Search

This paper analyses Latin America’s role in an international system in flux, with high levels of uncertainty and transformations that signal a shift in the geoeconomic and geopolitical landscape across the world. Against this backdrop, the paper examines the challenges (both old and new) the region must face, focusing on the impact of global changes on regional dynamics and the capacity of the different countries to find answers both to the international situation and old and new internal problems. In addition, as an introductory paper to this monograph entitled “Geopolitics from Latin America: a change of cycle and multipolarity”, it identifies the fulcrums of these changes, their impact, the main actors involved and the processes underway.

There has been a change in international politics since the 2008 financial crisis, thanks to a greater spread of economic resources and military capabilities. For many, it is a radical transformation that could spell the end of US hegemony in Latin America. This paper examines the proposition, beginning with a review of the concept of hegemony, which rather than being viewed as a structural characteristic is conceived of here as a “nuanced hegemony”, in other words a network of asymmetric and hierarchical relations. We can observe not just one transformation then, but the emergence of a hemispheric context that could be described as “differentiated hegemony”. The United States still occupies a central position, but its foreign policy is marked by subregional fragmentation and the externalisation of electoral priorities. The paper explores the effects at subregional level, focusing on the opportunities and challenges it presents to Latin American countries.

This paper examines the complex, multilateral and polycentric governance of the climate agenda, as well as the knowledge management architecture around the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Noting the difficulty involved in this governance, the paper shows how it has been capable of making progress in combating the climate crisis. Climate action governance resembles a network of networks, a dense web of public, private, social, technological, knowledge-based and intersectoral initiatives. Ensuring compliance with agreements is, without question, complex in many respects, but to date it has proven to be the only viable path. Highly dependent on the global context, the green transition is an opportunity to make a qualitive leap forward, against the backdrop of an energy crisis triggered by the invasion of Ukraine.

This paper analyses the concept of “global civil society” – which played a major role in the symbolic construction of the post-Cold War social reality – and reflects on its initial purpose as a critique of the conventional perceptions of state-centric politics and as a change of approach, towards non-partisan politics and cross-border activism. While it opened new horizons for the empirical analysis of “globalisation from below”, this concept failed to prompt a radical epistemological change; it did not succeed in generating knowledge that transcended “methodological nationalism”. The paper maintains that what once constituted the concept’s disruptive potential – its theoretical engagement with the idea of globalisation, reflected in the adjective global – ultimately tamed it. Drawing on this premise, the aim is to rekindle the spirit of the notion of “global civil society” by introducing a concept that takes up and pushes forward this unachieved goal: “planetary politics”.

This paper analyses the barriers to the recognition of gender-based persecution as grounds for asylum. It focuses on Spain and examines the rulings of Spanish courts on applications based on various types of gender violence between 2009 and 2019 and looks at the theoretical propositions of "the politics of silence". The paper proposes that these barriers can be attributed to the interweaving of androcentric and colonial frameworks that produce arbitrary representations of non-European women and their cultures. It also highlights the paradoxical way authorities deploy culturalisation strategies around female genital mutilation and forced marriage, treating them as "exotic" violence, in contrast to the strategies of invisibilisation and silence used with other types of gender-based violence, such as "intimate violence".

This paper applies a historical, cultural and social perspective to analyse the political transnationalism of indigenous peoples. Using key concepts like indigenous movements and transnational defence networks, alongside desk study and analysis of indigenous organisations’ goals and programmes, this paper proposes a classification and definition of three types of indigenous political transnationalism: migratory, institutional and relating to transnational peoples. Examples are given for each, including indigenous organisations from America, Africa, Asia and international organizations, with the aim of revealing the complexity and importance of transnationalism as a fundamental factor in the indigenous protests of the last decades.

With digital ecosystems being questioned around the world, this paper examines the EU’s role in and contribution to the emerging concept of artificial intelligence (AI) governance. Seen by the EU as the key ingredient for innovation, the adoption of AI systems has altered our understanding of governance. Framing AI as an autonomous digital technology embedded in social structures, this paper argues that EU citizens' trust in AI can be increased if the innovation it entails is grounded in a fundamental rights-based approach. This is assessed based on the work of the High-Level Expert Group on AI (which has developed a framework for trustworthy AI) and the European Commission’s recently approved proposal for an Artificial Intelligence Act (taking a risk-based approach).

This paper aims to analyse how gender relations interact in labour socialisation in the Moroccan export industry – based on a case study of the city of Casablanca – and the relationship with international migration. The paper uses qualitative research, with analysis based on grounded theory and an intersectional studies approach. The global labour market emerges as a new axis of inequality creating new spaces that keep the majority in a precarious position. The paper’s original contribution is to apply the intersectional theoretical framework to the Moroccan context, focusing on a relational view of the categories. Identifying three basic social processes (role of women, crisis of masculinity and migration) allows us to expand the knowledge about this reality.

In a world of growing international competition and rivalry between China and the United States, Latin America and the European Union (EU) are caught in the same thorny dilemma. Positioned between these global giants, both regions are facing a retorn to a Westphalian system of nation-states, which undermines their roles as emerging regional players. In view of these new global challenges in Latin America and the EU, this paper uses a qualitative and comparative approach to explore foreign policy discourses on autonomy in both regions. It examines their goals and priorities and assesses the potential regional and interregional consequences.

This paper examines the ties between Latin America and Asia by moving beyond the homogenisation of the two regions through elevating the importance of opposition to a third party, in this case an “imperialist” and developed North. In contrast to normative analyses based on outmoded conceptions of world history, it proposes an intellectual exercise that problematises the interregional bond by placing the emphasis on heterogeneities rather than broad bush approaches that ignore the complex and diverse national and regional realities.