Um Olhar do Sul: a Criação Global da Guerra às Drogas

The paper claims that it is necessary to seriously consider facts and phenomena beyond the ‘West’ in order to understand and theorise the complex social practices that shape the world. From a Latin American standpoint, it questions the traditional approach to a global matter: the War on Drugs. Researchers usually see this phenomenon in Latin America as reflecting US domination in the region. However, by identifying how and why the drug issue became a matter of security in Latin America and by specifying the collective countermeasures adopted, Latin American partici-pation becomes more apparent in the construction of the international process that gave rise to the normative framework that holds up the War on Drugs: the 1988 Vienna Convention. Keywords: War on Drugs; Global South; International Relations; Latin America; International Po-litical Sociology. Introduction The field of International Relations (IR) is admittedly neither international nor relational. On the one hand, its epistemological and empirical fields are anchored in sparse geo-graphical areas of the planet (Cervo 2008). On the other, the practice and construction of IR has been dominated single-handedly by theories and concepts crafted by academic communities located in the Unites States and Western Europe (Waever and Tickner 2009). Even so, by making use of the same classic concepts from IR, such provincialism has been questioned in territories different from the West (Tickner and Blaney 2013) and through non-western theory construction (Acharya and Buzan 2009). Criticism and questioning of the field is not only restricted to these places though; it also comes from those same cognitive sources and areas that dominate knowledge production (e.g.Salomon 2013