PAST RESEARCH

This research program aimed at developing an alternative approach to study regionalisms, particularly in neglected parts of the world. Taking stock of several decades of conceptualization, it provided a political sociology approach of regionalisms fed by contributions from the sociology of international relations and the public policy analysis. At the confluence of these two approaches, characterized however by their heterogeneity, the research program provides a methodological rather than theoretical framework to bring a new perspective on an emerging field of comparative regionalism. The relational dimensions, the socio-cultural contexts and characteristics of actors and their practices are key to shed a new light of what is considered as a social international phenomenon.


Grant: 4500€
Period: 2016-2019
Collaboration with: Olivier Dabène (Sciences Po/CERI)

Selected publications :

• A Political Sociology of Regionalisms. Perspectives for a Comparison, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
• La Gouvernance des régionalismes latino-américains : une perspective comparée des Secrétariats Généraux Régionaux, Paris : Etudes du CERI, n°232, Janvier 2018.
• « L’autonomie dans les bureaucraties régionales latino-américaines : le rôle et la place des Secrétaires Généraux », Critique internationale, Vol.2, n°87, 2020.
• « Le régionalisme pragmatique en Amérique centrale » (avec Olivier Dabène), Études Internationales, Vol. 50, n°1, Summer 2019, p. 95–120.
• « L’institutionnalisation du régionalisme centraméricain : les limites de la diplomatie présidentielle », Cahier des Amériques latines, n°91, Automne 2019, p. 173-194.
• “Why Central American Regionalism Never Ends Dying? A historical exploration of regional resilience”, in Briceno-Ruiz José and Rivarola Puntigliano Andrès (eds.), Regionalism in Latin America: Agents, Systems and Resilience in Latin American Regionalism, New York: Routledge, 2020.
• « Shaping regional governance: the EU Capacity-building Strategy in Central America », in Elsa Tulmets and Laure Delcour, Policy Transfer in International Relations and EU Studies: Towards an Interdisciplinary and Comparative Approach, Routledge, 2019.
• Revisiter le pouvoir normatif européen : le double visage de l’UE en Amérique centrale, Politique européenne, vol. 63, no. 1, 2019, p. 96-124.
• “Regionalism in Central America: an ‘all-in’ strategy”, in José Briceno-Ruiz and Isabel Morales, Post-hegemonic Regionalism. Towards a Pacific vs. Atlantic Divide?, Routledge, 2017 (co-auteur Olivier Dabène).

Over the course of the 20th century, Latin America has been a testing ground for a wide range of political regimes, providing opportunities to test, adjust and amend the concepts and theories of democracy that have usually been developed elsewhere. Latin America has thus made a significant contribution to the thinking on democracy by providing a framework for analysing the evolution of regimes. For a time, Latin America was a source of experimentation and theoretical development, but it has remained so to the present day, as demonstrated by the rise of participatory democracy and hybridisation. Since 2019, a rich sequence of events has opened up on the continent, highlighting major political, social and economic crises in a large number of countries. The exacerbation of social protests has marked the limits of the traditional framework of electoral democracy. In this sense, the organisation of elections and the alternation of power no longer seem to be vectors of democratic satisfaction. Citizens are distancing themselves from political parties, denouncing political elites, attributing little legitimacy to political institutions, and ending up relying on populist leaders who in turn often flout the foundations and functioning of democracy. These phenomena sometimes open the door to authoritarian excesses, which themselves take a wide variety of forms and degrees. However, authoritarian political styles, practices and ultra-conservative values have recently fuelled the Latin American political scene and have brought into tension the two concepts that structure this chapter. This project has several objectives. Firstly, it aims to give an account of the rich literature on democracy that has grown out of experiences of regime change in Latin America. Secondly, it aims to offer an assessment of the evolution of the quality of democracy in the continent in recent decades. The third objective is to examine a literature that has sought to qualify the evolution of regimes and the consolidation of democracies by developing two essential ideas: democracy can be undone and democracies are sometimes faced with hybridisation. This section will thus discuss the variety of forms of what is known as ‘democratic regression’ or ‘de-democratisation’. Fourthly, it presents both the recent experiments with new democratic arrangements and the theoretical analyses linked to these innovations.


Selected publications :

• Crises en Amérique latine. Les démocraties déracinées (2009-2019), Paris, Armand Colin, 2020.
• “Radicalizing the Alternation: Political Change and Degraded Democracy in El Salvador (2019-2021)”, in Dabène O. (eds.), Electoral alternation in Latin America, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
• “​​From Competitive Authoritarianism to State Capture: A Contested Re-election in Honduras (2017)”, in Dabène O. (eds.), Electoral alternation in Latin America, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
• “Démocraties et autoritarismes en Amérique latine”, dans Louault Frédéric, Parthenay Kevin (dir.), Politique en Amérique latine, avec Louault Frédéric, Bruxelles, Larcier, 2023 (avec Flavia Freidenberg et Dabène Olivier).