[Séminaire d'axe] War and the state in Latin America: a new research agenda

The multi-award winning book Bringing War Back In: Victory, Defeat and the State in Nineteenth Century Latin America (Cambridge University Press 2024) introduced a Copernican shift to debates on development in Latin America, revealing how nineteenth-century warfare profoundly shaped the region’s states in the long-term. Drawing on statistics and archival evidence, the book demonstrates how international threats during that era systematically spurred state building and how war outcomes generated divergent state capacity and development paths between winners and losers. Because all Latin American states both survived their wars and enjoyed enduring peace, the region provides a unique lens to fully test bellicist theory across war and post-war phases. The presentation will focus on how war explains the uneven state capacity and development we observe today, and the new agendas that are developing after the book in special issues of the Journal of Latin American Studies and other venues.

Speaker

Luis Schenoni, University College London

Luis Schenoni is Associate Professor and the Director of the Security Studies Programme in the Department of Political Science at University College London. His research has appeared in the top political science journals such as the American Journal of Political Science and the British Journal of Political Science. He has been awarded the ECPR Rising Star Award and the PEACE Emerging Scholar Award of the International Studies Association (ISA).

Chair

Charlotte Halpern, Sciences Po, CEE