220040 U.S. Imperialism Reloaded: Latin American Geopolitical Reflections (S) (WiSe 2026/2027)

Classical geopolitics has often reduced Latin America to a passive territory shaped by external hegemonic interests. This seminar offers an alternative reading: it places the region's agency at the center, examining how power and capital are co-produced at different scales to organize, fragment, and integrate its territories from independence to the present. At the heart of this inquiry lies a central question: how has U.S. imperialism been reproduced, contested, and transformed in Latin America over time, and what forms does it take today?

Moving beyond classical geopolitics—rooted in nineteenth-century European imperialism—the course places Latin American intellectual traditions at the center of the analysis. Across six units, the seminar combines theoretical approaches to geopolitical thinking with a historiographical review of the region's trajectory from a critical perspective.

Students will engage with dependency theory, CEPAL structuralism, the Escuela de la Autonomía, and contemporary critical geopolitics, while simultaneously examining key historical moments: from independence from the Spanish and Portuguese empires and the region's integration into the primary-export economy under British hegemony, through the rise of U.S. hegemony in the postwar period, Cold War interventionism, and neoliberal restructuring, to the current crisis of U.S. dominance and the rise of China. Special attention is given to contemporary territorial and geopolitical disputes over strategic natural resources, the Amazon, migration, infrastructure, and the 2025 “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.”

The goals of the seminar are to discuss Latin American agency in geopolitical processes, foster critical geopolitical thinking, and enable students to analyze contemporary cases using the conceptual tools developed throughout the course.