In November 2021, fifty-five years after independence, Barbados will transition from a constitutional monarchy to a Republic. Barbados is the fourth Commonwealth Caribbean nation to remove the Queen as constitutional head of state, joining fellow republics Guyana (1970), Trinidad and Tobago (1976), and Dominica (1978). While the decision to become a republic has been broadly supported, the process of enacting this change is not without controversy. What are the implications – constitutional, symbolic, and material - for Barbados, and for the wider region? Why has Barbados succeeded in this endeavour where other Caribbean states have failed? To what extent is there political will or popular support to effect such a change elsewhere? Has ‘time come’ for the British monarchy in the Caribbean?

The Institute of the Americas Caribbean Seminar Series is delighted to bring you this expert panel discussion in collaboration with the AHRC-funded collaborative research project, The Visible Crown: Elizabeth II in the Caribbean, 1952 to the present.

Panel:

Professor Cynthia Barrow-Giles is Professor of Political Science and former Deputy Dean of Outreach at the University of the West Indies (Cave Hill).

H.E. David Comissiong has served as Ambassador of Barbados to CARICOM since 2018. He is the founder of the Clement Payne Movement, which successfully campaigned for the official recognition of the working-class heroes of Barbadian history.

Dr Derek O’Brien is a Reader in Public Law at Oxford Brookes University. He has previously taught at the Truman Bodden Law School in the Cayman Islands.

Professor Emerita Carolyn Cooper taught literature and popular culture at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica for over three decades.

Barbados’s transition to Republic status in regional perspective

The UK’s leaving the European Union at the end of March 2019, will have consequences well beyond its shores, with the economic repercussions felt across the world. Amongst the countries that are likely to be most acutely affected are the small States of the Caribbean that belong to the Commonwealth. For almost forty years, much of their trade and development cooperation with the UK has been within the regulatory and institutional framework of its EU membership.
This initially was under the Lomé, then the Cotonou Agreement and now the Cariforum-EU Economic Partnership Agreement that was signed in 2008. The Agreements made it possible for Caribbean exports to enter the UK, free of duties and quotas. In addition, they have provided the Caribbean with substantial and vitally important financial and technical assistance under the European Development Fund. Immediately upon leaving, all those EU economic arrangements and treaties will automatically cease to apply to, or be applied by the UK. Hence unless replacement preferential trade and aid measures can be put in place to come into effect on the day after Brexit, Caribbean exports and development aid will suffer. This discussion will explore and assess the range of direct and indirect economic consequences of Brexit and the policy choices and strategy that can be pursued by the UK, the EU and the Caribbean countries themselves, to safeguard their interests and avoid becoming victims of Brexit.

Edwin Laurent SLE. OBE. CMG. is Director of the Ramphal Institute and Senior Visiting Research Fellow, King's College London who was Contract Manager and Quality Controller of the just concluded CARIFORUM capacity building programme in Competition, Procurement and Customs and Trade Facilitation. Prior to that he was Senior Adviser to UNEP's Green Economy Initiative for the Caribbean that sought to promote a holistic approach to policy making in, and management of, sustainable development.

He served for seven years at the Commonwealth Secretariat, where he was Head of International Trade and Regional Co-operation. He has held various diplomatic postings including: Ambassador to France, Germany and Belgium; Permanent Representative to the EU, WTO, FAO and OPCW, and was Special Envoy of the Heads of Government of Dominica, St Lucia and St Vincent.

He was educated at the Universities of the West Indies, Manchester and the Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies and has lectured in Central and West Africa countries and in the Caribbean on Trade and multilateral negotiations and written and published extensively on trade and development issues. He began his career at St Lucia's Ministry of Finance, later becoming Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Trade Industry and Tourism. In 2013 he was awarded the St Lucia Cross for services to development.

Brexit: Avoiding a Caribbean hangover

Dr. Trevor Stack (University of Aberdeen) - Drawing on fresh research from a large ESRC-funded team project in Mexico, I will address the challenges faced by activists or rights defenders within contexts where they are not only fearful of violence but also frustrated by the inadequacy of institutional channels. In such difficult contexts, where state institutions may well be part of the problem, it would seem that activist groups have a vital role to play. How can they make headway in the struggle for institutions that offer a real guarantee of justice?
Trevor Stack is Director of the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society and Rule of Law (CISRUL) and Senior Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies, University of Aberdeen. He works on citizenship and civil society, mainly in Mexico, and is currently PI of an ESRC project on activism in difficult contexts (as well as a Horizon 2020 Marie Curie project on Political Concepts in the World). He is the author of Knowing History in Mexico: An Ethnography of Citizenship (University of New Mexico Press, 2012) and lead editor of Religion as a Category of Governance and Sovereignty (Brill, 2015).

Activism in Zones of Violence and Institutional Fragility: The Case of Michoacán, Mexico

Dr. Manuel Vogt (UCL) - What are the long-term political consequences of counterinsurgent violence? An emerging literature analyzes the socio-political consequences of civil war. Yet, while the bulk of this research focuses on individual-level effects, we still have little knowledge about how these results aggregate up to collective outcomes. This study analyzes the electoral consequences of the genocidal counterinsurgency in Guatemala's three-decades long civil war (1966-96). Previous studies claimed that the violence has drawn the affected indigenous communities away from leftist parties into the fold of neo-authoritarian clientelism.
We use data from the Historical Clarification Commission (CEH) on massacres and arbitrary executions carried out by the state during the civil war, as well as electoral data at the municipal level, to analyze the impact of counterinsurgency violence on the post-conflict electoral support for leftist parties in a cross-section of all Guatemalan municipalities. Controlling for the factors that determined the non-random geographic distribution of state violence (insurgent potential and guerrilla presence), in addition to department-level fixed effects, our results indicate that the municipalities most affected by the violence voted most heavily for leftist parties in the post-conflict elections. These results also hold in a dyadic analysis of spatially contiguous municipalities within the same department.

Dr. Manuel Vogt is an assistant professor (lecturer) in the Department of Politics, School of Public Policy, at University College London (UCL). He is also an affiliated researcher in the R4D project 'Ethnic Power Relations and Conflict in Fragile States,' funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC). He received his Ph.D. in political science from ETH Zürich and was subsequently a visiting postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University.  His research and teaching interests stand at the intersection of international relations and comparative politics, with a particular focus on contentious politics in developing countries. He is most interested in four broad related topics: the macro-historical roots of inequality and civil violence in multi-ethnic states, the causes and consequences of group mobilization, democracy in multi-ethnic societies, as well as the impact of elite networks on contentious politics in developing countries.

This session is part of the UCL Americas Latin American Political Economy Seminar series, convened by Dr. Néstor Castañeda, Assistant Professor of Latin American Political Economy at UCL Institute of the Americas.

The Political Futility of Counterinsurgency

Patrick Timmons - In September 1969 the Nixon Administration launched Operation Intercept along the U.S.-Mexico border and at each of its crossing points. Intercept's stated aims were to end trafficking of marijuana and pills from Mexico to the United States. Intercept brought more than 2,000 federal agents to the border, most of whom were involved in searching every single person, vehicle or plane as they crossed northwards. With Intercept, the border bottleneck was born, and the people who waited in the long lines of cars -- and people in cities and towns along the Mexican border -- began to experience a new found separation that created a new border-crossing people.
This paper discusses the chaos Intercept sowed, and argues that it created the modern conception of the U.S.-Mexico border. Intercept made good on an election campaign promise Nixon made at a rally in Southern California. Indeed, Nixon was the first modern president to use the U.S.-Mexico border in his elections strategy.  Intercept began the separation of Ciudad Juárez from El Paso, a separation that has been strengthened and reinforced in subsequent U.S. border policies. As such, the episode also helps to illuminate the origins of Donald Trump's political style.

Patrick Timmons lives in Mexico City, and is a translator, freelance human rights investigator and lawyer, journalist and historian of modern Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Timmons has an M.Phil. in Latin American Studies from Cambridge (1998), a Ph.D. in History from the University of Texas at Austin (2004) and an LL.M. in International Human Rights Law from the University of Essex (2013). He is an Americas specialist working in the following subject areas around politics, law, culture and society: freedom of expression, enforced disappearances, right to life and the death penalty, rights of children and right to a family life, migration, and the U.S.-Mexico border.

Timmons's research on the transfrontier metropolis of Ciudad Juarez/El Paso has appeared in NACLA Report and his research on the history of capital punishment appears in the edited volume, 'The Cultural Lives of Capital Punishmen't by Austin Sarat and Christian Boulanger. He edits the Mexican Journalism Translation Project, helped establish and collaborates with the Freedom of Expression Project at the University of San Diego, and has recently translated works by journalist Marcela Turati and slain Sinaloan journalist Javier Valdez Cárdenas. Timmons has published numerous pieces of journalism, mostly focused on prisons, punishment, Mexican migrants in the United States, and attacks on Mexican journalists. Most recently as a freelance journalist he covered the Central Mexican earthquake for CNN International, The Daily Telegraph, the News at Ten for ITN, Good Morning Britain, and Horizontal.mx.

Trump's Wall: Nixon's 1969 'Operation Intercept', the Hemispheric Drug War and the Border Wal

Dr. Aleida Guevara, Cuban paediatrician, and daughter of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, delivers this lecture - Cuba sends medical brigades in response to disasters, and has established health centres in low-income and remote areas and trains medical practitioners from across the developing world. Dr Guevara, who has participated in international missions in Angola, Ecuador and Nicaragua, will explain the internationalist philosophy that underlies this work, as well as its challenges and achievements. 

Dr Guevara's tour marking 50 years since the death of Che is sponsored by the Cuba Solidarity Campaign. Introduced by Dr. Paulo Drinot (Senior Lecturer in Latin American History, UCL Americas); chaired by Rob Miller (Director of Cuba Solidarity Campaign); interpretation by Mr Luis Santamaria; convened by Dr. Emily Morris (Honorary Research Associate, UCL Americas).

NOTE: Presentation in Spanish, with consecutive translation in English

Dr Aleida Guevara on Cuban Medical Internationalism

Jill Hedges is Deputy Director of Analysis at Oxford Analytica, where she has been Senior Analyst for Latin America since 2001. Previously she was editorial manager of business information service Esmerk Argentina and a member of Amnesty International's Americas Research Department. She holds a PhD in Latin American Studies from the University of Liverpool, and her books 'Argentina: A Modern History' and 'Evita: The Life of Eva Perón', were published by I B Tauris in 2011 and 2016, respectively.

Eva Perón and the Women's Vote: Credit Where It's Due?

Speakers: Ezequiel González Ocantos (Oxford), Francisco Panizza (LSE), Ana Margheritis (Southampton), Jill Hedges (Oxford Analytica). This panel discussion will assess the outcome of Argentina's legislative elections on 22 October 2017.

For some, the mid-term elections is a gauge of the chances of former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to stage a political comeback, as well as a vital political test for the agenda of current president Mauricio Macri. Given the highly polarised context of contemporary Argentine politics, the election comes at a crucial moment. We are therefore delighted to welcome to the Institute a distinguished panel of experts on Argentine politics to discuss the election results and future trajectories for the country.

Dr Ana Margheritis is Reader in International Relations at the University of Southampton and Associate Fellow at the ILAS, School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK. 

Dr Ezequiel González Ocantos (Ph.D. Notre Dame, 2012) is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics & IR and Professorial Fellow of Nuffield College, at the University of Oxford. 

Professor Francisco Panizza is Professor in Latin American and Comparative Politics in the Department of Government at the LSE. 

Dr Jill Hedges is Deputy Director of Analysis at Oxford Analytica, where she has been Senior Analyst for Latin America since 2001. 
She's the author of books such as Argentina: A Modern History and Evita: The Life of Eva Perón, were published by I B Tauris in 2011 and 2016, respectively.

Assessing Argentina's October 2017 mid-term elections

Fifty years after his execution, this seminar, chaired by Dr. Paulo Drinot (now Professor of Latin American History, UCL Institute of the Americas and editor of 'Che's Travels: The Making of a Revolutionary in 1950s Latin America') explores some of the many facets of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara's extraordinary life and legacy.

Speakers:

Professor Dirk Kruijt, Utrecht University, author of Cuba and Revolutionary Latin America: An Oral History

Professor Elizabeth Dore, University of Southampton, author of Cuban Lives: What Difference Did a Revolution Make?

Richard Gott, Journalist and Historian, author of Cuba: A New History

Dr Helen Yaffe, LSE, author of Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution

Dr James Scorer, University of Manchester, on 'Man, myth and sacrifice: graphic biographies of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara'

Nikolaos Souslous, UCL, on 'Che and violence'.

This event is convened by Dr. Emily Morris, UCL Institute of the Americas Honorary Research Fellow.

Che: Man, Myth, and Legacy

Professor Charles Forsdick (Liverpool) - Reflecting on the recent experience of writing (with Christian Høgsbjerg) a biography of Toussaint Louverture, I draw in the talk on Edouard Glissant's claim - in his Caribbean Discourse - of the continued need to 'argue around Toussaint'. The paper focuses on the domestication of the revolutionary implications of Louverture's life by those who have presented him as an ancien régime figure, and detects the renewal of such thinking in what has been identified as a recent 'conservative turn' in global histories of the revolutionary age.
Reasserting in response a reading of Louverture as the 'Black Jacobin' in an age of revolutions, the paper considers the key role still played by C.L.R. James (and various versions of The Black Jacobins) in situating the Haitian Revolution and its leader in a wider context of debates on Empire, decolonization and their afterlives.

Charles Forsdick is James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool. He is currently Arts and Humanities Research Council theme leadership fellow for 'Translating Cultures'. He has published on travel writing, colonial history, postcolonial and world literature, and the memorialization of slavery. Recent publications include The Black Jacobins Reader (Duke University Press, 2016) and Toussaint Louverture: Black Jacobin in an Age of Revolution (Pluto, 2017). Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of International Slavery 2010-13, he is currently Chair of the Editorial Advisory Board at Liverpool University Press and a member of the Academy of Europe.

'Arguing around Toussaint': The Black Jacobin in an Age of Revolutions

Professor Maria Victoria Murillo presented her most recent book: The Politics of Institutional Weakness in Latin America (edited with Daniel M. Brinks -- University of Texas, Austin, and Steven Levitsky -- Harvard). This volume offers a conceptual and theoretical framework for studying weak institutions. It introduces different dimensions of institutional weakness and explores the origins and consequences of that weakness. Challenging existing theories of institutional design, the volume helps us understand the logic that drives the creation of weak institutions and the conditions under which we may transform them into institutions that matter.

About the speaker:
Professor Maria Victoria Murillo is the director of the Institute of Latin American Studies and a professor in the Department of Political Science and the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University.

She is the author of many influential books on Latin American Politics. She has also published many articles in top journals in political science and political economy. Her research focuses on distributive politics in Latin America, including labor politics and labor regulations, public utility reform, education reform, and economic policy. Professor Murillo received her B.A. from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Murillo has taught at Yale University, was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University (Harvard Academy for Area Studies & David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies), at the Russell Sage Foundation, and a Fulbright fellow. Murillo is also the co-editor of the Latin American Politics and Society Series of Elements by Cambridge University Press.

The Politics of Institutional Weakness in Latin America

UCL Institute of the Americas is a leading multidisciplinary specialist institution for the study of Canada, the Caribbean, Latin America and the United States. We offer the UK's largest programme of undergraduate, masters and doctoral degrees on the Americas.

Barbados’s transition to Republic status in regional perspective

UCL Institute of the Americas

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