Search

Although many international relations (IR) theory and international political economy textbooks consistently reference dependency theory, it is commonly considered a passé , outdated, or defunct theoretical approach. This paper challenges conventional wisdom, stressing the continued relevance of dependency as an analytical approach. Overall, it argues that Dependency theory represents a successful effort at decentering IR. To do so, it first discusses decentering as an effort to challenge and engage core concepts in IR to transform the "universal" understandings of global politics. In this sense, Dependency theory decentered IR by introducing an understanding of the world in which Western and non-Western spaces are mutually constitutive, highlighting the role of non-core contexts in creating and maintaining the status quo of the universal. Second, the paper analyzes the influence of Dependency theory in modern discourses of political economy like the resource curse, globalization, Post-Colonialism, and Post-Developmentalism. These parallelisms show Dependency's effectiveness at decentering IR and transforming the way the discipline studies non-core spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During his term in office, Donald Trump was consistently hostile toward Latin America and its people. Regardless of what they felt about him, Latin American leaders had no choice but to adapt to an era of confrontation and unpredictability. This paper uses the concept of autonomy to make a twofold argument. First, Trump accelerated an already existing trend whereby Latin American leaders increasingly looked to expand opportunities of all kinds with governments outside the hemisphere. Second, ideological and nationalist obstacles within Latin America slowed or even blocked autonomous action. Trump held open the autonomy door, so to speak, but many were hesitant to walk through it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional research on modernity has interpreted Latin American experiences as lagging behind, as expressions of an 'incomplete' or failed modernity, since they do not meet the conditions of a 'complete' achievement of modernity as described by theories developed within European and, later, US academia. Since the emergence of dependency theory in the 1960s, and more emphatically since the 1990s, after the dissemination of postcolonial and decolonial theories in the region, this still dominant interpretation has been challenged by new approaches which convincingly underline the interdependent development of global modernity. This article reconstructs part of these debates and identifies a number of different lineages in current research on modernity in Latin America: a first lineage which describes modernization in Latin America as a mimicry of European/Western modernity; a second lineage which characterizes modernity as a global transformation activated by the colonial annexation of the Americas into capital accumulation; and an intermediary lineage which also recognizes the importance of colonialism in shaping global modernity, but at the same time underlines the European origin of modern emancipatory imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay, a shorter version of which appeared as a Stabroek News Column (Guyana, May 5, 2014), pays tribute to Norman Girvan, Caribbean economist and public intellectual who died tragically in April 2014, and whose life’s work exemplified a commitment to pan-Caribbeanism and deepening the rich tradition of radical Caribbean thought. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article critically discusses the recent enlargement of the 'Varieties of Capitalism' (VoC) approach to Latin America as an attempt to come to terms with the persistence of transnational socioeconomic inequalities. It finds that the VoC approach largely fails to deliver a convincing analysis and, by implication, to inform political strategies capable of overcoming them. Through an engagement with the VoC approach's foundational theoretical body and the new 'hierarchical market economies' ideal-type, three main analytical shortcomings are identified: (1) the approach's functionalist firm-centrism; (2) its methodological nationalism; and (3) its fundamental ahistoricism. By way of conclusion, the article proposes an alternative perspective on transnational inequalities which is centred on classical dependency approaches but also combined with insights from geographical political economy, among others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]