Springe direkt zu Inhalt

Call for Papers for the Regional Conference Latin America

The regional conference "Political Polarization, Regional Governance and Challenges for the Liberal Script in Latin America" is a cooperation of SCRIPTS, El Colegio de Mexico and the University of São Paulo. It will take place on site in Mexico City in early 2023. The exact date of the conference is to be confirmed. The deadline for paper submissions is 15 April 2022.

News from Mar 14, 2022

About the Regional Conference in Latin America

Together with its international academic partners, El Colegio de Mexico and the University of São Paulo, SCRIPTS will host two regional conferences on the crisis of the liberal script with the aim of analysing the variations of the script, its challenges and contestations in the Latin American context and the implications beyond. The first conference will take place in Mexico City, at Colegio de Mexico in early 2023. A follow-up conference will gather selected presenters from the Mexico conference in São Paulo, at the University of São Paulo in late 2023.

From the recent presidential election in Chile going back to the collapse of Venezuela, Latin America has been the stage of polarized and volatile politics, of the constant redesign of regional governance institutions, and of countless challenges to democracy. Some of the attacks on democracy took the form of traditional institutional ruptures while others mined selective institutions associated with the rule of law. Populist leaders were the main architects of the latter. The long Latin American tradition of strong regional governance institutions was replaced by an à la carte approach, wherein states join and defect from these regional arrangements as they see fit. As a result, these governance institutions are losing strength and legitimacy -- their mandate as providers of public goods increasingly under attack. In the absence of regional public goods providers in the realm of macroeconomic coordination, human rights protection, environmental policies, the protection of democracy, Latin America has dived into worrisome thresholds of economic instability, social inequality, environmental degradation and human rights violation. Looming large is the ubiquitous fear that democracy will not withstand these many challenges -- an impression backed by a not-so-distant experience of authoritarianism.

Call for paper and panel proposals

The CfA is open to everybody. We particularly invite panel and paper proposals on the following topics:

  • Contemporary as well as historical understandings of “liberalism” and the “liberal script” in Latin America and their contestations

  • Latin American varieties of populism and their challenges to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law

  • Origins and causes of contemporary crises of democracy in Latin America

  • Regional governance institutions in Latin America and their contestations

  • Latin America and the world: troubled relationships with the U.S., China, and others.

Please submit your panel and paper proposals to Dr. Isabel Winnwa (irc@scripts-berlin.eu) until 15 April 2022. You can also e-mail any questions you might have to the same address.

Participation on-site

We expect to be able to cover reasonable travel and accommodation costs of presenters.

Conference attendance is planned to be limited to invited presenters. More information, also on online participation, will follow.