This thematic section explores how Latin American perspectives expand and challenge IR theories and, most importantly, bring local knowledge to the center of theoretical innovation, thereby contributing to the broader Global IR agenda. It includes scholars working to adapt mainstream theories to new empirical contexts and to develop concepts and mechanisms that better capture regional dynamics and foreign policy practices, as well as research inspired by critical traditions that interrogate coloniality, hierarchy and exclusion in IR’s core categories. This includes contributions that recover and systematize Latin American theoretical debates, explore locally grounded knowledge and vocabularies, and foreground epistemic plurality as a condition for Global IR. The theme invites dialogue across methodological and ontological preferences while keeping a shared focus on how IR theory can be made more historically situated, reflexive and open to knowledge produced in and about Latin America.

Coordinators: Fernanda Barasuol and Mariana Kalil

This section analyzes Latin America’s role - in empirical and epistemic terms - in an evolving global order marked by intensified geopolitical competition, contested multilateralism, and new forms of Global South diplomacy. It examines how governments, regional organizations, and societal actors in the region understand and negotiate their place vis‑à‑vis emerging and established powers, including, but not limited to, the United States, China, the European Union and other middle powers. The theme analyzes how geopolitical rivalries can deepen existing vulnerabilities and political instabilities in the region, but also open windows for new bargaining strategies, diversified partnerships and issue‑specific coalitions that seek to leverage external interest for regional development and strategic autonomy. The section brings together research on regionalism and cooperation, examining the reconfiguration of existing organizations, the emergence of new forums, and the coexistence of overlapping, sometimes competing, integration projects.  A further focus is on the changing patterns of diplomatic practice and alliance‑building and how countries in the region experiment with different forms of cooperation across global challenges such as energy transitions, health crises and security threats. By linking questions of positionality, regional autonomy and external projection, this theme invites analyses of Latin American agency in shaping and being shaped by a shifting international order.

Coordinators: Luíza Cerioli and t.b.a.

This thematic section analyzes how changing patterns of trade, production, finance and investment shape Latin America’s position in the global political economy, while foregrounding regional experiences and concepts as analytical tools for emerging International Political Economy and Development Studies. It includes research on regional integration, development strategies, and South–South and transregional cooperation, as well as the governance of debt, global value chains, and critical materials in a context of geoeconomic fragmentation and contested globalization. Scholars draw on Latin American intellectual traditions such as structuralism, dependency and development theory to understand contemporary issues such as financialization, new forms of commodity dependence, structural heterogeneity, regionalism and growth trajectories, speaking to wider debates on uneven development and global capitalism. The theme is explicitly interdisciplinary, bringing IR into dialogue with economics, sociology, geography, and development studies to explore how Latin American cases and knowledge can illuminate broader questions within IPE and Development Studies.

Coordinators: t.b.a

This section focuses on how emerging technologies reshape security practices, governance, and power relations in Latin America and across the Global South, with particular attention to the politics of cyberspace, data and digital infrastructures. It brings together work on cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, platformization and surveillance to explore how states, corporations and other actors manage risks, build capabilities and reconfigure notions of sovereignty and territorial control in increasingly digitized societies. Research in this thematic explores not only the new spaces for regional cooperation and public-private partnerships, but also the militarization of cyberspace, international actors involved in digital regulation, and the role of alliances in shaping technology transfers, use and standards. Focusing on Latin American cases and experiences and engaging with Global IR's objective of de-Westernizing knowledge within the discipline, scholars in this section explore how digital inequalities intersect with existing hierarchies of class, race, and gender, and how civil society, social movements, and local communities articulate alternatives for technological futures.

Coordinators: t.b.h

This thematic area examines how Latin American societies confront intertwined social and environmental challenges – climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, urban vulnerability, disaster risk and cross‑border social-environmental conflicts – and how these experiences speak back to and reshape debates in Global IR. It highlights how socio‑environmental dynamics complicate classical understandings of security, development and order, showing that global governance cannot be understood without attention to territorial, ecological and social inequalities in Latin America and other regions of the Global South.  A central focus is on how different groups, such as indigenous peoples, rural populations, women and other minorities, experience socio‑environmental harms and mobilize for rights, recognition and protection, thereby expanding IR’s vocabulary of justice and responsibility beyond state‑centric frames. The theme brings together research on environmental and climate justice, adaptation and resilience, the politics of land use and infrastructure, and the everyday impacts of environmental degradation on health, livelihoods and security.  The section also analyzes Latin America’s participation in regional and global climate and environmental governance as sites where Global IR is made and contested in practice. Scholars explore climate diplomacy, cooperation and coalition‑building across states and non‑state actors, asking how Latin American experiences contribute to rethinking global governance, responsibility and solidarity in IR.

Coordinators: t.b.a