries are in the core”, raising the possibility of development in the periphery. But Cardoso was the figure who more explicitly advocated for the possibility of capitalist development under situations of dependency. He coined the concept of “associated-dependent development” to refer to a situation in which the interests of foreign corporations come to be associated with those of local capitalist groups through the actions of multinational corporations (Cardoso 1972a: 149). Cardoso engaged in open polemic vis-à-vis Frank’s Development of Underdevelopment thesis and the researchers of CESO. He complained that these approaches advanced an incorrect interpretation of the reality of contemporary capitalism and, therefore, an ill-founded political praxis: “it is necessary to understand that in specific situations it is possible to expect development and dependency” (Cardoso 1972b: 2014; emphasis in original). Cardoso’s dependency theory was better suited to influencing the next generation’s research agendas in comparative political economy (Bizberg 2018; Bruszt and Greskovits 2009; Evans 2009; Evans and Stephens 1988; Kohli 2004, 2009; Nölke and Vliegenthart 2009) than the versions of dos Santos and CESO, which remained closely tied to classic theories of imperialism and revolutionary change, and which had, instead, substantial influence on world-systems theory (Amin 1974; Wallerstein 1974). Cardoso’s theory also left greater scope for institutional politics and reformism than did the CESO’s versions of dependency theory (Kay 1991). In Cardoso’s view, there was no room for revolutions in an associated-dependent development model, which must be limited “to associating itself with international capitalism as a dependent and minor partner” (Cardoso 1972a: 163). It is probable that dos Santos is right when he argues that there was no dissonance between the new social democracy program that Cardoso the president implemented in Brazil in the 1990s, and the ideas that Cardoso the social scientist had advocated in the 1960s and 1970s (dos Santos 1998; see also Cardoso 2009).

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To be sure, while Cardoso’s version of dependency opened up space for the possibility of dependent development, he also made clear that this developmental path would probably imply social inequality and marginality (Cardoso 1972a).

Limits of the Theory Dependency theories – particularly those more sensitive to historical processes in concrete situations of dependency – have had an enduring influence on several fields of the global social sciences inside and outside Latin America. Yet they were not exempt from severe criticism. Critiques pointed out epistemological, conceptual and methodological shortcomings that arguably led to the decline of these theories, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. While a full discussion of these criticisms exceeds the scope of this chapter, I do wish to focus on the most crucial ones. In the final section, I will propose a way to at least partially overcome the limits suggested by these criticisms. The global readership of dependency theories swiftly identified the vagueness of the central concept: dependency. This criticism came from Latin American scholars close to the dependentistas, such as Francisco Weffort (1970), as well as from international scholars (Bath and Dilmus 1976; Chilcote 1974; Lall 1975;). Weffort complained that the concept of dependency had a dubious scientific status, running the risk of becoming a purely ideological brand4. The North American readership of Latin American dependency theories complained that key concepts and variables were so imprecisely defined as to render its measurement and statistical testing almost impossible. Kaufman et al. (1975: 330) advocated for an incremental application of the theory without elevating it “to the status of an overarching developmental paradigm”. In a similar vein, Mahoney and Rodríguez-Franco (2018) have recently argued that the dependency theories must be taken as a “frame” rather than as a “theory” understood in its narrow sense of a set of testable hypotheses.5 For these authors, the value of dependency theories as frame remain uncontestable, while as a testable theory it has delivered mixed results. A second target of criticisms has to do with the scales of analysis, and more specifically, the adequacy of the core–periphery distinction. Observers from radically different standpoints such as neoclassical economists, critical geographers and postcolonial intellectuals all agree – although for different reasons – on the inadequacy of the core–periphery distinction to grasp the complexities of contemporary global capitalism. Former Chair of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke has argued that “the traditional distinction between the core and the periphery is becoming increasingly less relevant, as the mature industrial economies and the emerging-market economies become more integrated and interdependent” (quoted in Fischer 2015: 701). Postcolonial scholars in turn have accused dependency theories of reproducing

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Western depictions of postcolonial societies – such as those of modernization theory – which define them as incomplete versions of Anglo-European modernity (Mignolo 2005; for a cosmopolitan version of the same criticism, see Chernilo and Mascareño 2005). Another possible limitation of the core–periphery distinction is its methodological nationalism, that is its focus on national economies and nation-states, neglecting other geographical scales and non-state actors. In the 1970s, this led to a serious theoretical and political cleavage between Marxists, who advocated a focus on class struggle, and those who advocated a focus on national movements (Beigel 2006). Certainly, dos Santos’ (1978: 361) classical, albeit narrow definition of dependency focuses exclusively on “countries/nations”, and the CEPAL economist Di Filippo (1998) has claimed that the basic unit of analysis for a core–periphery approach is the nation state. However, Latin American dependentistas – including dos Santos himself – gave a great deal of attention to the role of non-state actors operating at the local and transnational scales (e.g. transnational corporations and local capitalists). Sunkel (1970: 16–17) forcefully argued against the homology between “economy” and “country”, and advocated for a concept of transnational economy that penetrates and overflows national economies. In fact, the core–periphery approach should not be thought of in terms of geographic categories, let alone in terms of a typology of nations (like developed vs. underdeveloped countries, or Global South vs. Global North), but rather as an analytical device that helps to describe and assess different modes of asymmetrical and subordinated integration into the global economy (Fischer 2015; Sunkel 1970). A last epistemological criticism that deserves special attention has recently been put forward by Wibbels (2009), and points to the lack of microfoundations in classical Latin American dependency theories, as well as in contemporary follow-ups. By microfoundations, Wibbels refers to assumptions about the logics that orient individuals’ actions. In fact, none of the three core assumptions that I have identified as shared by the dependency research program refer to actors’ motivations. According to Wibbels, the properties of global capitalism and the national/local situations of dependency – system-level assumptions – must be linked to the interests of the individuals who make up economies and societies. Such a micro–macro link would first require the identification of the key actors embedded in a situation of dependency, and second, the identification of the preferences and conditions under which they operate (Wibbels 2009: 442). Wibbels recommends a cross-fertilization between dependency theory and economic geography, a discipline with clearer microfoundations and micro–macro links (see also Schwartz 2007). This may be a wise piece of advice. But a more important task for the new generation of students of dependency is to provide a clear identification of actors, causal mechanisms and scope conditions. The next section turns our attention precisely to this.

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Mechanisms of Dependency: A Way Forward Several of the above-mentioned criticisms deserve careful consideration by those who want to bring dependency theories back into the analysis of contemporary global capitalism. Here I would like to propose a way to overcome some of these criticisms by introducing the concept of the causal mechanism, and placing it at the forefront of dependency analysis. The causal mechanism is an epistemological category that has been elaborated in different fields of the social sciences (see Bennett and Checkel 2015; González 2016; Waldner 2012). Introducing this notion implies taking the analysis beyond the description of a situation of dependency, in order to identify the specific causal mechanisms of dependency that operate within a given situation. Adapting dos Santos’ (1978: 361) classical definition of dependency, and drawing on Bennet and Checkel (2015), I define mechanisms of dependency as physical, psychological or social processes through which certain economic units are shaped by the action and expansion of other economic units, under two sets of conditions: (A) those pertaining to the development of global capitalism (global division of labor), and (B) those pertaining to the local model of capitalist development. To apply this definition may sound simpler than it really is. It implies identifying the agents that intervene in a given situation as well as their logics of action, plus the concrete scope conditions (global and local) under which the mechanism in question operates. By introducing the notion of the mechanism of dependency, several epistemological obstacles pointed out by the critics of dependency theories would be addressed. To begin with, the specification of mechanisms of dependency would provide for the microfoundations that Wibbels pointed out were missing in classical dependency theories. Furthermore, causal mechanisms usually operate across geographical scales and levels of analysis. Hence, there is no reason to limit the analysis to mechanisms of dependency that only operate at the national level. Likewise, there is no reason to apply the core–periphery distinction exclusively to national economies. In fact, I have purposely introduced the notion of the “economic unit” in my definition of mechanisms of dependency in order to open up space for the analysis of these mechanisms among a variety of socio-economic agents operating at multiple scales. Finally, we provide one possible way to resolve the question of dependency theory’s status. By making the identification and specification of causal mechanisms the scientific goal of dependency theories, we are restituting their status as explanatory theories, and not merely as general frames, as had been suggested by Mahoney and Rodríguez-Franco (2018). Certainly, the notion of mechanisms of dependency is not completely new within the Latin American tradition. The Venezuelan dependentista Domingo Zavala (1973) explicitly used the concept with the purpose of reaching a deeper level of specification in his analysis. Cardoso also came close when he evoked

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similar epistemological principles to those underlying the causal mechanisms approach. In his sharp criticism of the attempts of US scholars to test dependency theories statistically, Cardoso advocated instead a method sensitive to causal processes at work within concrete situations of dependency (Cardoso 1977a; see also Labarca 2019). More importantly, in their classic works dependentistas did identify specific mechanisms of dependency. In fact, crucial concepts such as overexploitation (Marini [1973] 2018), associated-dependent development (Cardoso 1972a) and resource transfers (dos Santos 1978) can all be thought of as causal mechanisms of dependency. At the risk of being too schematic, I will present some examples of mechanisms of dependency identified by classical dependentistas as well as by contemporary followers, which I believe illustrate the direction that this research agenda should take. I propose to sort these mechanisms in relation to three main structures of contemporary capitalism: production, finance and knowledge.

Mechanisms of Dependency in Production Overexploitation consisted of the increase in labor-intensity (and therefore, decrease in wages) imposed by capitalist in peripheral economies (sectors) over workers, in order to compensate for the decline of profit rate due the unequal exchange with core economies (sectors) (Marini 1969; Marini [1973] 2018). Two types of agent intervene in these mechanisms: local business-owners and local workers. Following Marini, the main scope condition for overexploitation is that it occurs in a context where the level of consumption by workers does not affect the process of production, and where there exists a reserve of precarious workers who are prone to selling their labor power in spite of low wages and underemployment. While Marini was thinking of economies in less developed countries, we can also hypothesize that overexploitation can take place in emergent economies in the context of maquilas and even in developed economies whose labor markets are split between a formal sector and a sector of precarious or informal workers (Fontes 2010; Nölke and Vliegenthart 2009). Recently, Antunes de Oliveira (2021) has used the mechanism of overexploitation to describe the unpaid reproductive work in the household, largely done by women providing a gender perspective that was absent in Marini’s original formulation. Associated-dependent development: Cardoso’s famous concept can also be thought of as a mechanism of dependency that captures the linkages between three types of agent: local capitalists, the state (which can be further divided up into state agencies) and transnational corporations (Cardoso 1977: 20; Cardoso and Faletto 1969). As Cardoso argues, and as Evans (1979) shows, associated development does not constitute a relation of interdependence in the liberal-institutionalist sense, since it preserves an unequal integration between

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core and periphery through the kind of association between local and transnational capital groups that it leads to (Cardoso 1977: 20). Ruiz (2021) has employed the concept of associated dependent development as a dependency mechanism to describe the ties between Chilean Administrators of Pension Funds (local capital), and transnationalized financial groups. Asymmetrical integration in the Global Value Chain: Even though the concepts of global commodity chains (GCC) and global value chains (GVC) made their way into the political economy literature in the 1990s (Gereffi and Korzenievicz 1994; Gibbon 2001), the Latin American dependentistas had already identified mechanisms of dependency that worked within global production chains (see dos Santos 1978: 383–384; Marini 2018 [1973]: 144). Asymmetrical integration implies that even the most advanced economic units in peripheral regions are stuck in low to middle-tier positions within GVCs, under pressure from lower segments and yet facing strong constraints on upgrading (Fischer 2015: 714). In this mechanism, the agents that intervene are the leading firms in the GVC, usually based in core economies of the Global North, and medium and low-tier firms located either in emergent economies or in less developed countries. As argued by dos Santos and Marini 50 years ago – as they were laying out their view of what they called “monopolistic capitalism” – leading firms helped by core states and global governance regimes have monopolized cutting-edge technologies. This mechanism also has to do with resource-absorption practices described by Sunkel (1972) and dos Santos (1978), and implemented by leading corporations – such as transfer pricing, brand name royalty fees, insurance and over-valued transport costs.

Mechanisms of Dependency in Finance Perhaps one of the most fertile areas in which to develop a research agenda on mechanisms of dependency is that of finance. Latin American dependentistas focused on production and exchange (trade) rather than on finance, under the Marxist assumption that capitalist accumulation relies primarily on industrial development (Bambirra 1974: 28). As dos Santos (1998) argues, the foreign debt crisis of the 1980s showed the importance of understanding the mechanisms of financial dependency. Indeed, new generations of Latin American IPE scholars paid due attention to financial markets and multilateral financial institutions in the wake of the Latin America external debt crisis (among others Griffith-Jones and Stallings 1995; Tussie and Boltzman 1992; Vivares 2013). More recent works based on insights from dependency theory have demonstrated that domestic policies in peripheral economies – and particularly fiscal policy – are constrained by their dependence on external finance (Wibbels 2006). Dependent financialization occurs under conditions of asymmetric exchange relations between industrialized core economies and deindustrialized peripheral economies. Dependent financialization is a consequence of the

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increasing liberalization of finance following the end of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s (Helleiner 2010; Marichal 2010). It implies that massive capital inflows enter peripheral economies from the core, resulting in both sovereign and private overindebtedness that, in turn, results in increasing dependency on financial capital (Marichal 1988). A specific mechanism of dependent financialization put in place in the 1980s and 1990s and described by Latin American IPE scholars was multilateral lending conditionality in which loans to peripheral economies from multilateral banks is made conditional to comprehensive macroeconomic and structural reforms (Sanahuja 2001; Tussie and Botzman 1992). At a global level, dependent financialization has led to procyclical waves in which capital inflows emanating from a huge surplus of liquidity in the core economies fuel export-led production in peripheral economies. Booms are followed by a deterioration of market exports in the periphery, and by the outflow of speculative capital, leaving behind the social and political consequences of debt, recession and procyclical fiscal policy – namely austerity (dos Santos 1998; Fischer 2015; Wibbels 2006). A similar dynamic has been described at the regional level in Europe, where industrialized core economies and deindustrialized peripheral economies are deeply integrated within the European common market and monetary union (Becker et al. 2015). Foreign direct investment dependency: Classical dependentistas did pay a great deal of attention to this dependency mechanism, as FDI penetration directly affects production which was their primary focus (dos Santos 1970: 231; Furtado 1970: 173). For dos Santos (1978: 390), FDI dependency is a mechanism that allows transnational corporations to directly capture the surplus of local production. Similarly, Sunkel (1972: 527) argued that once subsidiaries are well established in a host country, they can draw on domestic public and private resources to expand operations without necessarily needing new injections of FDI. According to Fischer (2015: 722), this is the underlying mechanism through which core economies such as the US obtain the financial account surpluses that fund the increasing US trade deficit. Contemporary followers of Cardoso’s approach have nuanced this position by arguing that FDI dependency can, under certain conditions, lead to economic upgrading and development. These conditions mostly have to do with the presence of a developmental state that can regulate and steer FDI toward the most productive economic sectors (Kohli 2009), as well as the presence of regional developmental governance regimes that may upgrade the capacities of local actors (Bruszt and Greskovits 2009; Bruszt and Palestini 2016).

Mechanisms of Epistemic Dependency Technology monopolization: Dependentistas were also aware of the existence of knowledge dependency. Cardoso (1972a: 210) referred to the concentration

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of the “production of the means of production (technology)” by core economies. Similarly, dos Santos (1978: 225) argued that the sale of machines and know-how offers a relatively reduced revenue compared to maintaining a monopoly on those resources, and using it to open subsidiaries in the periphery that exploit local workers. The monopolization of technology occurs through institutional devices such as patents and intellectual property rights that are protected and enforced by global governance regimes such as the WTO (dos Santos 1978: 388; Evans 2009). After the so-called fourth industrial revolution, those institutional barriers are not even necessary to keep knowledge and technological dependencies in place, as it has become exponentially harder for peripheral economies – either nations or lower segments of GVCs – to catch up with cutting-edge digital technologies (Fischer 2015). Knowledge appropriation: Another mechanism of epistemic dependency is represented by the capture of high-level skills and talent from the periphery by core economies. This mechanism was not described by dependentistas, although one could argue that they themselves were trapped by this causal mechanism, as they became dependent on the positive reception of their works by (and support from) mostly US-based academic centers. There is a high proportion of high-level students and high-skilled workers from so-called emergent economies – including China and India – that stay in the US labor market. This has prompted Fischer (2015: 714) to argue than neither China nor India (let alone other emergent economies like Brazil) can be considered core economies, as they still are dependent on US knowledge production, and cannot attract ‘brains’ as the US does. Similarly, scientific practices and standards of knowledge-valuation are determined by knowledge-production centers in the US and secondarily in Europe, most of which have strong ties with leading corporations in GVCs (for the case of dependency mechanisms in the field of social sciences, see Paasi 2005; for the specific case of IR, see Tickner 2013).

Conclusions Dependency theories are among the most original Latin American contribution to Global IR. They assumed the perspective of the third world (the Global South) to shed light on the main characteristics of global capitalism. In so doing, Latin American dependentistas put theories of imperialism upside-down. While the latter (including World System theory) started by explaining the dynamics of industrialized economies before moving on to explain its consequences for the third world, dependency theories started the analysis from Latin American economies and their socio-economic problems linking them then to the global dynamics. Researchers at CEPAL/ILPES and CESO focused on the interaction between the constraints imposed by capitalist accumulation in the core on the periphery, on the one hand, and the internal socio-political processes endogenous to peripheral societies, on the other.

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Authors such as Cardoso, Faletto, dos Santos and Furtado have attained a global influence on research emanating from the North and the South. Hence, Latin American dependency theories are a case in point of the diffusion of ideas between the local and global levels, which is one of the key points in the agenda of Global IR (Acharya 2014). These theories are, furthermore, rooted in an older tradition of Latin American social sciences which is still practically unknown for global audiences. Thus, dependency theories help IR to overcome its Western dominance, by linking concepts emanated from Latin America with problems of global salience, such as inequality and power asymmetries (Acharya 2016: 6; Deciancio 2016). In the last number of years, many Latin American dependentistas and their followers have passed away, and it is right that we pay tribute to them. In doing so, we are acknowledging the legacy of a generation of scholars who were both intellectually and politically committed to investigating and overcoming global inequalities. However, rather than being an homage, this chapter has been an invitation to continue producing original knowledge concerning contemporary global capitalism, based on the core assumptions of the dependency research program. Addressing young students who wanted to engage with the study of dependencia in the 1970s, Cardoso warned that they should not make the mistake of replacing one abstraction (imperialism) with another (dependency). Today, we should avoid substituting abstractions such as “globalization” for the old dependency. Leading by example, Cardoso, Faletto and Bambirra proposed to study concrete situations of dependency, a counsel that has been adroitly followed by contemporary researchers studying the varieties of dependent capitalism (e.g. Bizberg 2018; Bruszt and Greskovits 2009; Nölke and Vliegenthart 2009). In a similar vein, this chapter has advocated a focus on causal mechanisms of dependency, further specifying the actors, logics and scope conditions under which certain economic units shape the development of others. In the current stage of global capitalism, this obliges us to carefully look into core–periphery relations within GVCs, as well as mechanisms of financial and knowledge dependency that unfold through deeply interconnected financial systems and digital economies. It also means identifying mechanisms of dependency within new situations of dependency such as the relations between China and Latin America or Africa (Stallings 2019). In so doing, we will keep alive the contribution of the dependentistas to the construction of a Global IR.

Notes 1 There were important contributions to dependency theories from other research centers in Latin America such as the Universidad Central de Venezuela, the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP), the Programa Centroamericano de Ciencias Sociales and the Colegio de Estudios Latinoamericanos of the Universidad Autónoma de México, among others.

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2 Many of the ideas put forward by dependency theories – including the notion of dependency – had been already anticipated by the Peruvian intellectuals Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre and José Carlos Mariátegui in the 1920s (see Helleiner and Rosales 2017). 3 The historical-structural approach of Cardoso and Faletto was influenced by their ILPES colleague, Spanish sociologist José Medina Echavarría, who introduced the sociology of Max Weber into Latin America (Morales 2012). Vânia Bambirra, in turn, followed the Marxist tradition. However, like Cardoso and Faletto, she also developed a typology of concrete situations of dependency in Latin America, following a historical-structural approach (Benítez 2019). 4 For a similar criticism from the Global North, see Packenham (1992). 5 For a similar argument regarding Cardoso’s and Faletto’s approach, see Labarca (2019).

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Gereffi, Gary and Miguel Korzeniewicz. 1994. Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism. Praeger. Germani, Gino and Jorge Gracierena. 1961. De la sociedad tradicional a la sociedad de masas. Buenos Aires: Paidós. Gibbon, Peter. 2001. “Upgrading Primary Products: A Global Value Chain Approach.” World Development 29(2): 345–363. González Casanova, Pablo. 1953. Una Utopía de América. México: Colegio de México. González, Felipe. 2016. “Los Mecanismos Sociales y su relación con la distinción micro-macro.” Cinta de Moebio (55): 16–28. Griffith-Jones, Stephanie and Barbara Stallings. 1995. “New Global Financial Trends: Implications for Development.” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 37(3): 59–98. Haggard, Stephan. 1990. Pathways from the Periphery. The Politics of Growth in the Newly Industrializing Countries. New York: Cornell University Press. Haya de la Torre, Víctor. 1936. El anti-imperialismo y el APRA. Santiago de Chile: Ercilla. Helleiner, Eric. 2010. “A Bretton Woods Moment? The 2007–2008 Crisis and the Future of Global Finance.” International Affairs 86(3): 619–636. Helleiner, Eric and Antulio Rosales. 2017. “Toward Global IPE: The Overlooked Significance of the Haya-Mariátegui Debate.” International Studies Review 19(4): 667–691. Kaufman, Robert, Robert R. Kaufman, Harry I. Chernotsky and Daniel S. Geller 1975. “A Preliminary Test of the Theory of Dependency.” Comparative Politics 7(3): 303–330. Kay, Cristóbal. 1991. “Reflections on the Latin American Contribution to Development Theory.” Development and Change 22(1): 31–68. Kay, Cristóbal. 2019. “Theotonio Dos Santos (1936–2018): The Revolutionary Intellectual Who Pioneered Dependency Theory.” Development and Change 0(0): 1–32. Kohli, Atul. 1994. “Where Do High Growth Political Economies Come from? The Japanese Lineage of Korea’s ‘Developmental State.’” World Development 22(9): 1269–1293. Kohli, Atul. 2004. State-Directed Development: Political Power and Industrialization in the Global Periphery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kohli, Atul. 2009. “Nationalist Versus Dependent Capitalist Development: Alternate Pathways of Asia and Latin America in a Globalized World.” Studies in Comparative International Development 44(4): 386–410. Labarca, José Tomás. 2019. “La Contribución de Cardoso y Faletto Más Allá de La ‘Teoría’ de La Dependencia.” Cuadernos de Teoría Social 5(9): 61–73. Lall, Sanjaya. 1975, “Is ‘Dependence’ a Useful Concept in Analysing Underdevelopment?” World Development 3(11–12), 799–810. Larrain, Jorge. 1989. Theories of Development: Capitalism, Colonialism, and Dependency. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing. Madariaga, Aldo and Stefano Palestini. 2021. Dependent Capitalisms in Contemporary Latin America and Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Forthcoming. Mahoney, James and Diana Rodríguez-Franco. 2018. “What Is Dependency Theory ?” In The Oxford Handbook of the Politics of Development, eds. Carol Lancaster and Nicolas van de Walle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 22–42. Mariátegui, José Carlos. 1928. Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana. Lima: Editorial Minerva.

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Marichal, Carlos. 1988. Historia de la Deuda Externa de América Latina. México: Alianza Editorial. Marichal, Carlos. 2010. Nueva historia de las grandes crisis financieras. Una perspectiva global, 1873–2008. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana-Debate. Marini, Ruy Mauro. 1969. Subdesarrollo y Revolución. Mexico: Siglo XXI. Marini, Ruy Mauro. 2018 [1973]. “Dialéctica de La Dependencia.” In América Latina, Dependencia y Globalización, ed. Ruy Mauro Marini. Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 107–164. Medina Echavarría, J. 1962. Aspectos sociales del desarrollo económico de América Latina, Vol I. París: UNESCO. Mignolo, Walter. 2005. The Idea of Latin America. Oxford: Blackwell. Mkandawire, Thandika. 2001. “Thinking about Developmental States in Africa.” Cambridge Journal of Economics 25: 289–313. Morales, Juan Jesús. 2012. “De Los Aspectos Sociales Del Desarrollo Económico a La Teoría de La Dependencia: Sobre La Gestación de Un Pensamiento Social Propio En Latinoamérica.” Cinta de moebio (45): 235–252. Nölke, Andreas and Arjan Vliegenthart. 2009. “Enlarging the Varieties of Capitalism: The Emergence of Dependent Market Economies in East Central Europe.” World Politics 61(4): 670–702. Paasi, Anssi. 2005. “Globalisation, Academic Capitalism, and the Uneven Geographies of International Journal Publishing Spaces.” Environment and Planning 37(5): 769–789. Packenham, Robert A. 1992. The Dependency Movement: Scholarship and Politics in Development Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Palma, Gabriel. 1978. “Dependency: A Formal Theory of Underdevelopment or a Methodology for the Analysis of Concrete Situations of Underdevelopment?” World Development 6: 881–924. Pinto, Aníbal. 1958. Chile: un caso de desarrollo frustrado. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria. Pinto, Aníbal and Jean Kñakal. 1972. El sistema centro-periferia veinte años después. Revista de la Integración, 10: 5–84. Prebisch, Raúl. 1950. The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems. New York: United Nations. Riggirozzi, Pia. 2011. “Region, Regionness and Regionalism in Latin America: Towards a New Synthesis.” New Political Economy 17(4): 37–41. Ruiz, Felipe. 2021. Financialization and the construction of peripheral business power in the Chilean pension system. In Dependent Capitalisms in Contemporary Latin America and Europe, eds. Aldo Madariaga and Stefano Palestini. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Sanahuja, José Antonio. 2001. Altruismo, Mercado y Poder. El Banco Mundial y La Lucha Contra La Pobreza. Barcelona: Intermón Oxfam. Schwartz, Herman. 2007. “Dependency or Institutions? Economic Geography, Causal Mechanisms, and Logic in the Understanding of Development.” Studies in Comparative International Development 42(1–2): 115–135. Stallings, Barbara. 2019. Dependency in the 21st Century? The Political Economy of China-Latin America Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sunkel, Osvaldo. 1970. “Desarrollo, Subdesarrollo, Dependencia, Marginación y Desigualdades Espaciales: Hacia Un Enfoque Totalizante.” EURE 1(1): 13–49.

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Sunkel, Osvaldo. 1972. “Big Business and ‘Dependencia’: A Latin American View.” Foreign Affairs 50(3): 517–531. Sweezy, Paul. 1972. Modern Capitalism and Other Essays. New York: Montly Review Press. Tickner, Arlene B. 2013. “Core, Periphery and (Neo)Imperialist International Relations.” European Journal of International Relations 19(3): 627–646. Tussie, Diana. 1993. The Developing Countries in World Trade: Policies and Bargaining Strategies. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Tussie, Diana. 2020. “The Tailoring of IPE in Latin America: Lost, Misfit, or Misperceived?” In The Routledge Handbook to Gobal Political Economy, ed. Ernesto Vivares. London: Routledge. Tussie, Diana and Mirta Botzman. 1992. “Sweet Entanglement: Argentina and the World Bank (1985–89).” In Cross-Conditionality Banking Regulation and Third-World Debt, eds. Ennio Rodríguez and Stephanie Griffith-Jones. Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press, 156–190. Vivares, Ernesto. 2013. Financing Regional Growth and the Inter-American Development Bank: The Case of Argentina. New York: Routledge. Waldner, David. 2012. “Process Tracing and Causal Mechanisms.” In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science, ed. Harold Kincaid. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 66–84. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World System, Vol. I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York and London: Academic Press. Weffort, Francisco. 1970. “Notas sobre la Teoría de la Dependencia: teoría de clase o ideología nacional.” en Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencia Política (Santiago de Chile) 1(3). Wibbels, Erik. 2006. “Dependency Revisited: International Markets, Business Cycles, and Social Spending in the Developing World.” International Organization 60(2): 433–468. Wibbels, Erik. 2009. “Cores, Peripheries, and Contemporary Political Economy.” Studies in Comparative International Development 44(4): 441–449. Zavala, Domingo. 1973. Los Mecanismos de la Dependencia. Caracas: Fondo Editorial Salvador.

12 BETWEEN ‘LO PRÁCTICO’ AND ‘LO POSIBLE’ International Insertion as an Innovation in Latin America’s Contribution to Global IR Fabrício H. Chagas-Bastos

Introduction The Global/worlding International Relations (IR) agenda opened up opportunities to voices and forms of knowledge produced outside the Anglo-European core of the discipline (Acharya, 2011, 2014, 2016, 2018; Tickner & Wæver, 2009). The perception that the discipline is becoming less Anglo-EuropeanAmerican, more coloured and diverse has muddled the fact that research still falls short on how to study Southern/non-Western IR contributions—i.e., how to address the conceptual foundations for a redefined discipline (e.g., Chagas-Bastos, 2018; Shahi, 2019; Shahi & Ascione, 2016). Although more attention has started to be paid to conceptual analysis than to grand theory production, the study and incorporation to analysis of concepts coming from peripheral regions have been marginal in mainstream publications—with few exceptions (Bischoff, Aning, & Acharya, 2015; Shilliam, 2010; and this book itself ). In this sense, ‘Southern/non-Western IR’ has been thereupon a synonym of ‘Asian approaches to IR’, due to the concentration of power and wealth in that region of the world. In addition, the lack of incentives to intellectual innovation in some areas of the South is a strong limitation to Southern/non-Western IR contributions to the discipline. In Latin America, for instance, research shows how the thinking about the international phenomenon in the region has been (and still is) highly linked to the concepts of dependency and autonomy inherited from the Dependency Theory and ECLAC1 school (Tickner, 2003, 2008). The intellectual effervescence in Latin America occurred concomitantly with the ECLAC school’s momentum in the 1950s and 1960s (with widespread resonance in the United Nations system) faded away (Palma, 2009). The innovations on

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international thought in the region seem to have been stagnated. One should not, however, throw the baby out with the bathwater. Latin American international thought presents characteristics that are a fertile ground for intellectual innovation. Hybridity has always been a prominent characteristic of Latin American international thought (Tickner, 2003, 2008). Different from the Asian-based IR schools, Latin America sits as a bridge between Western and non-Western civilisations2 (Huntington, 1996; Morse, 1988). This means that post- and de-colonial pressures embedded to knowledge production are substantially lower than those observed in Africa, the Middle East, or Southeast Asia. Furthermore, rather than grand theory building, the scholarship endeavour in the region has a tradition of concept development (e.g., autonomy). Finally, the main intellectual endeavour about the ­international in the region, Dependency Theory, neglected agency in its theorisations —supplying those interested in theorising agency from peripheral lenses with a solid starting point (Chagas-Bastos, 2017; Tussie, 2020). This leaves ample space for a different focus that helps us understand the behaviour of those in the South, in international politics, that escapes mainstream theories— much in line with Global IR agenda (see Hurrell, 2016a, 2016b). In this chapter, through the concept of international insertion I present how Latin American international thought can innovate and contribute to Global IR. I take an approach grounded in the history of concepts to demonstrate how a Latin American knowledge-based concept can explain and understand the behaviour of Southern countries in contemporary power transitions—or more specifically, while navigating through global hierarchies. In the remainder of this chapter, I first discuss what ‘innovation’ means, and how it is important to a Global IR debate. The next section briefly develops the theoretical and methodological frameworks of the history of concepts. The following sections delve into where the concept of international insertion comes from, what it means, and why it is important to a broader IR discipline.

Intellectual Innovation and the Latin American IR Sociology of knowledge teaches us that innovation—empirical, conceptual, or theoretical—should bridge the knowledge corpus built in the past with new pieces that can be recognisable in the present and in the future (Whitley, 1984). In short, “innovation, in order to be recognised as such, must therefore contain both new and old elements in relation to the attention space in which they are put forward” (Nielsen & Kristensen, 2014, p. 98, emphasis in original). Moreover, it is rivalry between a few prominent positions in an attention space—journal articles, book chapters, conferences etc.—that drives intellectual innovation (Collins, 1998). Kristensen and Nielsen (2013) pinpoint that Collins’s model when applied to IR should also consider geopolitics and state

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behaviour (e.g., foreign policy opportunities and constraints). The ‘real-world’ inputs are expected to influence IR scholarship—particularly in peripheral regions. Collins (2002, p. 48) states that although “material and socio-political dynamics can affect the conditions for intellectual innovation […] what makes certain ideas innovative among intellectuals is that they are new and distinctive in their own field of argument”. Kristensen and Nielsen (2013, p. 21) add that those factors have “an indirect impact on intellectual life insofar as they change its material and organizational base”. In China, for instance, theoretical innovation has been pointed out as a product of intellectuals seeking academic prestige, rather than a by-product of power transitions. According to Kristensen and Nielsen (2013, p. 25), “[f ]or scholars to achieve or retain attention space, they have to present their ideas as new (by combining Chinese thoughts and scientific methods) and important in relation to ongoing conversations (the Chinese theory debate)”. In Collins’s terms (2000, p. 160), “the strategic choice is between formulating a distinctive position to contend for first-rate attention, or to become the follower of an existing position”. In stark contrast with the Chinese ‘reinvention’ strategy, it is peculiar that in Latin America—despite the dramatic political and geopolitical transformations that have occurred since the mid-1980s—the thought about the international has been absent in presenting new ideas to achieve new attention spaces. After a ‘golden age’ of political-economy-based contributions, scholars in the region have not combined Latin American thoughts and scientific methods nor established a ‘Latin American’ theory debate with the mainstream. The triad dependence-autonomy-regionalism from the 1950s to 1960s still frames the analysis and structures the academic networks—even though the study of agency has gained ground, and policy space has made an inroad from Development Studies. From an intellectual perspective, Latin America’s historical contributions to IR revolve around the region’s own problems—i.e., economic development, political autonomy, and defence of natural resources—and were based on the Latin American social thought multidisciplinary background (Tussie, 2020; Palma, 2009). Such an approach produced critical perspectives at first to the asymmetries of the international system, and later, to regional governance and integration. It is noteworthy to stress that the ‘region’s own problems’ must not be understood as ‘self-centred’. It is a common mistake within the literature from and outside the region to confuse developmental and autonomic concerns with an exclusive preoccupation with the Latin American problems. A tentative hypothesis3 to explain why there is a lack of innovation does not come from the intellectual endeavour itself, but from the academic structure across the region. The IR founding fathers (mostly male and affluent) were sheltered by and trained within the ECLAC school canon and had closeknit academic and political connections with policymakers. This fact led to a self-contained narrative that serves two purposes. Firstly, it protects senior

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scholars from the ‘scientific death’, ensuring the maintenance of long-standing reputations and academic hierarchies. Various prominent scholars have built their careers on the ECLAC school’s footsteps and admitting that its face value has crashed could cause reputational and career losses. Secondly, the academic ideas of dependency-autonomy were incorporated to the idiosyncrasies of the academic milieu, serving as a flagship contestation argument (or victimisation) to political interests. Innovation, conceptual or theoretical, has been seen as a threat and treated as an alien, or even a by-product of the mainstream intellectual colonial domination. Two solutions are at hand to produce innovation in an environment that (almost) rejects it. One is to leave and seek opportunities in other intellectual centres. Another is to challenge the intellectual status quo by linking knowledge produced in the past with new elements that can be read and recognised as novel contributions by regional actors and more broadly to the global discipline. I take the second path. I explore Latin American particular features of hybridity, bridging status between the East and West and the concept development intellectual tradition to build a new concept. This is particularly relevant in a moment in which the discipline has started to pay more attention to conceptual analysis than to grand theory production. I briefly develop next the history of concepts framework, use it to connect international insertion with the regional intellectual past, and then, present it as a Latin American innovation to Global IR.

Conceptual History: Theory and Method A concept does not exist in a vacuum, devoid of a power supply that can mould it and make it advance throughout time. Concepts are dynamic entities located in time and space that give us linguistic and intellectual means/frameworks to describe, explain, and understand the world; and their meanings change according to different uses of words, vocabularies, temporal scope, and social standards. Moreover, a concept is always operated by an interested actor, using objective and subjective conditions to express the content they apprehend. In any intellectual exercise, there is no such thing as ‘just the facts’ or pure objectivity.4 Decisions about what to include into and exclude from concepts and theories are constantly taken by weighing what matters. And these are difficult choices. Such decisions inevitably take the argument and the reader to a particular direction (Chagas-Bastos, 2018; Chagas-Bastos & Burges, 2019). Park (2017) points out that concepts carry specific historical meanings, in a process of semantic accumulation that is often restricted by linguistic limitations and political possibilities (see also Ball, 1998). To understand how concepts play5 a central role in our socio-political language, one must look for their most basic meaning; the one that connects past, present, and the future;

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that brings the accumulated meanings; and that refers to the progress of its understanding. Koselleck (1992, 1996) notes that a basic conceptual approach combines multiple experiences and expectations that are identified as atemporal and indispensable for any formulation of the most urgent socio-political issues. Conceptual genesis in the Begriffsgeschichte tradition has its theoretical foundation in the fact that ideas use political or social language to account for life experiences (in terms of understanding). It is the process of synthesising political ideas in the form of concepts; given that a concept is always associated with what one wants to understand. There is then a tense relationship between concept and content, which expresses the convergence between subject and object. This tension between message, reality, and mental apprehension is the engine of the expansion of interpretive intellectual frameworks. Hence, it is not enough to identify when the meanings of concepts are created or redefined by ordinary language. It is necessary to explore what are the frameworks of experience that are reflected under the form of concepts—and transferred to the political vocabulary. The creation of an idea whose meaning was collectively attributed constitutes the amalgam between abstraction and theorisation, which occurs through the repetition of various types of text/speech differently distributed. Exploring layers of words throughout history is a documentary and linguistic analysis. Two sequential methods are in play: (i) the opposition, and (ii) the analysis of meaning framed by a temporality. The first examines what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’ of a certain concept. For instance, I define international insertion by what is not (e.g., it is not foreign policy, or the search for markets). The latter is a mapping of the historical changes of meaning through time. More specifically, I trace a temporal line within Latin American IR scholarship to establish when international insertion started to mean something as a concept (and what were these meanings over time). Ultimately, the task is to uncover the logic and semantics of concepts that have been used to describe historical events and processes. In addition, Farr (1989) observes that all political action involves agreements between political actors. These agreements are based on collective understandings on how certain concepts should be applied to the political world. Such understandings add to the two methods mentioned about the three general rules: (a) the criteria for applying concepts; (b) the scope and selectivity of the phenomena interpreted by certain concepts applied to the political world; and (c) the kind of attitudes that these concepts express. These general rules dictate how the conceptual history studies past societies and social change. Although the history of concepts is a well-established methodology in several disciplines, it has not received much attention in IR. Only recently scholars have resumed the deeper analysis of the variety of concepts present across the discipline (e.g., Berenskoetter, 2016, 2017; Leira, 2019). I propose then an innovation coming from Latin American international thought, freed from the straitjacket of old great paradigms and their infallible axioms (namely,

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the structural approach form Dependency Theory). The policy inclination, or ‘practical nature’, of Latin American international thought—and its imprecise use of terminology—produces a methodological problem. Due to its ­nature—as I develop in the next section—the number of entries on ‘international insertion’ in Portuguese and Spanish is immeasurable, to the point that it is impossible to cover all of them with minimal academic rigour. It should be noted that, even though it is not possible to produce a systematic literature review, the literature review I present here framed by conceptual history seeks to point out the polysemy of meanings and uses of the term over time. I review those works presenting an explicit conceptual structure, incorporating in the language the criteria, scope, and selectivity of the phenomena interpreted by the idea of international insertion. I present next how the idea of international insertion has progressed over time and space, until it becomes a concept that addresses the intellectual and geopolitical changes faced by the South from the 2000s onwards.

Between ‘lo práctico’ and ‘lo posible’ Latin American IR knowledge production has two particular features: it has been founded and developed with eminently practical (i.e., policy) goals, and has recently assumed a more pragmatic approach to politics and economic development strategies—combining neo-classical economic principles with progressive social policies to anchor endogenous credibility on external factors, and push exogenous credibility on internal propellers (Santiso, 2006). International insertion as a concept has one leg on the critical argument supplied by ‘lo práctico’, and another on the opportunities opened by a more ‘possibilistic’ and less ideological approach to the world. I turn now to insertion’s origins and intellectual traditions nurturing the concept. Autonomy and dependency have abundantly been used to explain foreign policy behaviour (see Chapters 11 and 13), regional governance and integration (e.g., Briceño Ruiz, 2018), regionalism (Deciancio, 2016), theoretical reproduction (Briceño Ruiz & Simonoff, 2017), and global governance (Deciancio & Tussie, 2020). The most influential explanation for the long-standing practical footprint in the region’s international thought argues that engaged scholars and policymakers have always been concerned with policy and developmental issues (Tickner, 2003). More specifically, Latin American international thought has been built on interpretations of the Dependency Theory, in which the structure is assumed to be a primitive entity that reproduces national and international elite arrangements, resulting in a capitalist unequal distribution of wealth that explains the peripheral condition of underdevelopment. The development of theorisation about the international in the region was based on the practical view of how international relations, grounded in the idea of the ‘international’ as a lever to development, based historically on the quest for autonomy.

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The geopolitical changes from the early 2000s that affected the entire Global South put a definitive pressure on the power of structuralist interpretations and utopian-based political postures—such as the Marxist revolutionaries. The financial stabilisation experienced as a result of the combination of structural reforms and the economic growth driven by the commodity boom allowed peripheral countries to believe they could have more international ambitions—a significantly different profile from the 1980s to 1990s, when they sought to sell themselves as reliable participants of the globalisation. The new possibilities for the South to navigate, insert, and reinsert themselves within global hierarchies were unprecedented. Santiso (2006, pp. 173–174) observes that actors in Latin America moved from eminent developmental needs, to a stage in which more possibilities were in play—lo posible— exorcizing […] the ghost of a good theory that would solve all the problems and contribute to the laws of development, from which a simple and rational formula could be deduced that would be applicable from the Andes to Patagonia […].

Where Does Insertion Come from? The idea of international insertion has been used since the 1950s as common wisdom within Latin American IR literature to describe ‘international action’, ‘foreign actions’, ‘international projection’, or even ‘international presence’. The scholarship and policy production actively taking up the term starts in the late 1980s and early 1990s at the intersection of Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA) and International Political Economy (IPE). In general, the term has been used as a synonym of foreign policy, or to describe the strategies available to peripheral economies facing structural challenges in the international economy.6 Foreign policy change was a key feature in the first attempts to approach insertion. During the 1990s, the meaning of insertion was linked to how a country’s development level could limit its foreign policy options (i.e., autonomy levels) and, therefore, its possibilities of recognition as a relevant actor in global hierarchies (see Chapters 2 and 13). Moreover, after the long decade of stabilisation in the 1990s, ECLAC’s analysts (and the businessmen and scholars alike) were particularly interested in the discussion on how to internationalise markets in the region facing globalisation. The underlying idea here is the concern of losing (once again) the road to social and economic modernisation and deepening the dependence on central markets. In this context, IPE lays the ground to international insertion in five key areas: (i) international exchange flows, analysing the dynamics of exports and imports of goods and services; (ii) the financial instruments to deal with international trade and foreign direct investment; (iii) advances in new technologies and innovation in industrial processes (research and development); (iv) adaption of labour force

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to new technologies; and (v) adaptation of economic solutions to different cultural, geographical, political, and social environments. International insertion meant though, specifically—for those in the periphery—reducing economic dependency by assuming a different role in the international division of labour. The direct consequence of a practical usage is the fact that scholars in Latin America for long were not concerned with establishing precisely the concepts with which they operate—or simply directly incorporated mainstream ideas. They left insertion with a loosely held collection of intellectual material. At this point, the challenge is more epistemological and methodological than conceptual/theoretical. In contrast with Western IR, in Latin America, thinking the international is marked by two fundamental distinctions. Firstly, as hinted above, theoretical reflections and elaborations are intrinsically related to practice/policy goals. Secondly, although for mainstream IR there is a clear (even though artificial) division between politico-economic theoretical subjects, to Latin American international thought such divisions never made much sense: thinking the region’s place and agency in the world necessarily means thinking about its development and, ultimately, its place in the global economic value chains.

The Brazilian Perspective The change of mindset in the South regarding the perception of its position within global hierarchies over the 2000s coincides with what has been generically treated by the literature as ‘emergence’ (Chagas-Bastos & Franzoni, 2019). Brazil, South Africa, India, among others, have begun to claim more active and pre-eminent roles as they integrated into the global productive and financial chains. Decision-makers in Southern capitals have then begun to combine and (somewhat) coordinate different branches of public policies (foreign, economic, and defence) abroad seeking to transcend the (almost) exclusively economic and material catch-up focus of previous decades. In this transitional context, Amado Cervo (2001, 2003, 2008a, 2008b, 2010, 2013)—one of the pioneers of international studies in Brazil—set the first formal attempt to conceptualise insertion. His original goal was to create a Brazilian-based concept to explain Brazilian foreign policy. More specifically, he intended to create an autochthonous legitimisation to Brazil’s rising power project during Lula da Silva administrations (2003–2010)—i.e., an autonomy expansion through a South–South strategy. Cervo banked his explanation on a historical background (strongly connected to the Annales School) and used a social constructivism theoretical approach with de-colonial intentions. Cervo’s conceptualisation of insertion, however, is confusing and flawed. He treated insertion as a paradigm7 or a model that explains psychological, cultural, and political obstacles to cooperation between societies. In other words, international insertion would imply a paradigmatic view of the world that

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carries the national schemata, material interests (military and economic), and the political interactions to define goals and build institutions. In the end it is a full package of disorganised analytical categories. In a similar vein, Celso Lafer (1987, 1990, 1992/1993, 1993, 2001), a former Brazilian foreign affairs minister, for long couched his argument on national identity. He defined insertion as a metric for the values of a country in the world, in its political, economic, and military-strategic aspects.8 In short, the values projected abroad would give the measure of a country’s importance and autonomy to act within global hierarchies. The high profile given to Brazilian scholarship (Kristensen, 2020) obscures other attempts across Latin America to grasp what insertion means. Several authors across Latin America also have explored the idea of insertion under the ‘post-hegemonic’ times.

Latin American Contributions Rodríguez (1987, 1989), for instance, seeks to develop an ‘insertion model’ for Colombia over the 1980s. His analysis describes the contribution of exports to the net balance of surplus formation in the balance of payments—taking into account the inequality of the terms of trade, and the different economic and technological development levels. The definition of international insertion for him had the same meaning as the role (central or peripheral) of a country in the international division of labour—and derives directly from the existence of complementarity between an advanced industrial nucleus and a periphery that produces primary goods. It also meant to weigh the accelerated changes of globalisation and attempt to establish a ‘reliable’ profile under the changing environment to be more politically autonomous. In Uruguay, the study of the country’s insertion followed a common path. Clemente (2007) outlined international insertion as a political and economic projection of capacities abroad and/or strategies to change developmental status, facing external constraints in multiple dimensions (political, economic, and social) and scopes (global, international, and regional). Arteaga (2007) suggested that historical cognition is the matrix of international insertion, highlighting the sociological and anthropological aspects of the concept—but he does not go beyond that. Bizzozero (2007) identified a division between actors and conditions (inserting something somewhere). He then established a circular causal relationship where the environment, which encompasses the action (international insertion), depends on the strategies and objectives achieved by actors. The concept bears, for all three of them, a circular relationship in which cause and effect are indistinguishable: international insertion changes the state of development, whereas changes in development would change insertion. Uruguay’s former foreign affairs minister Luis Almagro (2011) defined insertion by connecting foreign and trade policy:

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Thirty or forty years ago South Korea, of course, had a different foreign policy strategy and a foreign trade strategy that was based on different items, that was based on a different country. Finally, we have a developed country there in South Korea, and their strategy has completely changed. So, what you insert in the world is the country that you have, the country that you can promote is the country that you have. It is unclear whether the components of international insertion are derived from internal factors of South Korea (or any other country), and then addressed to strategies which are then operationalised as policy goals. Or, in contrast, if strategies are based on the components, and then can be considered the reasons for changes in South Korean international insertion. Another way to think of Almagro’s reasoning is to look at insertion as the result of a direct spill-over from national resources abroad (specifically when he says, “what you insert in the world is the country that you have”). A third possibility refers to the images of and perceptions about states (“the country that you can promote is the country that you have”). At least one aspect is elucidative: to him, the main objective of international insertion is the improvement of development levels. Oyarzún (2013, p. 271), working on Chilean insertion, framed the concept in terms of an ‘international economic insertion’, as an “opening up [of ] possibilities for carrying out activities that are difficult to develop in isolation”. This would be, then, a foreign policy strategy that aims to strictly improve the country’s international economic leeway through open regionalism and increase trade flows (Oyarzún, 2018). Her understanding of the term tributed to Muñoz (1986) and the already traditional notion that insertion for Chile refers mainly to a reintegration of the country into the international economy (beginning in the 1980s), and diplomatic circles (in the 1990s). In sum, insertion means a reversal of Chile’s isolation that resulted from the 1973 military coup through economic means. The state of ‘in between’ the practical and the possible constrained Latin American contributions to Global IR. Common to all reviewed authors, to a greater or lesser extent, is the dichotomy autonomy-dependency. Some adopt a victimised tone, while others discreetly attempt to move forward adopting an ascetic scientific approach to development and inequality. This new moment for the Global South demands to put aside the deterministic structural explanation supplied by the dependentistas and to create analytical instruments able to tackle the process of creating agency spaces. This is what I develop in the next section.

The Latin American Contribution to Global IR It can be argued that the problem of insertion is common to all those who are not in privileged positions in the international society. To a greater or lesser

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extent, the challenges faced by those in the South are similar. Although based on Latin American intellectual experience, the concept of international insertion can be applied to different parts of the periphery—or to the different types of periphery situations within the global hierachies. This is why we should pay attention to insertion. This is how an innovation coming from Latin America can establish a theoretical and empirical debate with the mainstream and contribute to Global IR. From a Northern disciplinary mainstream point of view the argument that a state must be ‘inserted’ undoubtedly sounds like an alien. This is not true, however, if we take into account that decision-making with respect to the international in the South has as its starting point the marginalisation and is commonly dominated by the need to expand or affect the spaces of agency in which they articulate—precisely, their insertion. For instance, Tussie (2009) describes aptly how the advantage of research and robust technical information provokes imbalances in trade negotiations, and how priorities and capacities for and from Southern capitals mark a stark contrast with its counterparts in the North. IR theories have given only lateral attention to the systemic problems faced by the neglected South. Hoffmann (1977, pp. 47–48) argues that the whole edifice of IR was created seeking an intellectual compass which would serve multiple functions: exorcise isolationism, and justify a permanent and global involvement in world affairs; rationalize the accumulation of power, the techniques of intervention, and the methods of containment apparently required by the Cold War; explain to a public of idealists why international politics does not leave much leeway for pure good will, and indeed besmirches purity; appease the frustrations of the bellicose by showing why unlimited force or extremism on behalf of liberty was no virtue; and reassure a nation eager for ultimate accommodation, about the possibility of both avoiding war and achieving its ideals. Those in the international system’s peripheries only appear when he inquires “how and under what conditions the weak have been able to offset their inferiority?” (Hoffmann, 1997, p. 59). Crucial for those outside the West, this ­interrogation—unfortunate and strikingly—has never been appropriately addressed by IR mainstream. First and foremost, to IR literature the conditions under which the ‘weak’ have been able to ‘offset their inferiority’ have been treated as mere developmental concerns—as ‘low politics’. The differences between central and peripheral countries’ development levels, ambitions, and concerns put aside any type of inquiry about how peripheral nations could engage with and participate in international decision-making. Further, the premise of a ‘high correlation between might and achievements’ forced non-Western/ Southern states to compare their results with the North and not to the process of agency creation itself.

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The change of mindset in the South regarding the perception of its position within global hierarchies coincides with what has been generically treated by the literature as ‘emergence’ (Chagas-Bastos & Franzoni, 2019). Brazil, India, South Africa, among ‘emerging countries’, have begun to claim more active and pre-eminent roles as they integrate into the global productive and financial chains. Decision-makers in Southern capitals have then begun to combine different branches of public policies abroad (foreign, economic, and defence) in a coordinated whole to create agency spaces; transcending the (almost) exclusively economic and material catch-up focus of previous decades. Moreover, Tussie (2009, p. 339) argues that “[t]he interaction between accepted theories and internal agendas determines how research is played out through a complex and contested process of social decoding, feedback, and redefinition”. Innovation coming from the South draws on geopolitical changes and social decoding produced by the new positions actually occupied and the new world views embedded to them. Although some voices distrusted the emergence of the South (e.g., Patrick, 2010), it is clear today that the movement towards the centre of the system has not manifested itself as an act of rebellion against asymmetries and injustices. It has been rather one where the South sought to transform some of the international agenda setting references—and in many cases strengthen basic principles such as the rule of law and the liberal economy couched on Southern perspectives. The goal has been to achieve status to get a seat at the table, not to overthrow it or build a new one. The pressing geopolitical and disciplinary changes urged for a concept that would interpret the new behaviour portrayed in the South. Insertion presented itself as a suitable candidate to incorporate such changes. First, Hoffmann’s assumption over the behaviour of the ‘weak’ in international politics is grounded in the idea that the only possible path to overcome subordination is to privilege structural interactions and use the breaches within the global hierarchies to seek recognition. The possibility for those in the South with ambitions to become de facto players and not merely exporters of primary commodities and cheap labour falls outside this mindset. Hoffmann, and most of the mainstream IR theorists, had sidestepped the (important) question—to the non-Western/ Southern—of agency in international politics. Second, the idea of insertion has reached enough ‘common wisdom’ semantics to ‘put language to work’ as concept making. Second, it could not be left unidentified, given the number of fragmented attempts to culture a concept. Third, it could not be assimilated anymore with the practical anti-dependency and pro-autonomic meanings—it became clear that the historical meanings of those definitions did not suit the 2010s zeitgeist. The criteria to define international insertion should be grounded in and address recognition and status through Southerner lenses. Insertion refers to the factoring and coordination of domestic policies towards the international—foreign, economic, and defence policies—states in

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the periphery use to create agentic spaces within the global hierarchies. How these policies are combined respects a “complex and contested process of social decoding, feedback, and redefinition” conditioned not only by institutional structures, but also by politics and politicians in turn (Tussie, 2009, p. 339). Insertion is necessary to those countries attempting to transition from the condition of one who seeks to be recognised as part of, to one who is admitted as possessing and capable of seeking status within military, political, and economic global hierarchies9. To put in a nutshell: insertion means being recognised by the small group of gatekeeping states as a relevant part of the specific social network that constitutes international society. Having autonomy to not be dependent, or to simply be present in global governance agencies is not enough. As I noted above, innovation should connect the known past with novelty pointing to and being recognisable in the future. The new concept I propose opens space for the development of theoretical approaches from a Southern perspective of agency in international politics. Instead of an anachronistic dilemma framed as a choice between dependency and autonomy, this new framework is based on a post-dependence mindset that advances towards an understanding of how states coming from the peripheries of the international system can create spaces to move towards better positions within global hierarchies. On their own, the concepts of autonomy and dependency limit the analysis of the engagement of Southern countries with global hierarchies. To advance on this post-dependence framework, I overcome the limitation posed by Dependency Theory’s overly structural look to international politics by incorporating to the ideas of autonomy-dependence and sovereignty the notions of recognition and status-seeking. It implies to move the focus of ‘emergence’ from mere discourse of autonomy, or a status change to a political phenomenon that must be theorised on the matters of its material, ideational, and emotional components. Not only are the material limitations and development challenges that those in the South face reinforced by capitalism asymmetries, but also the psychological aspects of selective recognition, contempt, and prejudice intrinsic towards those in the South.

Conclusion I advance in this chapter the Global/worlding International Relations research agenda. I discuss and recover the innovation embedded in the Latin American international thought in terms of one of its original contributions to the discipline: the concept of international insertion. Further, single out how the concept can contribute to expand our thinking on theorising international politics from a non-Western perspective. The concept is closer to an evolutionary aspect than a revolution of ideas. This means that I perhaps did not tribute directly to or promote a rupture with the conceptual background used in the

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region in past but connect insertion to what has been produced to prove its innovative character. I do so by discussing and developing the history of the concept and tracing its origins. Dependency Theory evokes the nostalgia of a bygone golden age, but Latin American International Relations can supply the IR discipline with original knowledge. This chapter elaborates the concept of international insertion to demonstrate how Latin American international thought can innovate and provide a contribution to Global IR research agenda. Using some aspects of the Latin American tradition of ‘lo práctico’ to think the international enables me to address ‘lo posible’, tackle the geopolitical and societal changes that emerged over the past decades, and innovate. To develop a rigorous review of the relevant literature, in addition to mapping the conceptual genesis present there, I used Koselleck’s history of concepts to show how international insertion developed over the years, based on the Latin American readings of FPA and IPE, moving from a common wisdom to its establishment as a formal concept. The analysis of international insertion overcomes the shortcoming posed by mainstream IR theories, because it enables a more precise analysis of under which agency conditions the South can offset its ‘inferiority’. Tussie (2009, p. 335) reminds us that “ideas can serve to conceal the stratification of the global system into a core of rule makers and a broad band of heterogeneous rule takers”. This is more evident when scholars in a region decide, conscious or unconsciously, to conceal the stratification of their own intellectual stagnation under the form of academic hierarchies. In studying how the South creates spaces to act within global hierarchies, international insertion is not only a useful concept to IR literature but also the missing piece in Dependence Theory—given that it does not focus exclusively on how the structures constrain the ‘weak’.

Notes 1 Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. 2 Merquior (1991), in contrast, argues that the region should be seen as the ‘Other West’. 3 I advance, however, on Tickner’s (2003) initial pessimistic explanation to the same phenomena. According to her the absence of theorisation in Latin America is a product of weak incentives to engage in theory-building at the national/regional levels. The sociological investigations on Latin American IR have only started to be done, opening new avenues for research. Starting points can be found in Tickner (2003), Kristensen (2015), and Tussie (2020). To date, there is no comprehensive bibliometric survey about Latin American IR production. 4 Cox’s (1996, p. 67, emphasis in original) classical citation aptly captures the idea that knowledge (and we can also extrapolate it to concepts) “is always for someone and for some purpose. […] All theories [or more generally, knowledge] have a perspective. Perspectives derive from a position in time and space, specifically social and political time and space”.

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5 There are two possibilities for studying the history of concepts, the Cambridge School (Pocock, 1971; Skinner, 1969) and the Begriffsgeschichte (Koselleck, 1992, 1996, 2002, 2004). Due to space limitations and scope, I will not go further on this subject. Suffices to say that Palonen (1997, 1999, 2003) marks the difference between both schools considering that, for those in Cambridge, the changes in conceptual rhetorical formulation have the course of time as a background, while for the Begriffsgeschichte rhetoric is the instrument of expression of temporal changes in conceptual meaning. Park (2017) adds that, in practical terms, the Begriffsgeschichte is more interested in the context outside the text—a social history of concepts— while the Cambridge School focuses on the literary and linguistic characteristics of concepts. 6 Data from Google Books Ngram Viewer between 1980 and 2008 for entries in Spanish (‘inserción international’) and English (‘international insertion’) show consistent patterns in this direction. Data on the production in Portuguese (‘inserção internacional’) are still missing in Google datasets. 7 Understood in the Kuhnian sense, as a normalising intellectual tool for a body of theoretical and methodological standards in a given field of study. 8 In a very similar argument to the image theory developed by Robert Jervis. 9 Examples of how these agentic spaces have been created and explored can be found at Chagas-Bastos (in press), and Cepik, Chagas-Bastos, and Ioris (in press).

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13 THE CONCEPT OF AUTONOMY AS AN EPISTEMIC FOUNDATION? MANY PATHS, MANY TURNS María Cecilia Míguez

Introduction Autonomy is a critical aspect of GIR. This chapter seeks to carry out a twofold exercise regarding the concept of autonomy in International Relations (IR) in Latin America. Firstly, it brings a historic view of these debates to reflect on their content and future in order to, secondly, determine their validity and scope, since it will allow us to interpret existing conflicts in countries that are not global powers, that is to say, the vast majority. In this regard, autonomy stands at the center of the debate, not only as a contribution to the GIR project but also to think beyond Latin America and apply it to other latitudes. Why do scholars in Latin America keep debating autonomy? Sohail Tahir Inayatullah (1996) posed a similar question, claiming that strong countries such as the United States inherently enjoy their autonomy as a matter of fact, and, therefore, they need not ponder on how to gain it. This is why in mainstream IR thinking this is not even discussed. Major world powers continue to exert effective control over the fundamental factors of their economy and their political decision-making mechanisms, even in a globalized world. In this sense, autonomy brings to the GIR research agenda a core debate within southern countries reflecting the voices, experiences and knowledge of generally silenced areas of the world, in order to build a truly inclusive discipline (Achayra, 2014). In the analysis of foreign policy autonomy was foundational stemming from the structuralist visions. The concept has been influenced by different currents of thought and it changed over time accompanying global transformations. At present, debates have centered on its capability to travel to other parts of the world (Deciancio and Tussie, 2020) as it refers and intends to explain the dilemmas faced in the south (see Chapter 12). Even though power and autonomy

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are relative terms, the difference between major powers and countries of the global south is not a matter of degree but of kind, marking a strong quest for the latter and hence a narrative missing in mainstream IR. Both in the narrative and the theoretical production of peripheral countries, autonomy plays a relevant role and it has been the subject of discussion among those who consider it a foreign policy goal and those who seek to relativize its contents. In many contexts within global periphery—yet not only there—autonomy is important in symbolic terms, as it has been considered an essential mechanism to ensure different ways of non-dependent development, or at the very least policy space, and to guarantee the independence of the state (Inayatullah, 1996: 53). Therefore, this chapter is an invitation to conduct the counter-hegemonic exercise of recovering a fundamental contribution to understand the challenges of peripheral countries, to make a brief review and a critical rereading of those who have addressed the problems of autonomy, and the derivations the concept has had in the Southern Cone in order to contribute to a Global IR agenda. The historic aspect of a term or a concept, in Gadamer’s words, refers to the fabric of political, social, linguistic, economic, cultural relationships, among others, in which it originates and from which it derives its meaning (Gadamer, 1966). Historicizing a concept is to figure out its capacity to meaningfully articulate diverse experiences, to create discursive networks extending across the ages, and also its possibility of being an indicator of the structural changes and of the interpretations of those changes that players bring about with their practices (p. 301). That is why it involves not only “contextualizing” the different theoretical appreciations regarding autonomy but also retrieving the content of autonomy in international relations as the condensation of a historical experience (Palti, 2007: 301), or at least a historical-political aspiration. The currents of thought that developed the problematique of autonomy did so within the framework of the reading of Development Theory, of Dependency Theory and of critical systemic approaches. They were under the influence of other mainstream theoretical thinking, such as realism and interdependence, but marked by the need to develop policy spaces for countries such as Brazil and Argentina in the Southern Cone. Such theoretical developments took shape as a doctrine and epistemological contribution and, following global change, the subsequent reformulations we will analyze resulted in new, heterogeneous formulations, even contradicting their own doctrinal origin. Cox claimed that “theory is always for someone and for some purpose” (1981: 129), and, indeed, this is the reason why we seek to historicize and, at the same time, boost the concept of autonomy to think of international relations in peripheral countries. The visions on autonomy that emerged in central countries have not been able to understand the defensive nature of the content of autonomy for countries in the global south. That does not mean that it is the only aspect to consider, or even that it is the most important. But it does constitute a foundational element that condenses the experience of global asymmetries. In this regard, as

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it emerged, the so-called Autonomy Doctrine included a critical view—albeit with nuances—of the world order and the political aspirations that gave meaning to it questioned (although in a heterogeneous way) the distribution of global power. As it was reformulated the oppositional character may have been lost. We consider it essential to refresh the view that maintains the reference to the long hand of the United States during the Cold War period. A concept establishes a particular horizon for theory and for potential experience (Koselleck, 1993). We seek here to make a contribution to the plurality of voices (Achayra, 2014). Theoretical debates about autonomy constitute a central axis of foreign policy analysis because they also lead to rethink the possibilities of agency in peripheral countries. First, we will review the origins of the concept and then analyze its most recent classifications, modifications and derivations. Finally, we will address the characteristics of the different contributions, seeking to analyze the epistemic value of the theories of autonomy as a contribution to GIR.

Dependency and Autonomy: Content and Concept The emergence of the ECLAC theory in the 1950s and 1960s, and its subsequent criticism, the Dependency Theory, contributed to the reflection on the international integration of Latin American countries in International Relations (see Chapter 9). These contributions eventually amounted to a true paradigm of social sciences. They practically turned out to be the main lens through which scholars from the region analyzed development problems and class struggles, and they offered the platform for IR. The concept of autonomy gained a more prominent role, as a counterweight of the description of oppression and vulnerability in dependent countries. It was the Brazilian scholar Helio Jaguaribe who steered it first toward the field of international relations, in a paper entitled “Dependency and Autonomy in Latin America” (1969). In that document, he develops the essential aspects of the concept and an Autonomous Development and Integration Model for Latin America. At that time, he defined it as follows: “autonomy (…) means, at the national and regional level, both the availability of conditions that allow free decision-making by individuals and agencies representative of the system, and the deliberate resolution to exercise those conditions” (p. 66). He subsequently published “Peripheral Autonomy and Centric Hegemony”. He established four international stratification levels: countries with general primacy, with regional primacy, with autonomy—i.e. a margin for self-determination in domestic affairs and independent capacity for international action—and dependent nations (the majority), whose actions are conditioned by external factors and decisions. His analysis of the local elites stands out in the sense that they accept dependency in return for various class advantages. Autonomous spaces are only possible crossing national viability of a peripheral country and international permissibility. In this sense, he found that

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the existence of material resources (including human capabilities), the degree of socio-cultural cohesion, and the capacity of neutralizing external threats were the conditions to attain autonomy. In his early papers, he added the need for technological and business autonomy ( Jaguaribe, 1979: 96–97). In Argentina, Juan Carlos Puig systematically drafted a model to understand Argentine foreign policy in a similar way. He developed the so-called Doctrine of Autonomy. Puig had earned a PhD degree in Law at the University of Paris, and a PhD degree in Diplomacy at the National University of the Littoral. In May 1973, he was appointed as Minister of Foreign Affairs by then-President Cámpora. He sought to apply the core ideas of the Peronist Third Position,1 in light of the ongoing international détente. His administration re-established relations with Cuba and a re-approaching with East Europe. After this short experience, he fled to exile in Venezuela from where he participated in Latin American academic life widely. For Puig (1980), the autonomy is “the maximum capacity for self-determination that can be achieved, taking into account the objective conditioning of the real world” (p. 145), and it depends on the capacity of elites to sustain it. He claimed that international order is characterized by an established hierarchy which has different levels: “supreme distributors”, “lower distributors” and “recipients” (Puig, 1980: 141). The first impose their criteria at the international level; they drive decisions, “impose power or lack of power at the global, continental, or subregional level”. The last category, instead, merely accepts and is affected by those decisions. The core point in this theory is the need for autonomy as the counterpart to the description of the situation of oppression and vulnerability in dependent countries. Puig also built on Jaguaribe’s formulations by claiming that, even in the conditions of asymmetry, there were possibilities for autonomy. His analysis relies on the question about the search for autonomy margins regarding the hegemonic state. In this sense, the role of the elites or ruling classes in the countries which are in such subordinate condition is significant. Puig considers that “those responsible (for the dependency) are the dominant-dominees (Theotonio dos Santos, 1978) who act as a hinge of the “external dominator” acting on its behalf but, at the same time, and in doing so, strengthening their subordinate “internal domination” (Puig, 1980: 149). Therefore autonomy requires not only national viability and domestic resources but also an explicit commitment from the elites. Both authors stand apart from the Marxist currents of Dependency Theory, and position themselves in a strategic thinking within the framework of capitalism, but intending to use spaces of permissibility in the world system. Jaguaribe related these possibilities to the improvement in production scale and productivity—the bases for development—through regional integration ( Jaguaribe, 1982: 4). That is to say, it is not a matter of decision-making capacity but a matter of establishing productive forces that enable the space to pursue certain interests. An important contribution from this current was the

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drafting of a series of ideal types to explain foreign policy in different periods, based on Argentine history from its time as a Spanish colony. Dependency and autonomy in their pure state (i.e. not verifiable in reality) are the extremes of history and the road for peripheral countries to travel in order to achieve their autonomy. From this analytical perspective, four models have been developed to represent progressive degrees of autonomy, according to the behavior of the ruling elites: paracolonial dependency, national dependency (the case of Argentine foreign policy in the period from the declaration of independence to the First World War), heterodox autonomy (the case of the Peronist “third position” among others) and secessionist autonomy (Puig, 1980: 20). Puig’s political experience as well as Jaguaribe’s led to proposals that combine an effort to conduct a scholarly analysis with the strive to influence policy (Briceño Ruiz and Simonoff, 2017: 186). The agenda of the transformations taking place in the so-called Third World (both decolonization processes and the Cuban Revolution, and after the Lusaka conference related to the urgency of economic development) worked as the “backdrop” for political strategies and intellectual elaborations aimed at seeking alternatives (Miranda, 2005: 50). It is no coincidence that, in the case of these formulations, the State has a predominant role in achieving such viability, as in many Latin American countries the States have expressed projects that supported national interests from relatively anti-imperialist positions. The rescue of the concept of autonomy is linked to a practice and to a particular, concrete historical aspiration. It is also what David Blaney (1996) sought to proclaim in his analysis of dependency and its impact on International Political Economy: the critical social drive, ethical questioning and the confrontation implied regarding inequalities in the world system. Blaney argues that “the dependency legacy helps us to articulate one of our deepest moral impulses about the world: that the autonomy of peoples, state and political communities is valuable” (p. 484). The following paragraphs will analyze whether subsequent formulations about autonomy maintain that critical questioning of the global status quo and the asymmetries that characterize it.

Derivations: Costs, Emphasis on Non-confrontation, and Neo-idealistic Currents of Integration With the end of the Cold War the concept of autonomy was sidelined in academic publications. This was linked to the praise of globalization as the only possible way, the strengthening of a supposed unipolarity in which the United States dominated and even the end of the nation states. Long-standing principles of sovereignty and national self-determination took second place. At the same time, economic and financial hardship worsened, and there was greater interventionism from the major powers toward the weak or dependent nations, whose weight in the world scene became notably lower. In the

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case of Latin American countries, at the peak of the Washington Consensus, economic models were proposed that intensified dependency, whereby the region became the arena for privatization, deregulation, loss of decision-making power by the State and huge public indebtedness. All this took place within a framework in which the conditionality of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were accepted, a truly representative example of the dominance by the major powers in world economy and politics. In accordance, foreign policy was geared toward integration into the globalization process, assuming, to a greater or lesser extent, that autonomy was now a matter of degree not of kind and hence no longer in essence a doctrine or an objective underpinning foreign policy. Currents within IR reformulated the concept, steering it away from the conditions that had originated and expanded it not only to other configurations within foreign policy but also to some approaches to International Political Economy (Tussie, 2015). The most rounded formulation of that period in Argentina was the thesis on peripheral realism elaborated by Carlos Escudé (see Kacowicz and Wajner, Chapter 2). This approach would turn into the doctrinal rationale for the international integration project conducted in the 1990s. Escudé developed a series of postulates that reinforced the need for peripheral countries to avoid and/or reduce confrontation with the hegemonic powers, and criticized “principled” orientations (1984). His studies on the relationship between Argentina and the world powers during Peronist administrations had been the starting point for the prescriptive aspects of his theoretical elaboration (Escudé, 1983). By 1984, Escudé posed that in an “interdependent” world gestures of symbolic independence tended to isolate countries and marginalize them from the rest of the world, and they were counterproductive for their actual independence (Escudé, 1984: 66). The author would then expand on this line of thought, and in another paper of 1986, he directly stated the need to achieve “strong alliances with those countries which have the power to promote or castrate our fate. From a dependent position, the structuring of strong alliances with core powers is almost the only starting point to optimize a state’s international integration” (Escudé, 1986: 12). Drekonja similarly held that after the fall of the Berlin Wall the only possible option was not to confront the United States. The author’s postulations have evolved throughout the decade in an eloquent manner. In his first works the emphasis was placed on the notion of “peripheral autonomy”, as one of the possible strategies for the continent. Its conceptualization of autonomy is directly linked to variables as high and low profile. Peripheral autonomy is characterized by a prudent, measured profile that accepts the rules of the international system, of a reformist nature, and tolerated by the world power (1983). In this conceptual scheme the forms and the perception that the power has of peripheral countries’ foreign policy are the central variable (Tokatlian and Carbajal, 1995). After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Drekonja sustained that this strategy

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was no longer suitable for Latin America, and that the only possible option was not to confront the United States, assuming a “consented dependence” (1993). Also from Colombia, but rooted in the structuralist tradition (see Chapter 9), Fernando Cepeda Ulloa offered the interpretation of autonomy as a form, to refer to the material attributes that give “support” and “viability” to it (1986), arguing that a high-profile foreign policy without economic resources does not bring peripheral countries closer to greater autonomy. Across the continent, the difficulty in the practice of autonomy closed minds and further theoretical formulations. By then, it seemed to be accepted practice that being under the hegemonic umbrella had payoffs. In Argentina, Escudé associated autonomy with “negotiating capacity”, describing it mainly in terms of the relative costs of exerting the confrontation capacity that almost every medium-sized country has. He differentiated between consumption of autonomy and investment of autonomy. In this sense, for the author, autonomy is predicated diverting resources consumption to building a powerful foreign policy. Peripheral realism is predicated in contrast to “the elimination of all confrontations that are not directly linked to our material interest” (Escudé, 1992: 63). Escudé associates this directly to needs of the trading states: to abstain from “idealist” but costly foreign policies, and from “unproductive political confrontations with great powers, even when those confrontations do not result in immediate costs, and finally study the possibility of aligning and/or bandwagoning with the global policies of a dominant or hegemonic power” (Escudé, 1995). In short, even though there is a dialogue with realist currents, he is profoundly influenced by utilitarianism. Achieving material wellbeing is the core goal, itself a product of a rational, self-interested cost–benefit calculations. Hence, far from that initial idea of autonomy which had sought policy spaces for internal development, in this formulation it became a euphemism, an empty shell to praise the benefits of pragmatism at a time when the United States enjoyed its unipolar moment. Throughout the 1990s, gender studies in IR questioned traditional views of autonomy. They have geared their contributions toward the analysis of the differentiation between the formation of the female and the male identities. The former would be built based on the relationship with the rest, rather than arising from confrontation (see Chapter 8). Taking up feminist theories, David Blaney (1996) developed the concept of relational autonomy. He invited us to think the following way: “we can come to see the autonomy of political communities as a kind of relationship available in a global society supportive of self-determination and self-realization, not as separation from other” (1996: 473). Along similar lines, in Brazil, Gelson Fonseca Jr. (1998) developed the concept of “autonomy through participation”, understood as “the exercise of autonomy through a strategy that promotes adherence to international regimes in order to influence them” (pp. 368–369). The notion of Fonseca Jr. (1998),

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then adapted by Vivegani and Cintra (2004), was that Brazil’s autonomy in relation to the United States could be achieved by installing as a global trader, showing interest in the global arena, with the objective of influencing the formulation of rules in the international order. Roberto Russell and Juan Gabriel Tokatlian (2001) picked up Blaney’s idea to re-signify the meaning of autonomy: to understand it, no longer within a merely national framework but in relation to partners. Such autonomy would constitute the capacity and willingness of states to share decisions and jointly influence processes that take place within and beyond their frontiers (Russell and Tokatlian, 2001: 87). Russell and Tokatlian related autonomy to the regionalization, democratization and globalization processes, and the relative estrangement of the United States from the Latin American scene, giving a special preponderance to the role of institutions to avoid isolation. Thus, they no longer define autonomy in terms of the power of a country in isolation but of “its power to participate and effectively influence on world affairs, especially on international organizations and regimes of all kinds” (2010: 136–137). In their terms, relational autonomy requires a growing interaction, negotiation and an active participation in the drafting of international standards and regulations seeking to facilitate global governability (2010). In the spirit of constructivism, they place special emphasis on the presence of collective identities. Far from Blaney, who had retrieved the value of the ethical contained in Dependency Theory, Russell and Tokatlian disregard the existence of power and domination, ignoring the inherent tensions in the construction of a counter-hegemonic participation in the international system (Míguez, 2013).2 The transformations that have taken place in the world since the times of the so-called globalization have not modified the inequality and asymmetry conditions among nations, or eliminated the power of nation states either. Therefore, obtaining autonomy spaces for peripheral countries is still a quest regarding the global status quo. The strategies seeking to influence the global arena cannot be linearly translated into autonomic strategies, since that character requires an attitude that is at least relatively critical toward global power distribution. Taking into account the derivations that the concept has had it is important to highlight how mainstream theories had rationalized and consolidated elements that undermined the practice and theory of autonomy: the notion of interdependence, the irrelevance of peripheral countries in the definition of the global order, the reduction of confrontation as a political strategy and alignment as a recommendation are examples of that. It is not an accident that this occurred during the decade in which Latin American countries were totally conditioned by high levels of indebtedness, the collapse of the Soviet block and widespread structural reforms as a counterpart to debt renegotiations. Thus, autonomy was dismissed; it came to be evaluated as a cost, and at best, as an exercise of collective participation in international organizations. Some derivations put the emphasis on influence and participation, fundamental aspects

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to build a strategy of autonomy in the international system. Nevertheless, the original link with the concept of dependence was practically ignored. Modifying the concept in light of historical changes does not mean that it disappears (Simonoff, 2003). Now, is it possible to reduce dependency—understood as in the Autonomy Doctrine—– without tension and confrontation? Puig argued that “except for borderline or atypical cases, achieving greater autonomy entails, in the short term, a zero-sum strategic game, in which someone wins what someone else loses” (Puig, 1986, 51). Is the same theoretical definition of autonomy valid for all countries and nations of the international system, ahistorically? The discussion about these problems will continue in the next sections.

Autonomy and Diversification Two theoretical questions have emerged around the concept of autonomy. First, the question of classifications into ideal types, which can stand in contradiction to the concept of autonomy. Second is the question of how far can the concept be stretched? (Collier & Levitsky, 1997; Sartori, 1970). Puig developed a classification of Argentina’s foreign policies, and the most interesting concept, that of “heterodox autonomy”—“the potential autonomous decision-making margin of our country and its current margin” matched (1988: 33);3 it is so broad that it includes governments that applied very contradictory foreign policies (Míguez, 2017). Since autonomy can be placed in a continuum, it is exclusively measured against the country which is considered an hegemonic country at the time, ignoring other power struggles played out. This leads to the mistake of considering that any diversification strategy necessarily results in an autonomic strategy. (Rapoport and Spiguel, 2005). So what makes heterodox autonomy different from a kind of diversificated dependency? Does multipolarity or a multiplex world (see Chapter 7) enable increased autonomy? Can autonomy be disaggregated into operationalizable internal and external variables? Pinheiro and Soares de Lima (2018) ponders along these lines: indeed, to what extent do the different conceptual “adjustments” that were later made entail a contradiction with the initial contents of the concept as a result of the historical experience which originated it and gave it meaning? The revisitation of autonomy has taken up the issue of diversification of foreign relations as a relevant element for the building of autonomy margins regarding traditionally predominant powers in the region. Drawing on a thorough analysis of foreign policy during Lula da Silva’s administrations in Brazil, Vigevani and Cepaluni (2007) classified what they consider variations in the strategy of autonomy which they understand as a historical tradition in foreign policy. Autonomism stems from the diplomatic tradition of the school of Rio Branco (1902–1912) and Aranha (1938–1943), which

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intended to reconcile, when it was in full swing, the foreign policy leeway with the expansion of economic relationships with the predominant powers. This is why they term it “autonomy through participation” (p. 283). In addition they consider the existence of another type, “autonomy through distance”, which originates in the diplomatic tradition of San Tiago Dantas (1961–1963), reaffirmed by Azeredo da Silveira (1974–1978), characterized by the defense of sovereignty and strict definition of national interests based on a foreign policy to confront with the United States. The adjustments of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) to the neoliberal policy, brought together diversification in a multipolar scenario and the strengthening of autonomy through diversification (pp. 322–325). Such foreign policy included struggles with Western powers over commercial and environmental issues, the ambition to reform the UN Security Council and the affirmation of Brazil’s regional leadership together with coalitions with emerging countries. To close this revisitation Russell and Tokatlian’s (2010) concept of relational autonomy has some points in common with that of “autonomy through participation”: an active global agenda, participation in international forums, contribution to the construction of a global liberal order, but allowing control over local problems. Therefore, what is the element that defines the foreign policy? Is it autonomy or integration into the liberal order? What is the point of using the concept of autonomy if the approach contradicts the original questioning of the dependency situation that prevailed in Jaguaribe’s and Puig’s works, even though they accepted the existence of external determining factors that needed to be considered realistically? José Flavio Sombra Saraiva (2015) forcefully asserted that Cardoso’s policy abandoned the idea of autonomy as a foreign policy instrument, and it would be recaptured during Lula da Silva’s administration (p. 237). Fabio Forero (2015) contrasts diversification with the concept of autonomy. The author takes up Puig’s Autonomy Doctrine and Russell and Tokatlian’s formulation as part of a line of thought that considers diversification as an international integration model that would help increase autonomy. Weighing diversification so heavily in the definition of autonomy may result in a fallacy. Hegemonic powers compete in the global scenario, so the elimination of such struggles in peripheral countries may become a veil to understand the existence of other alignments that reproduce dependency relationships, even if they do not involve traditional, predominant countries. That is, considering diversification as the main measure of autonomy can lead to leaving aside the initial meaning of this term. Forero states, very aptly, that this strategy was carried out in the framework of “‘peripheral autonomies’ which cannot be assimilated to the original concept of autonomy as discussed so far and that, on the contrary, can reinforce the dependency of the production structure on commodity exports” (2015: 309). In short, the typification of autonomy leads

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to conceptual stretching (Collier & Levitsky, 1997) The risk is eclipsing the historical meaning in endless disaggregation of subtypes.

Conclusions: The Content of Autonomy and Its Epistemic Value Throughout this chapter we have addressed the genesis of the concept of autonomy originated in a theory of foreign policy. We reviewed its different variations in line with the global changes. Autonomy, born in the midst of the North–South debate, brings in an intellectual contribution from Latin America to think globally. It allows us to think about a problem of power from the point of view of oppressed or dependent countries. It is also useful to think about possible changes in the distribution of global power both in terms of material capacities and knowledge building, one of the main objectives of the GIR agenda. This foundational nature of the concept gives it a critical, transformative potential that retains resilience. Subsequent typification was a sign of the times as well as an eagerness to comply with precepts of traditional political science. Many of the adjustments to the mainstream tended to soften the oppositional character it implied. Along these lines, significant material and ideational elements were also proposed for the construction of more autonomous international relations. We consider it necessary to start from the initial and historic meaning of the concept, linked to the protection against encroaching powers in the economic, political and cultural spheres, and at the same time provide it with material and ideational strategies that contribute to the increase of the political space and to the agency capacity of the peripheral countries (see Chapter 3). That is why we point out the risks of overstretching as well as the complex relationship it has with the notion of diversification. The conceptual debate is part and parcel of global history (Acharya, 2014). Even though autonomy can be a goal of all countries (Holsti, 1992: 83), in the case of Latin American peripheral countries, the notion of autonomy refers to their dependent nature and, hence, a particular historical moment. Dependency is a structural—i.e. economic, social and political—phenomenon; therefore, the pursuit of autonomy should reduce it or break it down. Dependency continues to be a core explanatory element of global inequality. And, in this sense, the scope of the concept can be deterritorialized, because it is a problem that concerns most countries in the world. Consequently, the debate on autonomy should not refer to an instrumental matter or decision-making capacity, but to a discussion over content.4 And such content, which represents primarily a safeguard, an objection to the intrusion of hegemonic powers, has a particular time. Its meaning cannot be constantly adapted, or used á la carte (Pinheiro & Soares de Lima, 2018). In the inception of Jaguaribe and Puig, autonomy has both internal and external components of structure and agency, making the concept robust and operational. Among the former stand out the cited national

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viability, appropriate human and natural resources, a development model, solidarity-based integration and international permissibility. Among the latter, there is not only a technical criterion of agency but also a strategy of the elites. There is a possible operationalization of internal structural characteristics which enable autonomy as suggest in the case of Argentina, including the following: (a) the existence of a vast domestic market which is a condition for inclusive development; (b) sovereign capabilities for the protection of territory and resources, against the historical spoliation and plunder of world powers; (c) strategic alliances with peer countries; (d) control over capital and investment flows; (e) balanced and diversified trade; (f ) value for the construction of a national and regional identity (Rapoport and Míguez, 2015).5 This should be added to technological and scientific development. The autonomy of peripheral countries continues to be a goal that strengthens from the counter-hegemonic struggle against great powers, a struggle which is influenced by domestic economic policy dynamics, and which takes place, therefore, by opposition to such powers. It may occur in relation to and together with other non-hegemonic powers. Coalition building is a requirement for autonomy, an autonomy that is achieved “among peers”, a collective but horizontal construction. The concept of horizontal autonomy (Míguez, 2017) refers to the possibility of building space for peripheral countries in collective contexts—without necessarily linking it to the regional space, even if it is a privileged sphere. Furthermore, it draws on the assumption that autonomy is constructed in relation to other countries, but under relative parity regarding the big asymmetries in the international system. The concept has traveled through Latin America. But it also allows us to think about the foreign policy of many other regions and enables an understanding of how the south approaches global governance (Deciancio and Tussie, 2020) Policy space, to take an example, is a key concept in such debates and is intimately connected to autonomy. Building knowledge related to such practice or political aspiration implies taking a stand on an epistemology of the South (Boa Souza Santos, 2009),6 not because of the spatial area where it is located but due to the political geography in which it occurs. The structure of knowledge and its transfer of knowledge to dependent countries is one of the key elements to preserve a hierarchical international order. The transfer of paradigms through teaching in diplomatic schools, military academies, universities, etc., helps sustain the legitimacy of such order and the existence of subordinated international integration (Tickner, 2002). The vindication of autonomy by reconstructing the genesis of the concept and the experiences it analyzes allows us to project it and increase its value to revert or moderate the oppression, asymmetry and discrimination that characterizes the world system. It is a critical aspect in the construction of a global, plural and democratic discipline of international relations.

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Notes 1 Guillermo Figari (1993) defined the Third Position, an international strategy of the early Peronist governments, as an attitude tending to gain autonomy in the circumstantial situation through which the international community was going, trying to stay at a position of interest equidistant from the two superpowers and with a Western alignment, by means of developing a balance interplay. (pp. 187–188) 2 We also agree with the fact that part of that autonomy exercise implies the construction of a “counter-power that implies generating immunity against the dominant power” (Dallanegra, 1998: 93–94). 3 In the first paper where he defined autonomy as a stage where (…) the supreme national distributors of the State belonging to a political block continue to agree to the strategic steering of the dominant power, but openly disagree with such nation on at least three essential issues: (1) the domestic development model, which may be inconsistent with the expectations of the metropolis; (2) international relations which are not globally strategic; and (3) the limit between the national interests of the dominant world power and the strategic interests of the bloc. In other words, heterodox autonomists would not accept the dogmatic imposition, on behalf of the bloc, of political and strategic appreciations serving only the hegemonic power’s interests (Puig, 1984: 78). 4 By 1993, Guillermo Figari maintained that argument, claiming the importance of content against instrumental discussion (1993: 199). 5 See Santana and Aranda Bustamante (2013: 730). 6 The author defines it as “the pursuit of knowledge and knowledge validity criteria that provide visibility and credibility to the cognitive practices of classes, peoples and social groups who have been historically victimized, exploited and oppressed by global colonialism and capitalism” (2009: 12).

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CONCLUSION Taking Stock: Latin American Contributions to Global IR Melisa Deciancio and Diana Tussie

This volume introduced the many contributions of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) to the GIR project. When Acharya confronted faux universalism and explored “regional” sites of theory construction, he paved the way for the intersection between history and concepts, and opened the field to neglected—or sometimes hidden—voices. Latin American approaches to IR have a long-standing history that goes back to the origins of colonialism, the fight for sovereignty, independence and the path to regional coordination (Tickner, 2003, 2013). As a result, there is a gulf between IR as the “American social science” (Hoffmann, 1987) and the development of the field in the Global South. Many issues, approaches and problems were excluded from the Western conception of the field while power, interdependence and war stood centre stage. Just to take a subject matter, colonialism nor development were ever a major issue within mainstream IR, blind to its own historicity. Yet the imperial encounter has been fundamental to the generation of systems of thought, and it is quintessentially international (see Chapter 5). In this sense, a historicist approach, as a sort of Rosetta stone, is key to understanding IR beyond the West, marking a contrast with the American social science. As a departing point, IR in LAC has been caught between the North/South and West/ non-West dichotomy. Binaries such as these are rarely precise or even improve our understanding, obscuring the process we hope to illuminate. As Louise Fawcett argues, LAC is neither fully “Western” nor “non-Western”, leading the West/non-West dichotomy to neglect Latin American contributions in international relations (Fawcett, 2012). In itself, the project of GIR aims to bring in a more inclusive and universal IR agenda, transcending binary distinctions and recognizing the multiple foundations of the discipline.

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The roots of IR in LAC have sprung from the field of Law and, later on, Sociology and Development Economics (Deciancio, 2016a; Tussie, 2020). These traditions were initially born free from what Rosenberg has termed “the prison of political science” (Rosenberg, 2016), allowing sociological approaches rooted in the regions’ own reality. In Hinds’ words, this “un-disciplined” nature of scholarly analysis is itself worthy of further discussion as it reveals much about both IR as a discipline and the disciplining of the study of the world within this academic tradition. In short, since its beginnings, IR in LAC is more historically focused and more open to a variety of disciplines, although the collapse of the Soviet Union and the “unipolar moment” of the United States (Krauthammer, 1990; Mastanduno, 1997) caused a move towards the homogenization of the discipline (Blaney & Tickner, 2017). Shifting back a step in the temporal horizons and into the interstate realm, conceptual devices have pioneered legal doctrines such as peaceful resolution of disputes as a way of resisting great-power interventions. In fact, we can trace the roots of LAC thinking to the 19th century when the processes of independence and nation-building arose to put an end to European colonialism and intervention. Since then, an idea of “the other” both in terms of regional allies and imperialist external powers started to develop and, with it, several approaches to IR emerged. An entrenched culture of legalism persists. While in Europe, the main threat to Westphalian sovereignty came from the European states themselves, by contrast, in LAC, the principle of non-intervention has traditionally been enshrined as a legal antidote against foreign intrusion. In this sense, there is no unique way to think about IR. This volume brought the IR agenda of LAC into light both in terms of issues and in terms of traditions, challenging the conventional wisdom about the sources of IR theory. It demonstrated that Latin American scholars and policy makers made notable contributions to the discipline, with a special focus on regionalist approaches (Tussie, 2009) even when the shadow of the US endures in the countries’ integrative attempts (see Chapter 10). Since independence, Insertion in global dynamics has been motivated by the search for autonomy, economic development and a regional cultural identity space (Chagas-Bastos, 2017). Autonomy and development have been historically related to the creation of a larger union of states consisting of peoples who also share a common nationhood. If autonomy during the Cold War was underpinned by the idea of sovereign decision making, more recently it can be read as policy space under encroaching global rules. Let us spell out the implications of this account. There is indeed one world, but it is neither homogeneous nor fashioned in the image of the centre. To take Latin America, the region as a political site predates state formation and can be traced back to the 19th century when the processes of independence and nation-building arose as European colonialism was pushed out. By way of example, the renowned jurist Carlos Calvo was born in Uruguay, was raised in Argentina and was an ambassador in Europe in the 1860s for Argentina

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and Paraguay. The idea of the region not only as a site of action but also as an identity had developed as the struggles for independence and the coetaneous conformation of republics led to sharing efforts to single countries but also to wider regions. Here we adopt a regional perspective that is operationalized on the basis of linguistic and geopolitical frameworks and narratives. We assume that linguistic and geographical boundaries demarcate a certain level of cultural commonality within but also cultural difference between them. Colonialism and foreign intervention have, to a large extent, constituted such shared identities (see Chapter 10). Colonial domination, as Hinds points out, is not only one of merciless brutalization but also an epistemological domination. As Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) has argued, communities larger than tribes or villages are imagined but once imagined, take on a powerful life of its own. As a result, LAC IR was born and remains very much a space with open boundaries, where defying or refusing disciplinary margins is not only tolerated but encouraged. Its own beginnings related to law, development or sociology posited that, after all, it is at the international level that the extraordinary drama of colonialism reached its full height. It is at this level that there is a foretaste of the engulfing of the non-European world, the globalizing of the sovereign-states system and the world market, and the mighty world wars and struggles which such development brought in its train. The subsequent conceptual layer which came by way of centre–periphery analysis opened the box to the analysis of asymmetries and the locus of politics (see Chapters 9 and 11). These concepts opened new worlds of understanding and new policy paths. In turn, as said before, sociology showed the role of the state in peripheral capitalism, the dominance of debt and foreign investment, race, gender and social conflicts (Chapters 5, 6, and 8). Edward Said and his foundational work Orientalism demonstrates how the West came to be knowable to itself by creating knowledge about an “inferior” East, developing binary oppositions in which the West was always superior (Said, 1978). This process was made possible through positional power relations which created the “Oriental Other” and the “Western Self ”. Invidious stereotyping remains blind to the co-constitution of West and non-West (Bilgin, 2008; Blaney & Tickner, 2017; Tickner, 2003). A good deal of mainstream IR has not only been built as an extension of imperial concerns. What happened “out there” was seen, if at all, as reflections of the “global” process that merited geopolitical management, at best benevolently, but if need be, blood-stained interventions could also be used in defence of lofty ideals. The Eurocentrism of key IR concepts such as the anarchical nature of the international system perform as value judgements and teleological narratives that give meaning to the practices of those who define and are defined by them. At the same time, they suffer from unsustainably high levels of reductionism and insularity. Such lenses left behind a good deal of the way IR evolved in other areas of a world geopolitically united but sociologically deprived and economically asymmetrical. The colonial experience

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renders clear the brutal reality of exploitation and oppression, as so vividly described in the work of Frantz Fanon, Silvia Ribera Qusicanski or Gayatri Spivak (Spivak, 2014) as Hinds and Loza raise in this volume. It is not as if other peoples were unaware of the concept of the universal as Querejazu and Tickner point out regarding the Andean cosmovision. Rather, the mistake is to presume that one version takes pride over another instead of accommodating and appreciating them for their alterity. This leads to a shift from the universal to the pluriversal in our explanations of world politics, without losing the dimension of trauma and power that emerges from the colonial difference. What stems from this volume is that the human, gendered, ethnic, social content is also part of world politics. To address the historical fabric of theorization, GIR calls to put regions at the centre. It flags the importance of conceptualizing and investigating forms and functions of regionalism, bringing non-European experiences into light. In this sense, the construction of a GIR agenda cannot ignore LAC regionalism in terms of both its early history and its various approaches and conceptualization, despite the fact that in the mainstream canon, regionalism has long been associated with the European integration process which evolved after WWII. Literature and theoretical developments in mainstream IR referred to the European Union experience as the model every regional bloc with integration aspirations should follow. A good deal of the literature has followed this vision, arguing about the success or failure of other processes by applying the European model as a yardstick (Deciancio, 2016b). The remainder of this chapter will take stock of our research program addressing how to read IR through LAC, from the South side-up. First, it will address the main contributions of LAC IR that emerge from this volume. Then we will look into the role that LAC countries had in shaping global order while creating a regional order in the search for insertion in the world. We end with a future agenda for research that centrally incorporates the windows opened by the chapters.

Approaching GIR from LAC It stands out that LAC contributions to IR do not always radically break with Western traditions. We can identify partly different foundations of LAC IR that marked both subject matter and epistemologies. Schulz points out that in the very beginning, the “founding fathers” of Latin American international thought formed part of a social, political and economic elite integrated into internationalist circles at the “core”. But the sense of history or at least an interpretation of history became overwhelmingly present as the 20th century progressed. Latin America became the first identity of modernity where the modern republics could be built on virgin land without the baggage of aristocracy or the monarchy. Meanwhile, revolutions were interpreted as opening a context of social empowerment (not tied to the task of saving souls) would

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allow gradual but unceasing progress (Tussie & Deciancio, 2011). After WWII, the region had to face the world order that the United States constructed, an order from which it fell from grace becoming “a region”, so very expressively named as Extremo Occidente by Alain Rouquié (1990). Being the “Extreme West” meant that the so-called conditionalities of IMF standby loans were first codified here, when Peru faced a balance-of-payments crisis in 1954. By the end of the 1950s, without a trace of a Marshall Plan, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Costa Rica and Nicaragua had tasted the bitter pills of IMF medicines. There was a new awareness which led to conduct appropriate analysis with non-core conceptual devices. These, among others, were falling terms of trade (Chapter 9), the state of dependency (Chapter 11) and the quest for national autonomy (Chapter 2; Chapter 13) and regional autonomy (Chapter 10) or insertion (Chapter 12). Gradually, a third wordlist vision enabled the building of bridges to decolonizing areas in Asia and Africa, drawing attention to the hierarchies and twisted shapes embedded in the international sphere (see Chapter 5). All were independent states locked into the world market and the system of states, yet internally underpinned by unstable deals and fragile economies. The post-war saw a renewed script on the basis of counter-hegemonic visions as dependency, developmentalism, nationalism, race and realpolitik. Such mix underpins the political culture of most postcolonial countries, expressing the legacies of intervention as well as legitimate discontent and grievances over the imbalances of the political and economic arrangements of the post-war liberal order. The fall of the Berlin Wall was subsequently reflected in Carlos Escudé’s “peripheral realism” matrix (Escudé, 1995) dropping all traces of counter-hegemonic visions and prescribing conversion and accommodation to the rules of neoliberal globalization as an adaptive device to enable development (see Chapter 2). In terms of identity, as Arturo Santa-Cruz shows, the change in identity impacted the way the countries of the region conceived of both their interests and their relationship with the United States. Friendlier interpretations came to the fore, spurred at the time not only by economic incentives (such as finance and foreign direct investments) but also by the withdrawal of United States support for the spate of criminal dictators, the ugliest of features of the Cold War in LAC (see Chapter 4). The 21st century has seen the growth of dissenting emancipatory concepts in political and intellectual terms, or the raising of gender and race-based concepts to contest boundaries, and especially the long-reigning shadows of state-centric paradigms (Chapters 5, 6 and 8). They show how civilizing discourses were constructed in order to justify violent exploitation. The movement in the centres of power experienced in the first decades of the century from the West to East and the change in alliances also opens a new opportunity for rethinking IR ontological basis (see Chapter 7). The volume is thus an invitation to look at ourselves, at the narratives that we construct about our disciplinary history and at our relationship to scientific knowledge. Perhaps the most interesting invitation we find throughout its pages is the one to reflect on how we construct ourselves as researchers

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in interaction with our objects of study and the academic community we are members of. Each of the contributors was challenged to rethink the theoretical and conceptual developments of IR in LAC over time, identifying ontologies and contribution to a Global IR agenda. Individual authors engage with the above questions from a variety of perspectives that are guided by what they consider as important and indeed dominant. Different approaches to IR are here presented, not only showing what LAC scholars have to say regarding mainstream debates but also the way they have thought IR. In this sense, when addressing LAC contributions to the Global IR project, we cannot neglect the field’s multiple foundations, addressing a number of approaches from which the field has been nurtured in the quest to find explanations to the particular context of the region and of the world. Both externally—that is, within other social sciences—and internally, IR in LAC presents a series of features that left birthmarks to the long process of legitimization and definition of the field. The adoption of theories and ideas from the centres was largely accepted indiscriminately without considering the structural differences among geographies. When compared with the experience of the US and European countries, the study of IR in the periphery may seem relatively recent, but it is certainly not absent or completely new. While the development of IR in the centre came about due to challenges arising from war and peace, in LAC the field and its main formulations developed in association with the emergence of other real challenges. IR in the periphery has been marked by the struggle for economic development, access to credit and foreign aid, debt payment, regional integration to access a better international insertion, and adding value to its exports. These concerns put the focus on different needs; they required different approaches. While the experiences of state formation in Europe can be summed up in Charles Tilly’s classic aphorism “war makes states, and states make war” for Latin America, we could tweak this dictum to a different co-dependency: “markets make states, and states make markets”. Insertion and decolonization make up a distinctive ontology (see Chapters 7 and 12). As Beigel points out, “the main differences between mainstream academies and peripheral circuits are not precisely in the lack of indigenous thinking, but in the historical structure of academic autonomy” (Beigel, 2013, p. 19); in other words, the scarce recognition and awareness of peripheral knowledge in mainstream debates. A global approach to IR does not mean just setting the lens at the global level; on the contrary it means, as Narlikar points out, that we no longer allow the marginalization of the ‘rest’…from the mainstream debate. It means not being ‘critical’ for the sake of it, but engaging with content from the South/ the regions – be it theoretical or empiricalon its own terms. (Narlikar, 2016, p. 3)

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However, not all states look alike. As ideas and knowledge travel, so do disciplines. The way IR developed in the centre set the main bases of its study in other regions of the world, focusing on the way power and markets operate worldwide. However, when approaching the way IR developed in the periphery, particularities emerged, and a whole set of conceptualizations and questions that differ in great manner from those in the centre have appeared. Markets, states and power are main concerns in the capitalist world we live in, but the way we think about that interaction changes if we are on one side of the globe or the other(s) (Deciancio & Quiliconi, 2020). Enquiries, ideas, methodologies and analysis in the periphery are proof of that. Problems and approaches vary depending on how you are inserted in the international economy structure, if you are a norm maker or a norm taker, if you are a producer of manufactures or a commodity exporter, if you are a creditor or a debtor.

LAC IR Thinking: Order, Regionalism, Security and Development Our field has been engaged in rich empirical work. Mostly, the purpose is not to test new causal theory but to denaturalize dominant constructions, in part by revealing their connection to existing power relations. There was no missionary zeal in international thinking in LAC but acute awareness of hostile hands that could affect states’ prospects for survival or development. Discussions on governance and order in mainstream IR bring into light who sets the rules and how. Since the Spanish-American war in 1898, US attempts to global projection became evident, and even more in LAC. However, as Kacowicz and Wajner point out in this volume, alternative world orders (Cox, 2012) are worth considering as “Latin American visions and revisions of the world order are relevant beyond the realities of Latin America itself ”. Reading IR through Latin American lenses, as the authors propose, leads us to question the basic roots of the universalistic idea of order, set from above, from North to South and West to East. In this sense, as we have seen, LAC has a long tradition in participating in the configuration of world orders, not only as a rule taker but also as “norm protagonists” (Sikkink, 2014), or norm brokers (Riggirozzi, 2006) or “process drivers” (Tussie, 2009). Latin America as a region developed a distinctive juridical tradition of embedded principles of national sovereignty, non-intervention and peaceful settlement of disputes among themselves, avoiding through legal mechanisms the involvement of extra-regional powers. International law was seen as the “weapon of the weak” (Sikkink, 2014) to build alternative orders or influence in it. As Schulz points out, the region’s jurists and diplomats emerged as “norm entrepreneurs” in the development of modern multilateralism and international law. Latin American states have been early protagonists of the international protection of human rights resulting in the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man (Sikkink, 2014). Also, norms of arms control, collective

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security and confidence-building measures have been implemented in Latin America well before Europe. The Treaty of Tlatelolco in 1967 established the first nuclear-free zone in the world, setting a precedent for other regions (see Chapter 2). This regional regime has been the most important Latin American contribution to the implementation of norms of disarmament and non-­ proliferation in the nuclear realm. The proposal was the outcome inter alia of the 1962 Cuba crisis. The idea was that a ban on nuclear arms would ensure that this part of the world would not be involved in any conflict between rival great powers. Negotiations were conducted by Alfredo García Robles, who shared the Nobel Prize with Alva Myrdal in 1982. Such distinctive approaches sustain both analytical and normative dimensions with respect to the current and desired regional and world orders. Here again, regionalism can be seen as policy and conceptual apparatus to shape the regional (and by implication, the international) order. People who dislike existing norms often band together and try to change them. This path-dependent explanation combines regional cooperation with traditional Latin American activism in international organizations and in international law rule-making. If non-proliferation can be seen to fall in the script of liberal globalism, the region also served for less lofty ideals during the Cold War. One consistent complaint about research on regionalism has been its focus on norms most of us would consider “good”, such as human rights, protecting the environment and promoting democracy. The bias towards “nice” cooperation is addressed by Spektor’s piece in this volume, who along this path shows how Latin America is a thought-provoking place from which to think again about one of the IR’s central protagonists—the US- and feet of clay of the much-vaunted liberal order that the US championed as its contribution to order and peace. Spektor’s dissecting of regional social compacts highlights a chasm between the IR narrative and what IR does not want to know, the chains of domination, repression and mass atrocities that underpinned the liberal order haunting Latin American societies to this day, and helping to wreck economies across the board. Rabid disputes over the memory of that time remain to this day. The US wears the distinctive badge of consolidating dictators. To be sure, not all the blame falls on the US. Regional social compacts are networks that tie transnational elites together in ways that produce cooperation and regional order. The chapter explains why the domestic politics of peripheral actors are critical to the creation of hegemonic orders, a necessary corrective to the assumption still prevalent in the mainstream literature that the domestic politics that matter are those within the hegemonic cores. Regional social compacts such as dependency theory highlight the need to look at different kinds of elite configurations, coalitions and conflicts because different policies and constraints are constructed by these factions. LAC involvement in rule-making since independence and state formation is a distinctive birthmark. The region was constituted as such in the wars against the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in order to gain access to British

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and European markets. Many of the founding fathers had close intellectual and political ties with the French revolution. LAC absorbed these early aspirations turning them into situated approaches. By the time these markets closed in the mid-20th century, the symptoms of the peripheral condition were discovered and examined. Debates shifted to terms of trade and insertion in the world economy. In Argentina and Brazil, the pursuit of autonomy in foreign policy flourished (see Chapter 13). An LAC school of IPE was born from the fields of sociology and development economics, bearing the mark of a multi-­ disciplinary exercise. Marxist approaches had a long pedigree in scholarship that allowed understandings far removed from the realist-liberal duopoly that dominated the field of IR and the framing of IPE from there. Coming from the field of development, St. Lucian economist and Nobel Laureate. W. Arthur Lewis addressed the need to attract foreign investment to develop Caribbean industrialization and employ surplus labour. His work, in tandem with the vast scholarship in structuralism and centre–periphery analyses in Latin America at large, is widely renowned for unpacking the problems of under-development linked to the persistence of asymmetric integration. Both Raul Prebisch and Lewis’ work placed the regional experience within the broader global context and laid the foundations for an autochthonous regional IPE school that has travelled far and has become packed as dependency theory. From a sociological approach and the analysis of elites, dependency marked the way the world was structured and the place of LAC in it. As Palestini points out, the dependentistas addressed the economic, political and social problems that affected postcolonial societies when they became integrated into the global capitalist system, not as the exception but rather as the norm. Dependencia built on the economic structuralism of Prebisch and his many disciples expounded by the Economic Commission for LAC, a vision of the centre–periphery partition of the global economy (see Chapter 9). While this vision is an economistic one in which economic structures are the heart, dependency theory argues that development is not just about the terms of trade but also about politics. A defining feature of dependency theory was its starting point in the Global South. Here was an epistemic turn. While theories of imperialism were, of course, concerned with the Global South, they would start by explaining the class dynamics of the Global North to explain the consequences for the Global South. Marxist analyses see imperialism as the motive force and class as the actor. In contrast, dependency theory considered how the North posed a particular problem to the Global South, be it blocked, absent or dependent development. But it went even further by considering how the political and economic dynamics within the countries of the South shaped diverse forms of dependency. The centrality of IR to understanding any national path of development became apparent. At the crossroads of these lines is plantation slavery as critical to the development of the world system in which the forced labourers of these plantations constitute an international class of

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workers. The state is less important than the racialized character of this system which is based on white supremacy (see Chapter 5). Caribbean multicultural thinking has nurtured an internationalist movement, that itself holds but minor place within IR, while dependency theory that does actually look at the role of the state may seem today to be over deterministic. But the real-world concerns that lent them both credence endure as a basic instinct that needs no bibliographic reference to be identified. A brainchild of this tradition is the Latin American sustainable development school (Vanhulst & Zaccai, 2016). After the Brundtland Report (Brundtland et  al., 1987), the sustainable development discourse flourished in Latin America through a vibrant network of scholars. These scholars were affiliated with various international and regional institutions, such as the regional offices of the United Nations, the United Nations Environment Program/Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean (UNEP/ROLAC), the Bariloche Foundation and the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation (Vanhulst & Zaccai, 2016). The ECLAC and Bariloche Foundation were hubs for the academic and policy debates but also for the dissemination of ideas (Ferreira et al., 2006; Guimarães, 1994). The agenda of sustainable development has a long trajectory in Latin American, not only as just as an importer of foreign ideas and concepts but also offering a distinctive local perspective on it. Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Argentina were central in the debate. Latin American IPE has developed in an intellectual context that has borne this imprint but has continued to travel beyond. The role of politics in shaping IPE can be seen in the evolving issues taken up, from fixation with the US and the nefarious effects of its multinational corporations to more nuanced views in which regionalism and the room for agency come out. Fabricio Chagas-­ Bastos (in this volume) proposes building on a post-dependence mindset that advances towards an understanding of how states coming from the peripheries of the international system can create spaces to move towards better positions within global hierarchies. Insertion is a form of creating agency spaces within the global hierarchies. These spaces are created by a combination of domestic policies towards the international: foreign, economic and defence policies. Insertion is necessary to those countries attempting to transition from the condition of one who seeks to be recognized as belonging to one who is admitted by virtue of possessing attributes which enable status within military, political, technological and economic hierarchies. In a nutshell, insertion fills in the dots in the triad dependence–autonomy–regionalism presented above and moves to conceptualize presence in global governance in the way countries such as Brazil, India and Mexico have exercised with intensifying bilateral relations, building regional fora and actively participating in multilateralism, be it the WTO or the FAO or the G20. The movement towards the centre of the system has not manifested itself as an act of rebellion against asymmetries and

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injustices. It has been rather one where countries sought to transform agenda-­ setting principles and, in many cases, strengthen them such as the rule of law. The goal has been to achieve status to get a seat at the table, not to overthrow or build a new order.

Bringing “the others” in The Western/non-Western dichotomy entails the risk of falling into a new form of essentialism where “the other” is constituted as an “outsider” in the production of IR knowledge. Bringing diversity and plurality into IR means not only to question its imperial foundations and the material infrastructure that enabled the production of knowledge but also to identify the many identities that the field has in different political and cultural backgrounds. Opening that window brings in the issue of “those excluded within the excluded”, uncovering alternate ways of thinking about the world that are unrecognizable as “IR proper”, and that are most likely incommensurate with the ways in which we customarily talk about world politics (Chapters 5, 6 and 8). We are referring to subaltern groups producing knowledge from the margins and excluded geographies where knowledge is produced with the birthmark of local identities and cosmovisions that struggle to find a place in a non-Western (but still Western-dominated) IR field. Women, indigenous groups and religious groups are proof of that. We have noted that the prominent role of the state in Latin America is rooted in the defence of its sovereignty, its historical role as the expression of national identities and interests, and its alleged centrality in political, social and economic life. However, in a region marked by colonialism and the European influence, national identities have also been shaped by elites in order to fit the European civilizer pattern. In country after country, where indigenous population widely surpassed white European descendants, native identities were completely erased from that construction. As a result, the idea of the state was also built excluding a big share of what Latin America actually was. As expected, IR has not been developed far from this idea. Excluded geographies such as the Amazon or the Andes only mattered as sovereignty disputes among states, but not as regions where different knowledge and cosmovisions are produced (Picq, 2016; Querejazu, 2016). These alternative geographies may not be at the centre, but they are constitutive of the centre. As Picq points out, the Amazon has not been perceived as a place to study IR because it is imagined outside the modern state, when conceptualized, it tends to be as a uniform, unified entity, a frontier of civilization. (Picq, 2016, p. 2)

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It follows that if we want to understand how the world moves today, we cannot begin with a template of homogeneous states mirrored on the great powers. We cannot start by assuming that we are what we are not, just as Snow White’s stepmother talking to her mirror, wishing away her stepchild or sending her off to the woods. Acceptance implies new understandings but also unearthing older understandings that have sometimes fallen by the wayside (see Chapter 4), especially since the 1990s when, as Francis Fukuyama once told us, the final defeat of socialism by capitalism closed off the future and brought history (in the Enlightenment sense) to an end. In many corners IR became captive in “normal” political science and, in particular, in foreign policy analysis. In the process, historicity was lost. In this realm, we need to unthink the monolithic ideological assumptions which dominated the post–Cold War world. Women voices neglected from the start within Western IR (Tickner, 2005) have also been excluded in LAC. The feminist theories that gained space in Social Sciences in the 1980s, and the productions of the Group of Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Theory coincide in distancing themselves from Western traditional feminist perspectives with the aim of showing omissions and absences in hegemonic approaches. From this paradigm shift, new methodologies that focus on the interpretation and recovery of subordinate testimonies are also postulated. Knowledge that was traditionally presented as an absolute or as gender neutral responded to the actions of Western hegemonic scholars, mostly men. In this way, feminist theories introduced the discussion about the values and ideological frameworks within which knowledge about states and the international system is built. As Loza points out in her chapter, Latin American feminism within IR cannot be understood separately from postcolonial and decolonial theories, that reveal the persistence of colonialism in the international as well as in colonial societies. That is why Latin American feminist contributions often function as a critique of global or hegemonic feminism, which can adopt imperialist practices or overtones. These currents of thought challenge the modular analysis projects on regions, the nation and identities, expanding the approach to subaltern constructions and alternative experiences to Western ones. They give voice to historically marginalized actors, thinking critically about the differences that founded domination. Taking up Segato’s concept of “national forms of otherness”, Loza shows how diversity is contained in specific forms. In other words, each country organizes diversities differently. That organization is clearly hierarchical and not exempt from conflicting processes. The conceptualizations of the other and their experience change from one side of the border to the other. The ways in which identity terms are organized also change across nations with direct implication on how the gender regime (Walby, 2005) is shaped and on where the vectors of social and cognitive transformation lie.

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Final Thoughts As we write these lines, we are struck by a truly global shock wave, the pandemic that has hit the world in 2020. We are struck by the destructive and predatory practices of the great powers towards international institutions. We hope this can be resisted. The great powers need to be multilateral facilitators, not spoilers. For COVID-19 not to be a permanent threat, it has to be addressed globally and an eventual vaccine must be seen as a global public good. In the absence of strengthened global cooperation, ability to prevent future outbreaks will always be limited. Solidarity must be global if we are to avoid a permanent healthcare crisis and the prospect of attendant economic collapse and human immiseration, especially in the Global South. For the first time since the end of the Cold War, we are witnessing a fractious contest about securing primacy in the principal global systems of exchange and a dramatical escalation of the blame-game. We cannot foresee how this will affect the world, but we are sure it will affect our lives, and since our lives are part of our subject matter, our thinking will be affected. GIR is an invitation to reflect on the position of the subject who knows and builds knowledge. For too long, misperception and cognitive dissonance have been significant drivers of monocultural theories and have been refracted into practices. To pick up from Edward Said, othering enables presumptuous claims of superiority and devaluation of other knowledges (see Chapters 5, 6 and 8). To take the example of Caribbean thought, the proposition that the world is ordered around racialized exclusions is not virilized (see Chapter 5). Although with few exceptions, there has not yet been extensive travelling from regions to the mainstream. In fact, there is an iron wall that obliterates travel in that direction and that thus eschews analysing the relation between the theory that travels and the context in which it emerged. There are a number of windows opening for IR scholars. Acharya mentions the challenge to the West. We could add the demise of the so-called great debates and the extended questioning of the political, ontological and historical foundations of the discipline, asking how it came to be configured as it is and what sort of politics and social world it produces as a consequence. Power and knowledge must be conceived in an immanently inseparable way. Constructivism has given life to middle-range theorizing enabling vibrant dialogues and less mismatch between the faux universality of macro theorizing in IR and conceptual devices that emerge in the non-West. Hence, we suggest that LAC concepts are relevant beyond the realities of Latin America itself. The homegrown turn in IR (Kuru, 2018) adds an external driver paying attention to peripheral non-Western IR’s position at a time of gradual post-Westernization, both in the world and within the discipline. This new interest can be seen as a natural consequence of IR’s broadly perceived failure to meet the requirements inherent in its very name, that is, to be an international, even global, discipline.

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How then does that leave our options? First of all, we posit that we need confluence, simultaneously beckoning to each other and (why not?) to the grand narrative of IR that has sat on a pedestal. Once deprived of reverence to the consecrated, that narrative can be seen as incomplete so interconnections are needed both ways. Along that path, the discovery of each new layer changes the perception of the whole. Some prominent scholars aim to establish a Latin American school integrated into the global scholarly field and publishing networks in English. Others regard this as an unnecessary, even harmful, exercise and insist on speaking and publishing in Spanish and Portuguese so that the field continues to be useful and to advance knowledge instead of getting lost in the fog of “normal science”. Freed from the straitjacket of great paradigms and their infallible axioms, GIR enables a strategy which decentres IR and re-imagines international politics through different cultural, geopolitical and epistemological places. LAC’s distinctiveness lies in its theoretical arguments and assumptions. Querejazu and Tickner argue for the need to radically and critically continue to expand the realm of what might be considered to theorize the global and promote ‘‘worldism’’ which sees world politics as a site of multiple worlds. Beyond such conceptual devices that contributed to field building, some recent research is taking up theory testing in order to go global. This entails attempting to falsify general claims against empirical evidence. The neopositivist approach rests on generating hypotheses, and subsequently testing if they can survive being applied to other contexts. The objective is then to discover systematic cross-case covariations. Much has been written about the neopositivist approach and the associated methods. We need not go further into this debate, but just to highlight theory testing as the avenue in which younger scholars trained in the US are travelling. A neopositivist approach is most suitable for scholars with a commitment to the philosophical-ontological wagers of phenomenalism and mind–world dualism working with strict explanatory theories. Not everyone believes that theories are only strictly explanatory in the neopositivist sense. As Buzan notes, Many Europeans use the term theory for anything that organizes a field systematically, structures questions and establishes a coherent and rigorous set of interrelated concepts and categories. Many Americans, however often demand that a theory strictly explains and that it contains – or is able to generate – testable hypotheses of a causal nature. (Buzan, 2004, p. 80) The understanding of theory in LAC so far is closer to the European understanding than the American. Yet these more formal and quantitative rational choice contributions represent a shift and overlap with the wider approach in the field. Together they show agency in a decentred world compounded by

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the absence of a singular and stable essential Latin Americanism or Caribbeanism and the presence of an inescapable plurality of values and multiplicity of alternative analytical perspectives. Although most of this work fits under comparative politics, its value is that it is starting conversations, and building new authorities, concepts and theorizations that will become influential in their own right. Without absolutely nothing against technical proficiency, the warning we make is that we should never forget that methods are the tools we use when we do research, neither the goal nor the reason of our research. All research involves interpretation, and thus there is no neutral stance from which objective knowledge about the world can emerge however hard we try to acquire a disciplinary identity based on an illusory discourse of separation between academia and values. As we hope to have shown, all theory is situated knowledge. The study of extra-European experiences can contribute to the creation of GIR, an enterprise that will move on and put a premium on the diversity of methodological and theoretical approaches. Yet it is important to consider whether IR can be international given that “globalizing” fields of research can also constitute a trap to achieve those international standards. As globalization itself became a way of homogenization and Westernization of the rest of the world, making disciplines more global (despite such efforts’ good intentions) could also be, on the one hand, the way the mainstream comprises concepts and ideas from other regions of the world but does nothing with them and, on the other hand, the ways in which the periphery embraces mainstream and critical IR concepts to adapt its own IR production to mainstream standards imposed from the North. In this sense, we can question the globalizing scope in Western academic terms showing the risk that internationalization creates for the way different parts of the world approach IR in their own terms. Making it global can also mean making peripheral problems more diffuse, blurry and imperceptible, which can imply that the only ones capable of thinking about and developing solutions to those problems are the same ones that cause them. In this sense, inclusiveness can only be assured if we are ready to take into account excluded voices and pluralism can only be achieved if we are willing to recognize alternative ideas, theories and even practices.

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CONTRIBUTOR BIOS

Amitav Acharya  is the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance and a distinguished professor at the School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC. He is the first non-Western scholar to be elected (for 2014–2015) as the president of the International Studies Association (ISA). Previously he was a professor at York University, Toronto, and the University of Bristol, UK. He was the inaugural Nelson Mandela Visiting Professorship in International Relations at Rhodes University, South Africa; the inaugural Boeing Company Chair in International Relations at the Schwarzman Scholars Program at Tsinghua University; fellow of Harvard’s Asia Center and John F. Kennedy School of Government; and Christensen Fellow at Oxford. His latest books include The Making of Global International Relations (2019: with Barry Buzan) and Constructing Global Order (2018), among many others. His essays have appeared in International Organization, International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Asian Studies, Foreign Affairs, Journal of Peace Research, International Affairs and World Politics. Fabrício H. Chagas-Bastos  is an EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at University of Copenhagen’s Department of Political Science. His research specializes at the intersection of International Relations and Social Psychology, taking an interdisciplinary approach with the broad aim to study the political, intellectual, economic and developmental challenges faced by the Global South. He completed his doctorate in International Relations at the University of São Paulo and another in Psychology at the University of Melbourne, and has held visiting positions at the Australian National University, University of Cambridge, and University of São Paulo.

254  Contributor Bios

Melisa Deciancio  is a senior fellow researcher at the University of Mün-

ster and a research fellow at the National Scientific and Research Council of Argentina, based in the Department of International Relations at The Latin American School of Social Sciences (FLACSO) Argentina. Deciancio holds a master’s degree in International Relations and Negotiations and a PhD in Social Sciences from FLACSO. Her research is focused on the areas of International Relations Theory, Latin American Foreign Policy, Global Governance and Development. She is currently the academic coordinator of the Master in International Relations of FLACSO/Argentina and a teacher at FLACSO. She has held visiting positions at Amherst University, the University of Warwick, Brown University, the German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA) and the University of Southampton. Kristina Hinds  is a senior lecturer in Political Science at the University of

the West Indies (UWI), Cave Hill. She holds a PhD in International Relations (LSE), an MA in International Relations (University of Kent), a PGDip in University Teaching and Learning (University of the West Indies) and a BA in International Development Studies (St. Mary’s University). She has published Civil Society Organisations, Governance and the Caribbean Community, as well as journal articles and book chapters on a variety of areas relating to Caribbean governance and International Relations/Political Economy. Hinds has served on varied bodies within the International Studies Association (2015–2021) and as the Caribbean Studies Association’s Programme Chair (2019–2021). She is one of the hosts of “Down to Brass Tacks”, a Barbadian current affairs radio show; has represented Barbados as national Field Hockey Goalkeeper; and served as the female vice president of the Barbados Hockey Federation (2016–2018). Arie M. Kacowicz  is a professor of International Relations and the Chaim Weizmann Chair in International Relations at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. A faculty member since 1993, he was the chair of the Department of International Relations in 2005–2008, and he is currently the president of the Israeli Association of International Studies. His research interests include peace studies, international relations of Latin America, globalization and global governance, and the normative dimension of international relations. He is the author and editor of ten books, including The Unintended Consequences of Peace: Peaceful Borders and Illicit Transnational Flows (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Jorgelina Loza  has a doctorate in Social Sciences from the University of

Buenos Aires, is a member of Argentina’s National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), and has also held research grants at El Colegio de México and at the Ibero-Amerikanische Institut in Berlin, Germany. Her research topics include national and regional identities, social

Contributor Bios  255

movements and transnational collective action in Latin America. As an educator, she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses at the University of Buenos Aires, FLACSO Argentina, and NYU Buenos Aires. Her course at NYU, “Identity, culture and Politics in Latin America”, focuses on indigeneity and migration. María Cecilia Míguez is a doctor in Social Sciences from the University of

Buenos Aires, a specialist in Economic History and Economic Policies researcher from UBA/Argentina, graduated in Political Science from the same university. She is currently deputy researcher of the National Council of Scientific and Technological Research, vice director of the Institute of Historical, Economic, Social, Cultural and International Relations Research, Executive Unit of CONICET. She is deputy professor of Argentine History at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the UBA, and a postgraduate professor in the Master of Economic History at FCE-UBA and at FLACSO. Stefano Palestini holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences and a Master of Research from the European University Institute of Florence (Italy). He conducted postdoctoral studies at the Otto Suhr Institute at the Free University of Berlin (Germany). He holds a Licenciatura in Sociology from the Universidad Alberto Hurtado (Chile). His area of expertise lies in international politics, with a focus on comparative regionalism. Currently, he is studying the role of regional organizations in coping with political crises within the context of a rise of illiberal democracies and electoral authoritarianism in the Americas and Europe. Palestini has been a research fellow at the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies at the American University (Washington, DC). He has also taught at the Universidad de Chile, Universidad Diego Portales and the Helmuth Schmidt University (Hamburg, Germany). Between 2008 and 2010, he was a consultant at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP, Santiago de Chile). Amaya Querejazu has a PhD in Political Science and is an associate professor

of International Relations and Latin American Studies at the Faculty of Law and Political Science, Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia. She is also British Academy Newton International Fellow at the International Politics Department, Aberystwyth University, UK. Her research interests include IR theories, political theory, Latin America, alternative knowledges and relationality. Cintia Quiliconi  is an associate professor at the International Studies and

Communication Department of FLACSO-Ecuador and senior editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies. She has a PhD in Politics and International Relations, University of Southern California (USC), holds an MA in Politics from New York University, and a BA in Political Science from

256  Contributor Bios

the University of Buenos Aires. She has been a Fulbright scholar and consultant to various international organizations. Her research and publications focus on Latin American political economy, international trade and regionalism. Renato Rivera Rhon holds a master’s degree in International Relations from

the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals and a research master’s degree in International Studies from FLACSO-Ecuador. He has been a Fundación Carolina scholar and has represented Ecuador in regional organizations such as the Andean Community, the Organization of American States, the Forum for the Progress of South America (PROSUR) and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). His research focuses on Latin American regionalism, transnational organized crime and international political economy. He is a senior researcher at the Latin American Network for Security Analysis and Organized Crime (RELASEDOR). Arturo Santa-Cruz is a professor at the Department of Pacific Studies and Director of the Center for North American Studies at the University of Guadalajara. He has published in journals such as International Organization and Journal of Latin American Studies, as well as numerous book chapters. Among his books are Mexico-United States Relations: The Semantics of Sovereignty (2012), and Introducción a las Relaciones Internacionales: América Latina y la Política Global (co-editor, with Thomas Legler and Laura Zamudio; 2013). His latest book is US Hegemony and the Americas: Power and Economic Statecraft in International Relations (2020). Carsten-Andreas Schulz is an assistant professor of International Relations at the Instituto de Ciencia Política, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He received his DPhil from Nuffield College at the University of Oxford in 2015. His research focuses on the historical evolution of international order, hierarchy in world politics and the international relations of Latin American states, and it has been published in journals such as International Studies Quarterly, European Journal of International Relations, Geopolitics, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, International Relations and Latin American Politics and Society. Matias Spektor is an associate professor and founder of the School of International Relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) in São Paulo. His areas of expertise include international security and foreign policy. Current projects include the study of nuclear latency, elite manipulation of public opinion during foreign policy crises, the global anti-corruption regime, autocracy promotion and covert action, and the impact of minority presidentialism on the conduct of foreign affairs. He completed his doctorate at Oxford University, and has held visiting positions at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Council on Foreign Relations, the LSE and King’s College London.

Contributor Bios  257

Oliver Stuenkel is an associate professor of International Relations at FGV.

He is also a non-resident fellow at the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPi) in Berlin and a columnist for EL PAÍS and Americas Quarterly. He is the author of IBSA: The rise of the Global South? (2014), BRICS and the Future of Global Order (2015) and Post-Western World (2016). Arlene B. Tickner  is professor of International Relations in the School

of International, Political and Urban Studies at the Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá, Colombia. Her main areas of research include sociology of knowledge in the field of International Relations and the evolution of IR in non-Western settings, Latin American and hemispheric security, Colombian foreign policy and Colombian–United States relations. She is the co-founder (with Ole Wæver) and co-editor (with David Blaney and Inanna HamatiAtaya) of the Routledge book series Worlding beyond the West. Previously, she was an associate editor of the journal Foreign Policy Analysis, and she is currently a member of the editorial advisory boards of the Review of International Studies, International Studies Quarterly and British Journal of Politics and IR, among others. Diana Tussie is head of the Department of International Relations at FLACSO/

Argentina, where she teaches in the areas of International Political Economy, Economic Diplomacy and Global Economic Governance. Dr Tussie holds a PhD in International Relations from the London School of Economics. Her contributions to the debate and practice of International Political Economy and International Development are widely recognized. She has published extensively in English and Spanish. She has been co-editor of Global Governance in the period 2014–2018. From 2006 to 2009 she served on the Committee for Development Policy of the United Nations. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Chile, de la República, Manchester, Oxford, Córdoba and the German Institute of Global and Area Studies. In 2017, she was awarded the Distinguished Scholar, Global South Caucus Award from the International Studies Association. Daniel F. Wajner is a postdoctoral fellow at the Cluster of Excellence “Con-

testations of the Liberal Script” (SCRIPTS) of the Berlin International College of Research, Freie Universitat Berlin. His articles have been published in the journals International Studies Quarterly, Foreign Policy Analysis, Diplomacy and Statecraft, Regional and Federal Studies, Latin American Research Review and Journal of International Relations and Development. His main areas of research and teaching are international legitimacy, conflict resolution, regional cooperation and populist foreign policies, particularly focusing on their interplay in the realms of the Middle East and Latin American politics.

INDEX

Note: Bold page numbers refer to tables, Italic page numbers refer to figures and page number followed by “n” refer to end notes. Acharya, Amitav 1–3, 7, 10, 12, 20, 38, 67, 70, 89, 116, 123n4, 138, 144, 150–151, 184, 235, 247 Adams, John Quincy 175 Afro-descendent communities 99, 101, 105n9 Afro-descendent relationality 7, 90–91, 104; indigeneous and 97–98 Afro-descendent thought 7, 90–91, 97, 102 agency 36–38; from autonomy to 40–42; defined 36; ideal-type conception of 37; non-hegemonic 38–40; as “purpose action” 36–37 Agency for International Development and the Alliance for Progress 57 “Age of Revolution” 71 Alckmin, Geraldo 118 Alexander, Jacqui 81, 84 Alfonsín, Raúl 168 Almagro, Luis 210 alternative world orders: in age of globalization 11–27; analytical and normative perspectives 13–17; Latin American responses to 13–17; norms of international law and institutions 15–17; peace and security 15–17 Alvarez, Sonia 131, 138 American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man 241 Amerindian cosmologies 105n9

Amin, Samir 149, 186 ancestrality: and Afro-descendent communities 99; and spirituality 98–99 Andean Pact 152–153, 166–167 Anderson, Benedict 135, 237 Anglo-Argentine war 61 Anglo-European modernity 189 Antunes de Oliveira 191 Appadurai, Arjun 96 Archer, Margaret Scotford 37 Argaña, Luis Maria 121 Arteaga, J. J. 210 associated-dependent development 191–192 autonomy 17, 33–36; to agency 40–42; approach 20–22; content, and its epistemic value 230–231; content and concept 222–224; costs 224–228; defined 9, 232n3; and dependency 222–224; derivations 224–228; and diversification 228–230; emphasis on non-confrontation 224–228; as epistemic foundation 220–231; idealtype conception of 34; neo-idealistic currents of integration 224–228; overview 220–222; peripheral 225; relational 35–36, 42n8 Autonomy Doctrine 222–223, 228, 229 Ayoob, Mohammed 22, 34

260 Index

Bagú, Sergio 183 Bambirra,Vânia 195, 196n3 Banks, Sarah 96 Baran, Paul 185–186 Barder, Alexander D. 52 Bariloche Foundation 244 Barriteau, Eudine 80–81, 83 Bay of Pigs fiasco 57 Beckford, George 78 Beckles, Hilary 82 Begriffsgeschichte 206, 216n5 Beigel, F. 240 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) 115–116 Benedetti, Mario 13 Benn, Denis 82 Berlin Wall, fall of 225, 239 Bernal-Meza, Raúl 14 Bernanke, Ben 188 Best, Lloyd 78 Bilgin, Pinar 42n1 Bizzozero, L. 210 The Black Jacobins:Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Santo Domingo Revolution (James) 71 Blaney, David 90, 224, 226, 227 Blyden, Edward 74 Bogues, Anthony 85 Bolivar, Simón 146, 151, 164 Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) 24, 121, 154, 165, 169–171, 174 Bolivarianism 165, 174 Bolland, O. N. 70 Bolles, Lynn 80 Bolsonaro, Jair 111, 113, 119 Bond, Robert 167 Brathwaite, Kamau 84 Brazil: China as trading partner 115, 118; China’s economic rise in 113; environmental crisis in 122; foreign policy 21, 24–25; and “Friends of Venezuela” group 121; Latin American innovation to Global IR 209–210; “sub-imperialism” 57; trade surplus of 115; US-backed military coup in 57 Bretton Woods system 61, 193 Briceño Ruiz, J. 42n3, 42n6 BRICS 25, 116, 118 Brundtland Report 244 Bull, Hedley 12–13 Buzan, Barry 3, 79, 248

de Caires, David 78 Calderón, Felipe 172–173 Calvo, Carlos 31, 236 Calvo Doctrine of 1896 16, 109 Cambridge School 216n5 Cameron, Norman 74 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique 4, 14, 19, 42n8, 93, 109, 182, 183, 186, 187–188, 190–191, 193, 195, 196n3, 196n5, 229 Caribbean 86n1; challenge to WesternCentrism as IR theoretical contribution 82–84 Caribbean feminism 80, 82 Caribbean feminist theory 80 Caribbean feminist thought 80, 81–82; as IR theorising 79–82 Caribbean intellectual tradition: 20th-century 71–77; acknowledging 68–71 Caribbean Philosophical Association 71 Caribbean plantation slavery 72 Caribbean thought: for international relations 67–85; as theory for international political economy 77–79 Carpenter, R. Charli 41 Cartagena Accord 167 Carter, Jimmy 61 Carter, Kath 96 Casanova, Pablo González 183 Castro, Fidel 169 Castro, Raúl 172 Catholic Church 93 Center for Socioeconomic Studies at University of Chile (CESO) 182, 186 Central American Common Market 152 Cepeda Ulloa, Fernando 226 Cervo, Amado Luiz 14, 209 Césaire, Aimé 68, 83 Chávez, Hugo 121, 169–170, 171 Chen,Yin-Zun 138 China: rise in Latin America 113–116; theoretical innovation in 204; trade war between United States and 118; as trading partner of Brazil 115, 118; as a world power 75; as world’s largest consumer of iron ore and niobium 114 China–CELAC Forum 116 China Development Bank (CBD) 113 China–Latin America think tank forum 116 China National Cereals, Oils and Foodstuffs Corporation (COFCO) 114 CIA 57–58

Index  261

Cintra, R. 227 Clemente, I. 210 Closed Regionalism 150 C.L.R James Journal 71 Cold War 11, 34, 35, 51–52, 109, 122, 127, 168, 222, 242, 247; bipolarity 34; and concept of autonomy 224, 236; Latin America’s 38; and U.S. hegemony 15 Cold War South America 6; hegemony through transnational social compacts in 49–62; RSC in 56–62 Colegio de Estudios Latinoamericanos of the Universidad Autónoma de México 195n1 Collins, R. 203–204 A “Coming Anarchy” 12 Communism 62 Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) 24, 154, 165, 171–173, 174 Comunidad Andina de Naciones (CAN) 167 Condor Plan 59 Conference of Latin American Bishops in Medellin 94 conventional IR 32, 105n2 Conway, Janet M. 96 “Cosmopolitan global democracy” 12, 26 costs: and neo-idealistic currents of integration 224–228; and nonconfrontation 224–228 COVID-19 1, 247 Cox, R. 215n4, 221 Creutzfeldt, Benjamin 113 critical feminism 130–132 critical feminist theories 3 critical theory 2, 69, 133 Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera 4, 99, 134 Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation 244 da Silveira, Azeredo 229 David, Steven R. 34 Deciancio, Melisa 23, 112, 120, 140n1, 154 Declaration of Human Rights 23 decolonial feminism 135 “defensive regionalism” 109 de Lima, M. R. S. 34, 42n8 dependency: and autonomy 222–224; different approaches to 185 “Dependency and Autonomy in Latin America” 222 Dependency and Development in Latin America (Cardoso and Faletto) 182

dependency theories 202–203, 222; Latin American Dependency Research Program 184–188; limits of the theory 188–189; mechanisms of dependency 190–194; overview 182–184 dependent financialization 192–193 dependentistas 9, 149, 182–189, 191–195, 243 developmentalism (“desarrollismo”) 17–18 development debates: in IPE 146–150; in Latin American IR 146–150 The Development of Underdevelopment (Frank) 186–187 Di Filippo, Armando 189 diversification and autonomy 228–230 dos Santos, Theotonio 183, 186, 189, 190, 192–195 Drago Doctrine of 1902 16, 109 Drekonja, G. 225 Du Bois, W. E. B. 74 Dumont-Huiswood, Hermia 74 Echavarría, José Medina 183, 196n3 Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) 18, 19, 148–149, 152, 215n1 Economic Commission on Latin America (ECLA) 90, 92 “economic globalization” 19 The Economist 119 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 110 embodied knowledges 100–102 Emmanuel, Arghiri 186 Enloe, Cynthia 127, 129, 132, 136 epistemic value of autonomy 230–231 epistemic violence 89, 94 Escudé, Carlos 14, 17, 22, 35, 225, 226, 239 Estrada Doctrine of 1930 16 European capitalism 72 European colonialism 236 European debt crisis 183 Evans, Peter 191 “Extreme Occident” 14 Extremo Occidente 239 Faletto, Enzo 14, 19, 182, 186, 195, 196n3, 196n5 Fals Borda, Orlando 4, 95, 102 Fanon, Frantz 4, 68, 69, 74, 76, 83, 97, 238 FAO 244 Farr, J. 206

262 Index

feminism: Caribbean 80, 82; critical 130–132; decolonial 135; Latin America 131; postcolonial 134–135; radical 131–132; Western 138, 140n2 feminist theories: as analytical perspective for political action 128–130; Caribbean 80, 82; critical 3; postcolonial 135; Western 128–130, 135, 139 Fernandes, Florestan 183 Ferrer, Aldo 148 Figari, Guillermo 232n1, 232n4 Financial Times 114 Finnemore, Martha 36, 39 Fischer, Andrew M. 193–194 Fonseca, Gelson, Jr. 226 foreign direct investment dependency 193 foreign policy formulations and regional integration 20–23 Forero, Fabio 229 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing 127 Fox, Patricia D. 100 Frank, Andre Gunder 149, 186–187 Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) 109, 169, 170 Freire, Paulo 94–95 Fukuyama, Francis 246 Furtado, Celso 14, 18, 148, 149, 186, 187, 195 G20 244 G77 116–117 Gadamer, H. G. 221 Gardini, Gian Luca 24 Garvey, Amy Ashwood 74 Garvey, Marcus Mosiah 74–75 Germani, Gino 183 Giddens, Anthony 37 Girvan, Norman 4, 77–78 Glissant, Edourd 83 “Global Brazil and U.S.-Brazil Relations” 112 Global International Relations (GIR) 1, 31, 49; approaching from LAC 238–241; Caribbean in 1–10; Latin America in 1–10; Latin American contribution to 211–214; from non-Western international relations theory to 3–5 globalization 17–20, 119; alternative world orders in age of 11–27 Global Norm Entrepreneurs: Latin American States as 31–42 Global North 3, 5, 8–9, 12–13, 22, 112, 183, 192, 243

Global South 8, 13, 17, 18, 20, 22, 24, 27, 31–32, 34, 38, 68, 83, 85, 86n2, 112, 128, 139, 144, 157–158, 184, 189, 194, 208, 211, 235, 243, 247 global value chain: asymmetrical integration in 192; periphery relations within 195 Goddard, Stacie E. 41 Goveia, Elsa 73–74 Graciarena, Jorge 183 Gramsci, Antonio 69 Gran Colombia (Colombia-VenezuelaEcuador) 23 Grau, Raúl Cubas 121 Great Divide 163, 174–175 Great Recession 183 Group of Subaltern Studies 133, 246 “gunboat diplomacy” 39 Haitian Revolution 71–72 Harding, Sandra 130 Harlem Renaissance 74 Harris, Wilson 69 Haya de la Torre,Víctor 183 Haynes, Tonya 79–80, 82 Henry, Paget 69, 72, 74, 83 Herrington, Tracey 96 “heterodox autonomy” 21, 35 A History of a Negro Revolt (James) 72 Hobbes, Thomas 69 Hoffmann, Stanley 89, 212–213 How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Rodney) 75 Huawei 119–120 Hugo,Victor 173 Huiswood, Otto 74 IBSA (India, Brazil, and South Africa) 25, 118 IDB 113 Imagined Communities (Anderson) 237 Import-Export Bank of China (China Exim) 113 import-substituting industrialization (ISI) 18, 149 Inayatullah, Sohail Tahir 220 indigeneous relationality 97–98 insertion: autonomy 3; Cervo’s conceptualisation of 209–210; Chilean 211; creating agency spaces 244; defined 210, 213–214; dependence 3; international 9, 144–146, 149–150, 154, 157–158 Insulza, José Miguel 173

Index  263

“insurgent knowledge” 100 intellectual innovation and Latin American IR 203–205 Inter-American Development Bank (INTAL) 18, 153 “internal colonialism” 147 international insertion 208–209 international law and institutions: promotion of norms of 15–17 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 60, 225, 239 International Political Economy (IPE) 17–20, 77, 144; Caribbean thought as theory for 77–79; a field under construction 157–158; Latin American theories of 144–158; relevance of development debates in 146–150; toward a regional agenda 157–158 International Relations (IR) 91–93; Caribbean thought for 67–85; conventional 32, 105n2; intellectual innovation and 203–205; Latin American 91–93; relevance of development debates in 146–150; tying 20th-Century Caribbean intellectual tradition to 71–77; unsettling 102–104 International Studies Association (ISA) 158 International Union of American Republics (Pan-American Union) 166 The Invention of America (O’Gorman) 163 IR feminism: decolonial theories 133–139; Latin American contributions to 133–139; postcolonial theories 133–139 IR “from the margins” 111, 134, 212 Jackson, Patrick Thaddeus 40, 43n11 Jaguaribe, Helio 14, 17, 20–21, 153, 222–224 James, C. L. R. 4, 68, 69, 71–72, 74, 76, 84 Jervis, Robert 216n8 Joseph, T. S. 77 Kaltenthaler, Karl 169 Kamugisha, Aaron 72 Kant, Immanuel 69 Kaufman, Robert 188 Keane, Shake 84 Keck, Margaret E. 131 Kempadoo, Kamala 81 Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress 110 Kepmadoo, Kemala 76 Kirchner, Néstor 169 Kirkwood, Julieta 137 Kleinschmidt, Jochen 14

Kñakal, Jean 187 knowledge: appropriation 194; embodied 100–102 Koselleck, R. 206 Krishna, Sankaran 105n4 Kubitschek, Juscelino 110 Lafer, Celso 210 Lamming, George 84 Larrain, Jorge 185 Latin America: Afro-descendent relationality 97–98; autonomy approach 20–22; contribution to global IR 211–214; defensive posture 109–113; embodied knowledges 100–102; explaining voices and silences from 25–27; foreign policy formulations and regional integration 20–23; indigeneous relationality 97–98; liberation theology/ pedagogy/methodology 93–96; peripheral Realism 22–23; in the PostWestern World 116–122; responses to alternative world orders 13–17; rise China and post-western world in 109–123; rise of China in 113–116; spirituality and ancestrality 98–99; territoriality 99–100; unsettling IR 102– 104; unsettling knowledges in 89–104; Western IR approaches 130–133 Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) 1; approaching GIR from 238–241; in global international relations 1–10; IR thinking 241–245; order, regionalism, security and development 241–245 Latin American and Caribbean Union (ULC) 172 Latin American and the Caribbean Economic System (SELA) 152–153 Latin American Council for Social Sciences (CLACSO) 153 Latin American Dependency Research Program 184–188 Latin American Dependency School (“Dependencia”) 19–20 Latin American feminism 128, 131; as contribution to global IR agenda 126–140; feminist theories and political action 128–130; Latin American contributions to 133–139; postcolonial and decolonial theories 133–139; Western IR approaches 130–133 Latin American Free Trade Association (LAFTA) 151–152, 166–167

264 Index

Latin American innovation to Global IR: Brazilian perspective 209–210; conceptual history 205–207; international insertion 208–209; Latin American contribution to global IR 210–214; between ‘lo práctico’ and ‘lo posible’ 207–211 Latin American Institute for Economic and Social Planning (ILPES) 182, 184, 187 Latin American Institution for Integration 153 Latin American Integration Association (LAIA) 167 Latin American regionalism 166–173; ALBA 24, 121, 154, 165, 169–171, 174; CELAC 24, 154, 165, 171–173, 174; Mercosur 168–169 Latin American scenarios of world order 25 Latin American School of IPE and regionalism 150–157 Latin American School of Social Sciences (FLACSO) 153, 158, 182 Latin American states as global norm entrepreneurs 31–42 Latin American thought: ALBA 169–171; CELAC 171–173; on Latin American regionalism 166–168; Mercosur 168–169; regionalism in 163–175 Law of the Sea 6, 60 Levitt, Kari 78 Lewis, Rupert 74, 75 Lewis, Sir W. Arthur 6, 77–78, 243 “Lewis Model” of “industrialisation by invitation” 77 Liberal globalism 12, 20–21, 26, 242 liberalism 3, 20, 92, 130 Locke, John 69 López, Trujillo 130 ‘lo posible’ 207–211 ‘lo práctico’ 207–211 Love, Robert 74 Lucero, José 14 Lugo, Fernando 121 Lugones, Maria 134 Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio 172, 228–229 Machiavelli, Niccolo 69 Maduro, Nicolás 111, 120–121, 171 Mahoney, James 188, 190 Malamud, Andrés 24 Maluf, Paulo 118

Margulis, Matias 148 Mariátegui, José Carlos 183 Marini, Ruy 149, 187, 191–192 Marshall, Don 69–70 Marshall Plan 110, 239 Marx, Karl 69 Marxism 18, 19, 133 mechanisms of dependency 190–194; associated-dependent development 191–192; asymmetrical integration in global value chain 192; dependent financialization 192–193; in finance 192–193; foreign direct investment dependency 193; knowledge appropriation 194; mechanisms of epistemic dependency 193–194; overexploitation 191; in production 191–192; technology monopolization 193–194 Medeiros, Marcela de Almeida 92 Meeks, B. 82 Menem, Carlos 118 Merquior, J. G. 215n2 Mills, Charles 83 Mina Rojas, Charo 99 modernity 134 Mohammed, Patricia 81 Monroe Doctrine 109, 123n1, 172 Monthly Review 186 Mora, Frank 169 Morales, Evo 170 “The Most Noteworthy Caribbean Mind of the Twentieth Century” 71 Moyne Report 78 A Multilateral, Fluid, and Polycentric World of Nation-States 12 multilateralism 20, 23–25, 32, 153 “Multiplex World” 2 Murdoch, H. A. 83 muyu 105n10 Myrdal, Alva 242 Narlikar, A. 240 NATO 110–111 New International Economic Order (NIEO) 20–21 “New Medievalism” 12, 20, 26 New Regionalist Approach (NRA) 154 New World Group 78 Nexon, Daniel H. 40, 43n11 Nielsen, R. T. 203–204 Nixon, Richard 58 Nkrumah, Kwame 75

Index  265

Non-Aligned Movement 117 non-hegemonic agency 38–40 non-Western international relations theory and GIR 3–5 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 164, 168 North American scenario of world order 25 “Northern hegemony” 13 North–South Dialogue 60 NPT 24 O’Donnell, Guillermo 14, 19 OECD 116 O’Gorman, Edmundo 163–164, 167, 175n1 ontology 97–98, 105n7 open regionalism 24, 150, 153–154, 168, 173, 211 “opportunity structures” 40 Organization of American States (OAS) 59, 166 Orientalism (Said) 237 Ortega, Daniel 172 Ortiz, Caicedo 101 overexploitation 191 Oviedo, Lino 121 Oyarzún, L. 211 Padmore, George 74 Palestini, Stefano 8, 243 Palma, Gabriel 185 Palonen, K. 216n5 Pan-African Congress 74 pan-Africanism 74, 75 Panama Congress 164 Pan-Americanism 165, 175 Park, S. 205, 216n5 Patriota, Antonio 118 peace and security 15–17 Peña,Villarroel 130 peripheral autonomy 225 “Peripheral Autonomy and Centric Hegemony” 222 peripheral Realism 17, 22–23, 225–226, 239 periphery/ral: condition 8, 148; economies 184–186, 191–194; elites 55; societies 182, 186–187; states 34–35, 50 Peters, Dussel 114 Peters, Ingo 105n1 Petersen, Mark 24 Phillips, Caryl 71

Picq, Manuela 133, 245 Piñera, Sebastián 116, 173 Pinheiro, L. 34, 42n8 Pinochet, Augusto 60, 167 Pinto, Aníbal 148, 183, 187 Plan Colombia 109 “pluralistic universalism” 144 political action and feminist theories 128–130 political Realism 21 political violence and regionalism 49–62 postcolonial feminism 134–135 postcolonial feminist theories 133, 135 post-hegemonic regionalism 18, 23–25, 169 Post-Western World 123n4; Latin America in 116–122; rise China and 109–123 Prebisch, Raúl 14, 18–19, 148–149, 182, 187, 243 Programa Centroamericano de Ciencias Sociales 195n1 Program of Economic Integration and Cooperation 168 Protocol of Ouro Preto 168 Puig, Juan Carlos 14, 17, 20, 21, 34–35, 153, 223–224, 228–229 Quiliconi, Cintia 154 Qusicanski, Silvia Ribera 238 radical feminism 131–132 Reagan, Ronald 61 Realism 20; peripheral 17, 22–23, 225–226, 239; political 21 Reddock, Rhoda 70, 74 regionalism 8, 23–25; in Latin American School of IPE 150–157; in Latin American thought and practice 163– 175; open 24, 150, 153–154, 168, 173, 211; phases of 155–156; and political violence 49–62; post-hegemonic 18, 23–25, 169; theories of development and phases of 155–156 regional social compacts (RSCs) 51, 52–56; in Cold War South America 56–62 Reid, Michael 116 relational autonomy 35–36, 42n8 relational social theory 41 Riggirozzi, Pia 14 Robles, Alfredo García 242 Rockefeller, Nelson 58 Rodney, Walter 68, 74, 75–76

266 Index

Rodríguez, L. H. 210 Rodríguez-Franco, Diana 188, 190 Rosenberg, J. 236 Rouquié, Alain 239 Rowley, Michelle 76 Ruiz, Felipe 192 Russell, Roberto 14, 21, 35, 41, 93, 227, 229 Said, Edward 104, 237, 247 Salgado, Raúl 152 Santa-Cruz, Arturo 239 San Tiago Dantas 229 Santiso, J. 208 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa 96 Santos, Juan Manuel 173 Sarney, José 168 Scholes, Theophilus 74 Schulz, Carsten-Andreas 24, 238, 241 Scott, James C. 43n15 Second Hague Conference 6, 39 Second Vatican Council 93 security and peace 15–17 Segato, Rita 135–136 Senior, Olive 84 Serbin, Andrés 14 Shepherd,Verene 81 Shilliam, Robbie 99 Sikkink, Kathryn 36, 39, 131 Simonoff, A. 42n3, 42n6 Sjoberg, Laura 130 Smith, Peter H. 26 social action 36 Sombra Saraiva, José Flavio 229 South American Common Market (Mercosur) 121, 153–154, 165, 168–169, 174 spirituality and ancestrality 98–99 Spivak, Gayatri 238 structuralism 8, 144–145, 147–149; economic 243; transcending 17 “substantivism” 43n11 Summit of the Americas in Miami 109 Sunkel, Osvaldo 148, 186, 187, 189, 192–193 Sweezy, Paul 186 Sylvester-Williams, Henry 74 “Tale of Two Worlds” 12, 26 Taylor, Lucy 14 technology monopolization 193–194 Temer, Michel 118 territoriality 99–100

Thatcher, Margaret 61 theories of development 155–156 “the others” 245–246 Third Position 232n1 Third World 86n2 Third World order 14 Thomas, John Jacob 74 Tickner, Ann 104, 127, 130–131 Tickner, Arlene B. 7, 10, 14, 26, 90–92, 215n3, 238, 248 TikTok 122 Tilly, Charles 240 Tokatlian, Juan Gabriel 14, 21, 35, 41, 93, 227, 229 Torres-Saillant, Silvio 70, 83 Tosh, Peter 84 Tratado de Alianza y Confederación 151 Treaty of Tlatelolco 16, 23, 242 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 71 Truman, Harry S. 39 Trump, Donald 116, 119, 123n1 Tussie, Diana 14, 105n5, 112, 116, 123n2, 140n1, 168, 213, 215, 215n3 20th-Century Caribbean intellectual tradition 71–77 UN Charter 39 UNCTAD 60 UN Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL) 182, 187 Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) 24 United Nations 21, 23 United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America 167 United Nations Environment Program/ Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean (UNEP/ROLAC) 244 United Nations institutions 103 United States (US): and ALBA 165; and CELAC 165; and coup in Brazil 57; and coup in British Guiana 57; and coup in Dominican Republic 57; and Mercosur 165 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 23, 39 Universal Declaration of Mother Earth Rights 7, 103 Universidad Central de Venezuela, the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP) 195n1 UN Security Council 110, 229 unsettling IR 102–104

Index  267

unsettling knowledges, in Latin America 89–104 US Treasury 60 Valente,Vargas 138 van Klaveren, Alberto 164 Vargas Valente,Virginia 131, 138 Venezuela Crisis (1902–1903) 39 Vigevani, Tullo 14, 21, 42n8, 228 violence: epistemic 89, 94; political 49–62 Vivegani, T. 227 vivir bien/buen vivir 7, 103 von Klaveren, Alberto 167 Wajner, Daniel F. 241 Walby, Silvia 135–136 Walker, R. B. J. 96 Walsh, Catherine E. 97, 100 Waltz, Kenneth N. 34, 42n7 Washington Consensus 165, 168–169, 170, 174, 225 Wasmosy, Juan Carlos 121 Watson, Adam 13 Wæver, Ole 92 Weber, Max 36, 196n3 Weffort, Francisco 188 Wemheuer-Vogelaar, Wiebke 105n1 Wendt, Alexander 37 Western-Centrism as IR theoretical contribution 82–84

Western Christian civilization 15 Western feminism 138, 140n2 Western feminist theories 128–130, 135, 139 Western Hemisphere Idea (WHI) 175 Western IR approaches 130–133 West Indian Society for the Study of Social Issues 78 Westphalian sovereignty 16, 81, 236 Westphalian state system 72 Wibbels, Erik 189–190 Williams, Eric 4, 33, 74 Women in the Caribbean Project 80 World Bank 60, 113, 225 “worlding” 3 world order: Grotian 15; multiplex 113, 116, 123, 123n4; new 11; Northern 5, 13, 26; Northern and Latin American scenarios of 25; ‘Third World order’ 14 World Political Parties Dialogue 116 World War II 6, 14, 17, 19, 39, 110, 163, 238 The Wreched of the Earth (Fanon) 97 WTO 194, 244 Wynter, Sylvia 83, 84 Xi Jinping 114, 116 Zavala, Domingo 190 Zelaya, Manuel 121, 171