Us Power in Latin America ― Renewing Hegemony

This book offers an original and detailed analysis of contemporary US-Latin American relations. Utilising neo-Gramscian and historical materialist approaches, it offers a novel conceptual framework on US hegemony, extending critical theory in new and exciting directions. It disaggregating US power into various forms: structural (economic), coercive, institutional and ideological. The analysis makes considerable use of confidential diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks.

The book’s main argument is that the US is in the process of remaking its hegemony in Latin America. In the first decade of the twenty-first century Latin American politics was defined by the ascendency of leftist and centre-left forces. The emergence and consolidation of the ‘New Latin Left’ signalled a profound challenge to the longstanding hegemony of the US in the Western hemisphere. In their foreign and domestic policies, the region began distancing itself from Washington’s geopolitical and economic agenda. This book details the ways in which US foreign policy responded to these trends. Defining hegemony as an asymmetrical and dialectical relationship patterned by multiple and overlapping forms of power, it situates US hegemony alongside the political economy of the Post-Washington Consensus. The analysis examines the interplay of the different facets of US hegemony in Latin America, which are inextricably interlinked with ongoing processes of neoliberalisation.

Empirical chapters focus on: the structural power of the US’s multi-track free trade agenda; the coercive leverage of US military power; the institutional power of the Organization of American States (OAS) in relation to newly-created and Latin American-led mechanisms of regional cooperation; and the ideological power expressed in the discursive construction of Latin American populism. It brings clarity to what remains an open and contested process of hegemonic reconstitution, and promises to be of interest to scholars working in a number of overlapping subject areas, including International Relations (IR), US foreign policy and Latin American studies.