The Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (Latin American Congress of Social Sciences, CLACSO) has just held its ninth annual congress at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). CLACSO was founded in 1967 and played an integral role in the development of critical scholarship within the region, being a space of intellectual resistance to the terror and anti-Left violence of the Southern Cone dictatorships during the 1970s and 1980s. UNAM, likewise, has a long history of radical politics. It was the centre of Mexico’s 1968 student movement and itself on the sharp end of state violence during the global uprising of that year. Despite massive state repression in ’68, UNAM maintained its autonomy, and the military is still not permitted on campus today. Many of the exiled leftist intellectuals during the conservative backlash and military dictatorships during the 1970s and 1980s found a home in UNAM, which became the heart of critical scholarship in Latin America. This drew in new generations of leftists, including former Vice-President of Bolivia, Álvaro García Linera, who studied at the UNAM during the 1980s.
It was difficult not to be struck by this legacy during CLACSO’s congress. Vocal support for the political campaigns of Gustavo Petro, the leftist presidential candidate in Colombia, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, former President of Brazil and the man who is the likely foil to the ultraderechismo of current President Jair Messias Bolsonaro, was heard throughout the congress. The green handkerchief, now synonymous with the Latin American feminist movement, and its battle cry of ¡Ni Una Menos! (Not One Less!) was a common sight on the wrists of many women and non-binary participants. And space was given to activists and leftist politicians in the keynote speeches and panels alike.
This gave the congress a very different feel to the US and UK editions of Latin American Study conferences, LASA and SLAS respectively. There was a political urgency to presentations and discussions that has been almost absent in LASA and SLAS. The multidimensional crisis facing the region and world more generally sat centre stage, and theoretical debates were being constantly brought back into discussions over the current conjuncture in Latin America. Maybe this is because, unlike its largely anglophone (distant) relatives, CLACSO felt like a congress by Latin Americans, for Latin Americans. Almost all keynotes, panels and roundtables were in Spanish (or, to a lesser extent, Portuguese), a refreshing difference with SLAS and LASA. Although it is still very expensive for South American scholars in particular to fly to Mexico City, it is still in the same region, and the registration fee of US$60 (less for scholars and students from the region), whilst by no means cheap, is not completely out of reach for Latin America-based scholars either (unlike the fees wielded by its US and UK counterparts). CLACSO also subsidies the attendance of invited scholars and transmits panels and keynote speeches online, making it a more democratic and, frankly, important intellectual space. This helps overcome some of the barriers the political economy of knowledge production in academia and beyond erect for scholars and intellectuals more generally from the global South.
This means that CLACSO sits at the heart of intellectual debates in the region. It is by no means the only space where cutting-edge debates on and within the region occur, but it is one of the most important. Outside of the tri-annual congress, CLACSO is formed of over 90 working groups, working on anything and everything within the social sciences. These groups regularly meet virtually to discuss and debate their latest research, organise events and even publish edited collections together. Indeed, these edited collections are an excellent entry point into Latin American debates on the social sciences. Which begs the question, why were I and my colleague Tobias Franz from SOAS, virtually the only scholars from anglophone academia present? If Latin Americanists in the US and UK are not participating in these debates, for whom are they researching? And what is their value-added to debates in the region? Dr Franz and I have thought long and hard about this for our project, deciding that studying financial actors in London would add theoretical and empirical depth to research on energy transitions and extractivism in Latin America. These proposals were met enthusiastically by members of the Energy and Sustainable Development working group, a sign that we can hopefully add to, rather than simply draw from, Latin American debates on these issues.
Latin American Geographies-UK co-founder and current chair Dr Sam Halvorsen has written about the ‘cartographies of epistemic expropriation’ and how colonial relationships – both epistemic and material – are reproduced by scholars drawing on knowledge produced in debates in the global South if there is no attempt to engage in these debates in return. I do not mean this as a criticism of LAG-UK members and other scholars in the anglophone academy, but rather as a provocation. Engaging in these debates is no easy task: translation is long and/or expensive; building academic networks on the other side of the world is challenging; and knowing where to start is daunting. Going to the CLACSO congress itself is expensive and fraught with difficulties for everyone trying to fly less. Nevertheless, I want to suggest that CLACSO offers a good place to start, either through joining a working group or preparing for the next edition of the congress in three years’ time.
That is not to say CLACSO is without its limitations and contradictions. The opening address was a series of extended ‘thank yous’, an insight into the internal politics of the organisation. For all its talk of leading critical debates, there was a tension between the presence of current and former politicians from progressive political parties and governments and the more critical sections of the Latin American Lefts (for want of a better term), who have spent the past decade or so criticising these regimes for their inherent developmentalism, the expansion of extractivism in the region and the continued violence (both from state and non-state actors) experienced by indigenous groups and women. This was encapsulated by the presentation of García Linera’s new book (published by CLACSO), La política como disputa de las esperanzas (Politics as the Dispute of Hopes). In his discourse, García Linera showed an amazing lack of self-awareness and critique, presenting a re-hashed version of the ideas that underpinned the previous generation of progressive governments (known in English as the ‘pink tide’) to rapturous applause by some, and dismay by others. Furthermore, for all its talk of South-South cooperation and tackling new forms of dependency, as an organisation, it remains itself dependent on funds from supranational organisation linked to the United Nations and global North NGOs such as Oxfam, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. The sources of its funds are as not morally dubious in the way that, say, research institutes receiving military or intelligence funding is, but they still present some difficult questions about what critical scholarship means in the region.
Nevertheless, CLACSO remains an indispensable space of critical intellectual production globally. Where else would you find Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Arturo Escobar, Pablo Gentili, Enrique Leff, Gabriel Palma, Montserrat Sagot, Saskia Sassen, Rita Segato and Gladys Tzul Tzul alongside the likes of Francia Márquez Mina, Colombian political activist and Petro’s running mate? Also, where else are you likely to see Enrique Dussel, one of the reference points for critical Latin American scholarship in Twentieth-Century Latin America, give such an extended impromptu speech after receiving a lifetime award that the congress organisers had to drag him off the stage? For that alone, CLACSO was well worth the trip!
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