What is the primary focus of this congress?

The congress focuses on Latin American studies, bringing together scholars to discuss various aspects of the region in Mexico City.

LASA 2027 International Congress of Latin American Studies

Name: LASA 2027 International Congress of Latin American Studies
Start: 2027-06-15 00:00:00+00:00
End: 2027-06-20 00:00:00+00:00
Location: Mexico City

Jun 15–20, 2027Mexico City, MexicoIn-person

Registration open

The LASA International Congress of Latin American Studies is a significant academic gathering focused on Latin American affairs. This recurring event brings together scholars, researchers, and practitioners from various disciplines to discuss critical issues, present new research, and foster interdisciplinary collaboration. Its location in Mexico City, MEX, provides a direct connection to the region of study, offering unique opportunities for engagement and insight.

Committees & topics

Topics
Navegar el colapso: reinventar la política, cuidar lo común · Constitutional Aspirations and Frustrations · Democracias Violentas · Republics Under Oligarchic and Popular Pressures · Revolutionary Legacies: Culture and Social Protest in the Digital Age · Indigenous Peoples and Afro-descendants: Epistemologies and Knowledge · Agrarian and Food Studies · Archives, Libraries and Digital Scholarship

Why it matters

This congress is crucial for advancing the understanding of Latin America across political, economic, social, and cultural dimensions. By convening experts, it facilitates the exchange of diverse perspectives and cutting-edge research, which is vital for informed policy-making and academic discourse. The discussions often highlight complex challenges and innovative solutions pertinent to the region, making it a key platform for shaping future research agendas and international cooperation.

The event's focus on Latin American studies inherently involves a broad spectrum of topics, from historical analysis to contemporary geopolitical shifts. Understanding the nuances of these discussions can provide valuable insights into regional stability, development trajectories, and the evolving role of Latin American nations on the global stage. For those involved in international relations or regional development, the congress offers a concentrated view into the intellectual currents shaping the region.

How to prepare

Delegates preparing for the LASA International Congress should consider a thorough review of contemporary Latin American political and economic landscapes. Understanding the historical context of current events is paramount, as many regional challenges have deep roots. Engaging with recent scholarly publications and policy reports from institutions specializing in Latin American affairs can provide a solid foundation for participation.

To maximize engagement, attendees should identify key panels and presentations that align with their specific interests. Preparing targeted questions and being ready to contribute to discussions can enhance the learning experience. Additionally, considering the diverse academic backgrounds of participants, an interdisciplinary approach to preparation, incorporating insights from sociology, economics, political science, and cultural studies, will be beneficial. This approach aligns with the principles of "Dynamic Analysis" and "Engagement Strategies" in understanding complex regional dynamics.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 1 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Mexico

As the host nation, MEX serves as a central point for discussions on Latin American issues, offering a unique perspective rooted in its own regional experiences and geopolitical position.

Role in topic

MEX plays a pivotal role in Latin American studies, not only as a significant regional power but also as a cultural and historical nexus. Its hosting of the congress underscores its commitment to fostering academic exchange and its importance as a subject of study within the broader Latin American context. The city itself provides a rich backdrop for exploring themes related to urbanization, cultural heritage, and socio-political development in the region.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Navegar el colapso: reinventar la política, cuidar lo común

Latin America enters the late 2020s amid overlapping crises: climate breakdown, democratic backsliding, deepening inequality, and the erosion of public trust in institutions battered by the pandemic, austerity, and organized crime. Scholars across the region have revived debates on 'lo común' — the commons — drawing on Indigenous cosmologies, feminist care theory, and post-extractivist thought to imagine forms of politics beyond the neoliberal state. From the Chilean constitutional process to Colombia's 'Paz Total' and Brazil's post-Bolsonaro reconstruction, the search for new political grammars is underway even as authoritarian populisms gain ground. The topic asks how Latin American societies are navigating what many theorists describe as systemic collapse: ecological, epistemic, and institutional. It connects long-standing debates on dependency, coloniality, and buen vivir with newer literatures on care economies, just transition, and degrowth. Central tensions include the role of the state versus community self-governance, the politics of extraction in lithium and critical minerals, and the place of affect, memory, and spirituality in public life. Today the debate is sharpened by Milei's libertarian experiment in Argentina, the consolidation of Bukele's security model in El Salvador, and the fragility of progressive governments in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, and Chile. Reinventing politics while caring for the commons has become both an academic and an urgent civic question.

Constitutional Aspirations and Frustrations

Latin America has been a global laboratory for constitutional experimentation since the 1980s transitions from authoritarianism. Colombia (1991), Brazil (1988), Venezuela (1999), Ecuador (2008), and Bolivia (2009) produced ambitious charters incorporating social rights, plurinational recognition, and environmental protections. These texts raised aspirations that the state could be refounded to include historically excluded peoples and to constrain elite power. Yet the gap between constitutional promise and lived reality has fueled frustration. Chile's 2019 estallido social opened a constituent process that produced a progressive draft, rejected in 2022, followed by a conservative draft rejected in 2023 — leaving the Pinochet-era constitution in force. In Mexico, the López Obrador and Sheinbaum governments have pursued sweeping constitutional reforms, including the judiciary. Honduras, Peru, and Guatemala face recurring crises over the meaning and limits of constitutional order, while Cuba and Venezuela illustrate the use of constitutional change to entrench incumbents. The panel examines why constitutional moments succeed or fail, how courts mediate between popular sovereignty and minority rights, and what the recent wave of failed or contested processes tells us about the durability of Latin American constitutionalism.

Democracias Violentas

The concept of 'violent democracies,' developed by scholars such as Enrique Desmond Arias and Daniel Goldstein, captures a paradox central to contemporary Latin America: elections are largely free, civilian rule is the norm, yet homicide rates, state violence, and armed non-state actors coexist with — and sometimes are reinforced by — democratic institutions. Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Honduras, Ecuador, and Venezuela together account for a disproportionate share of global lethal violence despite being formally democratic. Historically, the unfinished transitions from civil wars and dictatorships left security forces unreformed, judicial systems weak, and impunity entrenched. Drug trafficking economies, mining and land conflicts, and the militarization of public security have produced new geographies of violence. Ecuador's rapid descent into a security crisis since 2021, Mexico's record homicide numbers, and the spread of extortion economies across Central America illustrate the regional pattern. The topic asks how violence reshapes citizenship, electoral competition, and the everyday exercise of rights, and whether mano dura responses — exemplified by Bukele's mega-prison model and its imitators — are compatible with democratic norms. It also engages feminist scholarship on femicide and the racialized geographies of state violence.

Republics Under Oligarchic and Popular Pressures

Latin American republics have long oscillated between oligarchic capture and popular mobilization. The 2010s commodity boom and bust, the pandemic, and the rise of digital media have intensified both poles. On one side, concentrated economic power — in agribusiness, extractives, finance, and media — shapes legislative agendas and judicial appointments. On the other, mass protests in Chile, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Haiti have repeatedly forced governments into crisis, while right-wing populist movements have mobilized middle-class anxieties against political elites. Scholarship has revisited classical republican theory to ask how Latin American polities can sustain a public sphere when economic inequality and political polarization corrode shared institutions. Cases such as Peru's serial presidential crises, Guatemala's struggle to seat Bernardo Arévalo against the 'pacto de corruptos,' and Argentina's libertarian turn illustrate how oligarchic networks and popular insurgencies can simultaneously destabilize republican governance. The panel considers comparative experiences of judicial reform, campaign finance, media regulation, and protest policing, and asks whether 'republicanism' remains a useful frame — or whether it obscures the coloniality and exclusion built into Latin American state formation.

Indigenous Peoples and Afro-descendants: Epistemologies and Knowledge

Indigenous and Afro-descendant movements have transformed Latin American politics and scholarship over the past four decades. Constitutional recognition of plurinationality in Bolivia and Ecuador, ILO Convention 169 ratifications, the 2015–2024 UN Decade for People of African Descent, and the rise of ethnoeducation and intercultural universities have institutionalized — partially — claims long advanced from below. Thinkers such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Lélia Gonzalez, Abdias do Nascimento, and Davi Kopenawa have reshaped how knowledge itself is conceived, challenging the coloniality embedded in Western academic disciplines. Yet recognition has often outpaced redistribution. Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities remain disproportionately affected by extractive frontiers, climate impacts, and racialized violence, from the Amazon to the Pacific coast of Colombia to quilombola territories in Brazil. Brazil's creation of a Ministry of Indigenous Peoples under Lula, Colombia's Petro government commitments, and Mexico's constitutional reform on Indigenous and Afro-Mexican rights mark important shifts, even as land conflicts intensify. The panel centers epistemologies — buen vivir, ubuntu-inflected Afro-diasporic thought, oral and ceremonial knowledge — as serious interlocutors for the social sciences and humanities, and asks how universities can decolonize without extracting from the communities they claim to honor.

Agrarian and Food Studies

Latin America is simultaneously a global breadbasket and a region of persistent food insecurity. The expansion of soy, palm oil, cattle, and avocado frontiers — driven by Chinese, European, and North American demand — has reshaped rural landscapes from the Brazilian Cerrado to the Gran Chaco and Mesoamerica. Agribusiness consolidation coexists with vibrant peasant, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant agroecology movements, and with La Vía Campesina's continued influence on global food sovereignty debates. The COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and climate shocks have driven food prices and hunger upward; FAO data show tens of millions of Latin Americans facing moderate or severe food insecurity. Land conflicts, assassinations of rural and environmental defenders (with Colombia, Brazil, Honduras, and Mexico among the deadliest countries globally), and disputes over agrochemicals, GMO seeds, and water rights structure the agrarian question today. The panel engages classical agrarian political economy alongside newer work on food sovereignty, gendered rural labor, agroecological transitions, and the geopolitics of fertilizer and commodity trade. It asks whether the region can reconcile its role as a commodity exporter with just transitions for rural communities.

Archives, Libraries and Digital Scholarship

Archives and libraries in Latin America carry the weight of colonial documentation, dictatorship-era repression files, and the records of social movements that have struggled to enter official memory. From Guatemala's Historical Archive of the National Police to Brazil's truth commission records, Argentina's ESMA archives, and community-based memory projects across the Andes, archival work is inseparable from human rights and historical justice. Digitization has opened new possibilities — open-access repositories, born-digital activist archives, digital humanities collaborations, and tools for computational analysis of colonial corpora — but also new risks: platform dependency, the precarity of digital preservation, unequal infrastructure between northern and southern institutions, and the ethical dilemmas of digitizing Indigenous and Afro-descendant heritage without community consent. Cuts to public universities and national libraries in several countries have deepened the precarity of the cultural infrastructure on which scholarship depends. The panel brings together archivists, librarians, and digital scholars to examine sustainable models for Latin American digital scholarship, the politics of metadata and access, and the role of archives in contesting authoritarian erasures.

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for LASA 2027 International Congress of Latin American Studies.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

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Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Cross-Cultural Communication

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

The states in play, with the data that shapes their stance

Mexico

Country dossier

Mexico June 2027

By committee

Frequently asked questions

Why it matters

How to prepare

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

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Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

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How to prepare

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Topics & background

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Frequently asked questions