IR 441 Latin American Politics

Latin America gets treated here less as a collection of country case studies and more as a region shaped by shared structural forces, coloniality, dependency, US intervention, authoritarianism and the long shadow they cast on democratization, human rights, and gender politics today. You'll work through dense theoretical readings (Quijano, Gunder Frank) alongside contemporary journalism and a full novel, *The Parrot's Perch*, so the analytical lens and the lived texture sit side by side. As an upper-level IR elective it assumes you're already comfortable with comparative politics and IR theory, and it pairs naturally with courses on development, human rights, or post-colonial thought, useful if you want to read the Global South on its own terms rather than as a footnote to Europe and the US.