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.