A Political Economy of Arab-Latin American Relations: Notes and Theoretical Reflections from within the “American Social Science” of IR Kevin Funk Department of Political Science & Center for Latin American Studies University of Florida
[email protected] FLACSO-ISA Joint International Conference July 23-25, 2014 Buenos Aires Abstract In recent years, an increasing number of predominantly Latin American scholars have started to analyze the history and present state of Arab-Latin American relations. Yet within what Stanley Hoffman famously referred to as the “American social science” of International Relations (IR), there is little recognition of this growing body of scholarship or of the increasing importance of South-South relations more generally. In addition to interrogating mainstream, Global North IR’s problematic relationship with the Global South, this paper attempts to break this silence by presenting a general overview of the existing literature on Arab-Latin American relations. By delineating what is (and is not) known about these relations from extant sources, I hope to contribute to the decolonization of the field. In addition, my analysis suggests several lacunae within this literature. These include a prevailing commitment to state-centrism and an overwhelming empirical, as opposed to theoretical, focus. Based on my own research, which has entailed conducting in-depth interviews with Latin American capitalist elites who have economic interests in the Arab world, I thus a present a political economy-inspired account of Arab-Latin American relations that A) captures the role of both public and private actors and B) contributes to theoretical debates within global political economy concerning our understanding of class and the formation of a transnational or at least trans-regional consciousness among globalizing elites.