Next week is the International Studies Association convention. Normally, it’s a highlight of my professional calendar, though doing ISA from my guest bedroom instead of the planned conventions in Honolulu (2020) or Las Vegas (2021) is something of a letdown. I don’t exactly miss the flights, but it certainly is less appealing to spend additional hours teleconferencing with time zones out of whack. Mostly, though, conferences are at least as much about the informal exchanges with friends and colleagues, chance encounters, and the opportunities to meet new people as they are about presenting papers. And so half the experience–by far the more enjoyable half!–is lost. Sometimes those things get written off as just “fun,” but those sorts of meetings have actually had somewhat career-altering effects for me, including with someone who is now a good friend with whom I’ve co-authored, exchanged fellowship visits, applied for grants, etc.
Despite attending ISA from my own house (and during a week in which we’re all supposed to be on holiday!), I’ve ended up with a full schedule. I’m presenting one paper (abstract and draft below), chairing a round table on Latin American contributions to international order, and acting as discussant for two other panels.
My paper is “Joining the global, protecting the regional: Latin America in the post-WWII critical juncture.” In part because the last seven months left almost no time for writing and research, it took a somewhat different direction. I have reams of archival documents from Chile and Argentina, in particular, that I’ve had little time to review. But the change of direction is also a reflection of some of the theoretical reading I’ve been doing, and my interest in engaging with work on international hierarchy more directly. So the abstract is in the right ballpark, but the draft paper, goes in a somewhat more theoretical direction.
Abstract: Following the Second World War, the United States advanced projects of international order-building at the global level, as well as across various regions. IR scholars have long been noted that US-led regional projects varied in nature—with leading accounts treating European projects as multilateral, Asian projects as networks of bilateralism, and the Western Hemisphere as “crudely imperial” in Ikenberry’s words. These projects of regional order-building have been studied predominantly from the perspectives of the United States and, at times, other Allied great powers. While Latin America has received limited attention in the immediate post-WWII period, it offers an important site for understanding how secondary and smaller powers engaged with the simultaneous reconstitution of regional and global orders. As that already possessed long traditions of sovereignty, diplomacy, and regional organization, Latin America was the most active group of Global South countries in shaping the postwar emergence of “liberal international order.” Drawing on archival work in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and the Untied States, this paper explores how Latin American leaders and diplomats understood and sought to shape the interface between inter-American regional institutions and global patterns of order.
I woke up this morning to learn that my book, Latin America Confronts the United States (Cambridge University Press, 2015) was included in a new Latin American Research Review essay by Dexter Boniface. It’s a great essay, which offers a helpful assessment of the field and discusses several interesting recent books: 
Substantively, the article explores Latin American contributions to emerging security orders in the late 1940s. There’s some classic work on this era’s influence in domestic Latin America politics (e.g., Bethell and Roxborough), but the multinational archival work on foreign relations remains pretty thin. Theoretically, it engages with IR debates about regional variation in postwar orders, connecting to debates on comparative regionalism and the “Why is there no NATO in Asia?” debate launched by Hemmer and Katzenstein nearly fifteen years ago. Methodologically, it employs historical institutionalism’s conceptual tools to offer a more systematic explanation of how “history matters” in the formation of international institutions. This meant really diving into the dynamics and logics of critical junctures, as well as mechanisms for change in historical institutionalism (layering and conversion, especially).
Our answer is two-fold. Internationally, the Paraguay-Taiwan relationship creates status benefits. Those benefits are asymmetrical, but valued by each side. However, this is status “at the margins” of international society, and it differs in important respects from the types of great-power-centric status that receive the most attention in IR. There’s also an important story about the domestic foundations: elite structures in Paraguay allow for concentration of material and immaterial status benefits, while also shaping a narrow and conservative foreign policy decision-making structure. I got to delve into research about de facto states, recognition and international-legal sovereignty, and small states and status, all of which helped me think through this bilateral relationship in new ways.
The first night started with an all-star (plus me) panel. I found myself sitting between Daniel Deudney–who perhaps co-coined the term “liberal international order” in 1998 with John Ikenberry–and Margaret Keck, whose work with Kathryn Sikkink reshaped IR’s approach to human rights and transnational activism. Down the row, my mentor and friend, the brilliant and always eloquent Max Paul Friedman, who followed Voltaire’s quip about the Holy Roman Empire but questioning whether the liberal international order was actually, liberal, international or orderly. Next to Max, Arlene Tickner of Colombia’s Universidad del Rosario, who is one of the most influential voices and advocates for IR scholarship that is inclusive of the Global South and its scholars. And Christy kept things moving with insightful questions.
Tom Long, PhD 