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The scholars usually define the relations between US and Latin America as neglect or in several occasions as indifferent. For many years Latin America countries there had been great expectations about these relations, especially in late the 90s when the transformations in international system and new domestic politics in the region started an era of optimism. This optimistic view had reflected the economic interests between the United States and Latin American and initiated hemispheric collaboration in trade negotiations. However, ten years later, the positive environment disappeared and the US-Latin American relationship came back to indifference. The proposal of hemispheric integration did not advance for various reasons, but the domestic protectionism pressures in the United State and negative perception of the government officials on Latin American countries affected the negotiations. Moreover, the failure of the economic and social policies applied in the Latin American countries allowed populist politicians to win elections. Leftist parties won elections in Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, and Ecuador. The return to the left means some countries, like Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, with their strong ideological discourse opposite the United States and its free-market. The United States and South America relationship it was affected in the global, regional and domestic dimensions. This paper aims to analyze the South America relationship with the US and to understand the interrelation between systemic and domestic factors affecting the American governmental perceptions of South America. The region shows important internal chances and represents a new direction for other countries in the hemisphere.This project will analyze the American governments official thinking about the South America political process. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper builds on existing norms literature in order to explain the process of international human rights norms diffusion into domestic settings using the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in the United States, South Africa and India. The CRC is the most widely ratified United Nations Convention with 192 countries party to the treaty. This widespread ratification suggests that a set of universal children’s rights norms may exist. The majority of the International Relations literature that addresses norm diffusion processes links the ratification of a human rights treaty by a state to the automatic adoption of the norms codified within the treaty into domestic law. Yet the process by which this happens -- and the extent to which it happens at all-- remains largely unexplored in the literature. This paper questions the idea that children’s rights are universally celebrated norms and that ratification of the CRC translates into full enforcement of those rights within a country. The paper's research suggests that the number of treaties ratified by a state is a weak indication of the existence of a universal human rights norm. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1999, the authors of this paper designed the initial offering of an innovative seminar on Globalization and the Information Society, taught both synchronously and asynchronously at the University of Michigan, American University, and the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. In subsequent years, the University of Ft. Hare in South Africa, Howard University, and Syracuse University were added. A centerpiece of the Seminar continues to be its global virtual cross-national collaborative learning teams, each comprised of students from each of the participating universities. Each virtual team, or Global Syndicate, is tasked with working together on a final presentation addressing key issues in today's complex information society and adopting one of five assigned stakeholder roles, including: (1) global and multinational corporations; (2) developed country national governments; (3) developing country national governments; (4) intergovernmental organizations; and (5) transnational civil society organizations. With the close of the spring 2005 semester, the Globalization Seminar celebrated its seventh consecutive year, with over 200 worldwide alumni of this dynamic active learning experiment. Each year, substantial qualitative and quantitative data have been collected on the course, including student perspectives on and satisfaction with the seminar and the global virtual teams. This paper presents a rigorous evaluation of virtual team learning outcomes, using both quantitative and qualitative data and approaches. Particular attention is paid to the roles of culture in active learning and in assessing such learning. Additionally, assessment of learning outcomes for the collaboratory forged across the Africa and U.S. regions is highlighted and new directions for research on active learning outlined. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fact that norms and ideas matter in international relations has been demonstrated by many scholars. Questions continue to plague ideational scholarship, however, about why norms matter when they do. In fact, for many, the lack of answers to these questions has led to the conclusion that, in the end, norms and ideas are epiphenomenal to numerous other factors, especially power, in international politics. This paper seeks to build an argument that counters criticisms like these by developing a better theoretical understanding of when and how norms shape policy outcomes, especially in the foreign policies of democratic great powers.Toward this end, I explore why the United States applied sanctions against South Africa in 1985, but not earlier. I focus on this case alone because it is one in which scholars of varying theoretical persuasions generally agree that norms best explain the outcomes. What remains puzzling about the case is why the norm of anti-racism brought U.S. action when it did. As various scholars demonstrate, this norm was firmly implanted internationally and within the U.S. domestic policy process by the 1960s. It was strengthened further by the emergence of more general human rights norms in U.S. foreign policy in the early 1970s. Yet, the U.S. appeared to ignore these humanitarian norms when it came to South Africa until sanctions in the mid-1980s. How do we explain the delay? Most work in constructivist scholarship would give mutually exclusive attention to either ideational structure or activist pressure in order to answer this question. I argue that both are necessary in order to explain outcomes. Agents are an important source of change, but they must work within constraints imposed by structure. More specifically, ideational structure often consists of multiple layers. Activists need either windows of opportunity within structure and/or the correct tools to unlock structural windows of opportunity in order to bring policy change. The argument helps to explain why the humanitarian anti-racism norm did not lead to sanctions by the U.S. against South Africa at different points in the late 1970s and early 1980s as well as why sanctions came when they did in 1985 and 1986 specifically. In order to test the reach of the argument, I also briefly explore its application to various U.S. decisions on whether or not to apply aid sanctions against a host of other U.S. allies (Turkey, Greece, and South Korea) with comparably poor human rights records to South Africa around the same time period. All of this results in a bottom-line conclusion: Rather than being epiphenomenal to power politics, norms, especially humanitarian norms, prove influential over decisions of both action and inaction in important and even vital strategic relationships. Among its several implications, the model proves especially important as a building block for better understanding how and when other types of norms matter in international politics. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]