This article argues that Southern Cone reactionary governments often tend to confront international and regional institutions. Evidence of this approach is found in the administrations of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil (2019–22) and Javier Milei in Argentina (2023–), exhibiting various forms of confrontation. The analysis highlights two primary explanations: first, the distinct nature of reactionary governments based in a world view rooted in a Western supremacist civilizationism (WSC) vision; and, second, the driving of their foreign policies by ‘culture wars’ and a new kind of alignment with the US named ‘performative emulation’. By focusing on how beliefs rooted in WSC influence foreign policy, the article illustrates how these reactionary governments are altering the regional political landscape with ‘culture wars’ becoming civilizational regionalism (Geistregionalismus). Methodologically, this article examines these two case studies to glean broader theoretical understandings from the experiences of reactionary governments in the Southern Cone, their foreign policies and their relationship with regionalism.

The article posits that populism is of limited value in understanding Caribbean regionalism and argues that while populism and charisma might reasonably explain the leaders that emerged in the early pre- and post-independent periods, that type of leader has largely disappeared in the contemporary period. It identifies the external environment and the state-building focus of Caribbean leaders as exerting the most influence on the direction of the integration process. It also considers the Caribbean Community’s (CARICOM’s) engagement with regional processes in Latin America. It focuses, in particular, on the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America and the challenges it presented both for their coherence and through exposing the limitations of the type of integration scheme CARICOM represents.

The contestation of multilateralism and international norms is a constitutive element of the new neopatriot far right. On a global scale, this adopts sovereigntist, nationalist, and anti-globalist perspectives, which in many cases are expressed through populist discourses that establish an antagonism between the “people” and elites (global, foreign, or even national elites associated with foreign interests). In the cases of Jair Bolsonaro and Javier Milei, prominent representatives of the new Latin American neopatriot far right, the contestation extends to regional organizations (particularly those that emerged during the 2003–15 “pink tide”), (re)politicizing consensus and norms from a sovereigntist reaffirmation opposed to cooperation and integration with neighbors. If Latin American progressive populisms saw in regional integration under the ideal of a “Patria Grande” (“Great Fatherland”) a strategy to build national projects and a united “people” facing engagement between national oligarchies and imperialism, the new far-right is reversing this antagonism in a sovereigntist way to contest regionalism and regional integration.

In the 2000s, the literature depicted Brazil as an emerging power and a regional leader. From time to time, Venezuela was presented as a potential contender. Fast-forward to today: Venezuela endures economic bankruptcy and demographic collapse, whereas Brazil looks internally divided and much diminished on the international scene. Whatever happened? This article argues that the emergence of these South American states was an illusion created by presidential activism and ostentatious summitry, as presidents seized a commodity windfall to make the case for greater power status and regional agency. Once the windfall ended, successor presidents were unable to deliver on what their antecessors had oversold. The rise of the Venezuelan-sponsored Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of the Americas and the fall of the Brazilian-promoted Union of South American Nations are examples of the weakness of interpresidentialist region building, as populist presidents like Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro contributed either to capriciously devise or abruptly terminate regional arrangements.

Kalpana Wilson’s (2023) article highlights pivotal moves in discourses to decolonise development, focusing on how essentialist and racist readings of decoloniality circulate in development spaces and in Brahmanical Hindu supremacist discourse. Building upon Wilson’s insights, this reply delves into the body-politics of race where diversity in development is a decolonial and antiracist option that manifests in substituting ‘white saviours’ for brown ones, and where reassessments of capital and labour relations are conspicuously absented in reformulations of development. The concept of the ‘morality trap’ is central to this, capturing the dilemma faced by well-intentioned individuals working in development who are sensitive to charges of complicity and implication in development’s racism. By examining the intersections of race, power, and development practices, I aim to elucidate how essentialist interpretations of decoloniality perpetuate racial hierarchies, as evidenced in the emergence of ‘brown saviours’. Such analysis helps to identify not only the body-politics of racism in development but its particularities to the development industry.

Research on labour and development has demonstrated the significance, both analytically and politically, of labour for understanding the political economy of development. Analyses of labour regimes highlight the central role of reorganised workplaces and changing labour processes in value chains across the global economy. Research in global labour studies illustrates the ways in which concepts and theorisations of labour struggles emanating from the Global North struggle to capture the dynamics of labour conflict in the Global South and their wider impacts. This article argues that the revival of autonomist ‘class composition’ approaches can advance a labour perspective on development by shedding light on the importance of labour’s defeats when mapping the contours of the political economy of development. This approach reveals how what E.P. Thompson called the ‘dead ends’ of labour history are essential to understanding the grounds upon which state and capital reorganise to contain workers’ demands and struggles, thereby setting new conditions for these struggles to re-emerge. Drawing on insights from the early work of Antonio Negri, the article will examine how processes of working-class composition and decomposition occurred within the trajectory of import-substitution industrialisation in Chile and Argentina, establishing new labour regimes in its early crises. The article demonstrates this through original archival research using industry journals and publications from the textile industry in Chile and metalworking industry in Argentina.

Development and Marxism are both discourses with a complex and not-always-consistent genealogy. This article seeks to (re)set the dialogue between them through a process of deconstruction. It shows the substantial shift in the position of Karl Marx from a somewhat evolutionist conception of development to one that aligns more with our understanding of combined and uneven development. It outlines Lenin’s epistemological break from an orthodox or evolutionist view of development to a view of the global economy via the hinge of ‘imperialism’. This ushers in a new view of capitalism as non-homogeneous rather than one where part of the world develops and another ‘underdevelops’. Finally, we offer some thoughts on development in the era of globalisation that, to some extent, confirms Marx’s original intuition that capitalism would come to spread across the world.

In Western academic spaces, more and more stakeholders are claiming commitments to ‘decolonisation’. Yet in environments shaped by rankings, impact factors, citation numbers and third-party funding figures, what claims to be decolonial scholarship can easily end up being as extractive and violent as the subject it is claiming to confront. In this article, we reflect on attempts to decolonise both the discipline and practice of ‘development’, especially with regard to knowledge ‘production’ in this academic disciplinary space. We are doing this from a particular situatedness that is itself contradictory, as we are both facilitators of an EU-funded network focused on ‘Decolonising Development’ and of Convivial Thinking, a non-institutional, transnational web-based collective. We argue that imperial forms of knowing and making sense of the world are deeply entrenched in the structures of higher education, both shaping and limiting the ways in which what we call ‘development’ is researched, taught and practised. By reflecting on instances of academic activism and institutional pushback in both aforementioned networks, we show how institutional violence limits scholarly imaginations in ways that make sure academic or dominant knowledge structures are not radically challenged, thereby making claims of decolonisation purely performative. Despite this, we also point to concrete openings in both networks where undoing the entanglements of decolonising narratives, ‘development’ and the imperatives of scholarship – and thereby dismantling the master’s house that sustains it – seems within reach.

This article critically examines the complex connections between human security and livelihoods in relation to development in the Niger Delta of Nigeria. This region is pervaded by a web of socio-economic and environmental issues that have severely impacted the lives of people and communities due to environmental degradation. For example, the exploration and exploitation of natural resources in this region has had extensive consequences on the livelihood activities of the people. Moreover, the Niger Delta has been affected by persistent social instabilities and a lack of access to some of the basic assets of security, including personal, health, economic and environmental security. While the concepts of livelihoods and environmental degradation are reasonably well understood in the context of the Niger Delta, the complex links between them in relation to human security remain unexplored. To examine how environmental degradation impacts livelihoods, this article explores the concept of human security, following a rights-based approach in line with the sustainable livelihood framework. Furthermore, it draws from semi-structured interviews conducted in the region on the lived experiences of community members, such as farmers and fishers, and their challenges in bridging generational crises in the context of environmental degradation. I argue that understanding the interconnectedness of security and livelihood issues in the context of such crises provides an innovative approach to considering both environmental and social factors in sustainable development, which is essential for the overall well-being of people in the region.