XIX Seminário Internacional da Rede Ibero‑americana de Investigação sobre Globalização e Território (RII)

Name: XIX Seminário Internacional da Rede Ibero‑americana de Investigação sobre Globalização e Território (RII)
Start: 2026-10-07T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-10-09T00:00:00Z
Location: Curitiba

Oct 7–9, 2026Curitiba, BrazilIn-person

Registration open

The XIX Seminário Internacional da Rede Ibero-americana de Investigação sobre Globalização e Território (RII) convenes in Curitiba, Brazil, to delve into the multifaceted impacts of globalization on territorial dynamics. This international seminar serves as a critical platform for scholars and researchers to present and discuss contemporary issues at the intersection of global processes and local realities. The event fosters a comprehensive understanding of how global forces reshape regions, economies, and societies, particularly within the Ibero-American context.

Committees & topics

Topics
Urban and Regional Studies in Ibero-American Perspective · Urban and Regional Inequalities · Geopolitics and Geoeconomics · Globalization and Territorial Transformations · Multiscalar Dimensions of Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Transformations · Global Processes and Contemporary Productive Transformations · Climate Crisis and Socio-Environmental Conflicts · Contemporary Urban-Regional Processes and Socio-Spatial Inequalities

Why it matters

This seminar is significant because it addresses the ongoing and evolving challenges presented by globalization, a force that continues to redefine national and sub-national spaces. By focusing on the interplay between global trends and territorial specificities, the event contributes to a nuanced understanding of development, inequality, and cultural preservation in an interconnected world. The discussions are particularly relevant for policymakers and academics seeking to formulate effective strategies for sustainable development and regional integration.

The gathering in Curitiba, BRA, underscores the importance of regional perspectives in analyzing global phenomena. It offers an opportunity to examine how countries are navigating the complexities of globalization, from economic integration to cultural homogenization and resistance. The insights generated from such discussions are crucial for understanding the diverse experiences within the Ibero-American sphere and for identifying common challenges and innovative solutions. The seminar's focus on research and investigation ensures that discussions are grounded in empirical evidence and theoretical rigor, providing a solid foundation for future academic and policy work.

How to prepare

Delegates preparing for this seminar should focus on understanding the core tenets of globalization and its territorial implications. A review of concepts such as "geoeconomics" and "critical-geopolitics" would be beneficial. Participants should also consider how global processes manifest at local and regional scales, drawing on specific case studies or theoretical frameworks that illuminate these interactions.

Familiarity with the Model Diplomat lessons on "what-is-stakeholder-mapping" and "dynamic-analysis" could prove useful for understanding the various actors and forces at play in globalized territories. Additionally, exploring "hidden-stakeholders" and "engagement-strategies" might offer valuable perspectives on identifying and interacting with diverse interests affected by globalization. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the seminar, a broad understanding of economic, social, and environmental dimensions of globalization will enhance participation and engagement.

Country perspectives

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

Brazil

As the host nation, BRA is a central locus for discussions on globalization and territory, showcasing its unique developmental challenges and opportunities within the Ibero-American context.

Role in topic

BRA provides the geographical and cultural backdrop for the seminar, offering a rich environment for examining how global forces interact with local and national development trajectories. Its diverse regions and significant economic presence make it a compelling case study for the seminar's themes.

Topics & background

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

Urban and Regional Studies in Ibero-American Perspective

Urban and regional studies emerged as a distinct interdisciplinary field in the mid-twentieth century, drawing on geography, sociology, economics, and planning to understand how cities and regions are produced, governed, and transformed. In Ibero-America, the tradition was shaped by structuralist thought from ECLAC (CEPAL) in the 1950s and 1960s, by dependency theory, and by influential urban scholars such as Milton Santos, Manuel Castells, and Jordi Borja, who linked urbanization to peripheral capitalism and uneven development. The accelerated metropolization of Latin America after 1960—producing megacities such as São Paulo, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires—made the region a laboratory for theorizing informal settlements, peripheral expansion, and weak metropolitan governance. Today the field grapples with planetary urbanization, platform-mediated services, climate adaptation, and the financialization of housing and land. The Ibero-American Network on Globalization and Territory (RII), founded in 1996, has consolidated as one of the principal academic spaces where these debates circulate between Iberian and Latin American researchers, comparing experiences of decentralization, regional planning, and territorial cohesion across very different state structures.

Key players

Urban and Regional Inequalities

Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula display some of the most pronounced urban and regional inequalities in the world. In Latin America—where roughly 80% of the population is urban—segregation by income, race, and origin has been entrenched since colonial-era spatial orders and reinforced by twentieth-century industrialization that concentrated investment in a few metropolitan poles while leaving vast peripheries with deficient infrastructure, informal housing, and weak labor protections. ECLAC has consistently documented the region as the most unequal in the world by Gini coefficient, and this inequality is sharply territorialized between core and peripheral regions and within metropolitan areas themselves. In Iberia, regional inequality manifests differently: depopulation of the interior ("España vaciada"), north-south Portuguese asymmetries, and tensions between dynamic global cities (Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon) and lagging regions, now intensified by tourism-driven gentrification and short-term rental platforms. Across both shores, contemporary debates center on housing affordability, access to urban services, spatial justice, and whether decentralization and place-based EU- or CEPAL-style policies can narrow gaps that market forces and austerity have widened.

Key players

Geopolitics and Geoeconomics

The post-Cold War assumption that geoeconomics would supplant geopolitics has been overturned since the mid-2010s. The U.S.-China strategic rivalry, Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the weaponization of trade, sanctions, and semiconductor supply chains, and the contested governance of critical minerals and energy transitions have fused security and economic statecraft. Concepts such as "friend-shoring," "de-risking," and industrial policy revival (U.S. CHIPS and Inflation Reduction Acts, EU Green Deal Industrial Plan, China's dual circulation) define a new global landscape in which territory, infrastructure, and technology are again explicit objects of strategic competition. For Ibero-America the implications are significant: Latin America holds large shares of global lithium, copper, and food reserves, while Iberia sits at the EU's southern flank with growing roles in renewable energy and Atlantic logistics. Regional actors debate how to avoid becoming a passive arena of great-power competition, whether through ECLAC-style productive development, CELAC coordination, or selective engagement with China's Belt and Road and U.S.-led nearshoring initiatives.

Key players

Globalization and Territorial Transformations

Since the 1980s, the liberalization of trade and capital, the ICT revolution, and the reorganization of production into global value chains have profoundly reshaped territories. Milton Santos described a "technical-scientific-informational milieu" in which selected places are densely connected to global circuits while others are bypassed. In Latin America, structural adjustment, privatization, and commodity booms reoriented territorial development toward export enclaves—soy in the Southern Cone, mining in the Andes, oil in the Gulf and Orinoco—while industrial regions de-industrialized or were inserted as assembly platforms (maquila, automotive clusters). The current phase is marked by partial deglobalization, supply-chain reshuffling, digital platform economies, and the energy transition, all of which are redrawing territorial hierarchies. Logistics corridors, data centers, renewable energy mega-projects, and critical mineral frontiers are creating new "global" places while deepening old dependencies. The RII tradition examines how these flows materialize unevenly in cities, regions, and rural spaces across the Ibero-American world.

Key players

Multiscalar Dimensions of Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Transformations

Contemporary geopolitical and geoeconomic shifts cannot be read at a single scale. Decisions taken in Washington, Beijing, or Brussels cascade through national industrial policies, subnational development strategies, metropolitan labor markets, and specific community territories where mines, ports, plantations, or data centers land. Scholars such as Neil Brenner, Saskia Sassen, and Bob Jessop have argued for a multiscalar approach in which the "global" and the "local" are co-produced, and in which states rescale—upward to supranational blocs and downward to regions and cities—rather than simply retreat. In Ibero-America, the energy transition illustrates this clearly: lithium triangle decisions involve indigenous communities, provincial governments, national mining codes, regional integration schemes, EU raw materials policy, and Chinese and U.S. industrial strategy simultaneously. Similar multiscalar entanglements arise around semiconductors, agribusiness, migration governance, and climate finance, requiring analytical frameworks that move fluidly between scales rather than privileging the nation-state alone.

Key players

Global Processes and Contemporary Productive Transformations

Production today is being reshaped by digitalization, automation, the energy transition, and the partial reconfiguration of global value chains. Industry 4.0 technologies, platform labor, and AI-enabled services are altering what is produced, where, and by whom, while decarbonization commitments under the Paris Agreement are pushing massive reallocations of capital toward renewables, electric mobility, and critical minerals. At the same time, geopolitical tensions are encouraging nearshoring, reshoring, and selective protectionism, breaking with the hyperglobalization model of 1990-2015. For Ibero-America these shifts open both opportunities and risks. Mexico and parts of Central America gain from U.S. nearshoring; South American economies face renewed pressure to specialize in raw materials for the green transition; Iberia is positioning itself as a renewable energy and green hydrogen hub for Europe. Whether these transformations translate into upgrading, diversification, and decent work—or reinforce extractive, low-value-added insertions—is the central productive question facing the region's territories.

Key players

Climate Crisis and Socio-Environmental Conflicts

The climate crisis has moved from projection to lived reality across Ibero-America: prolonged droughts in the Southern Cone and Iberian Peninsula, catastrophic floods in Brazil's Rio Grande do Sul (2024), Amazon fires, heat waves, and accelerating glacier loss in the Andes. The IPCC's Sixth Assessment confirmed the region as highly vulnerable, with severe implications for water security, agriculture, biodiversity, and coastal cities. The Paris Agreement and the Escazú Agreement (in force since 2021), the first regional treaty guaranteeing rights of environmental defenders, form the principal frameworks shaping responses. Mitigation and adaptation strategies, however, generate their own conflicts. Mining for transition minerals, large hydropower, monoculture expansion, wind and solar mega-projects, and carbon-offset schemes increasingly clash with indigenous, peasant, and urban communities over land, water, and consent. Latin America remains the deadliest region for environmental defenders according to Global Witness. The challenge is to reconcile decarbonization with environmental justice, recognizing that the geography of the climate crisis is inseparable from histories of extractivism and territorial inequality.

Key players

Contemporary Urban-Regional Processes and Socio-Spatial Inequalities

Contemporary urban-regional processes in Ibero-America combine consolidated metropolitan expansion with new forms of peri-urbanization, logistics-driven territorial integration, touristification, and platform-mediated housing markets. After decades of neoliberal urban policy, the post-2008 and post-pandemic periods have intensified housing unaffordability, displacement, and the financialization of real estate, while remote work and digital platforms reorganize commuting patterns and intra-regional hierarchies. UN-Habitat's New Urban Agenda (Quito, 2016) and SDG 11 set normative aspirations, but implementation is uneven. Socio-spatial inequalities persist along multiple axes: income, race, gender, migration status, and access to infrastructure and environmental quality. Climate impacts fall disproportionately on peripheral and informal settlements, while gentrification and short-term rentals reshape historic centers from Lisbon and Barcelona to Mexico City and Buenos Aires. Debates within the RII focus on right-to-the-city frameworks, metropolitan governance, social housing, and how planning instruments can confront accumulation patterns that continually reproduce spatial injustice.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for XIX Seminário Internacional da Rede Ibero‑americana de Investigação sobre Globalização e Território (RII).

Recent reporting to ground your prep

China's New Strategy for Taiwan and Japan

Europe's June Heatwave: Infrastructure Crisis

Democrats Push SCOTUS to Protect Abortion Pil

Frederick Douglass Bridge Protest Disrupts DC

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

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

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

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

By committee

Frequently asked questions

XIX Seminário Internacional da Rede Ibero‑americana de Investigação sobre Globalização e Território (RII)

Oct 7–9, 2026Curitiba, BrazilIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Urban and Regional Studies in Ibero-American Perspective · Urban and Regional Inequalities · Geopolitics and Geoeconomics · Globalization and Territorial Transformations · Multiscalar Dimensions of Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Transformations · Global Processes and Contemporary Productive Transformations · Climate Crisis and Socio-Environmental Conflicts · Contemporary Urban-Regional Processes and Socio-Spatial Inequalities

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

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

Brazil

As the host nation, BRA is a central locus for discussions on globalization and territory, showcasing its unique developmental challenges and opportunities within the Ibero-American context.

Role in topic

Topics & background

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

Urban and Regional Studies in Ibero-American Perspective

Key players

Urban and Regional Inequalities

Key players

Geopolitics and Geoeconomics

Key players

Globalization and Territorial Transformations

Key players

Multiscalar Dimensions of Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Transformations

Key players

Global Processes and Contemporary Productive Transformations

Key players

Climate Crisis and Socio-Environmental Conflicts

Key players

Contemporary Urban-Regional Processes and Socio-Spatial Inequalities

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for XIX Seminário Internacional da Rede Ibero‑americana de Investigação sobre Globalização e Território (RII).

Recent reporting to ground your prep

China's New Strategy for Taiwan and Japan

Europe's June Heatwave: Infrastructure Crisis

Democrats Push SCOTUS to Protect Abortion Pil

Frederick Douglass Bridge Protest Disrupts DC

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

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

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

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

Country dossier

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

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Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

Related conferences

24th Brazilian Congress of International Law

24º Congresso Brasileiro de Direito Internacional

8º Seminário de Graduação e Pós-Graduação em Relações Internacionais da Associação Brasileira de Relações Internacionais - ABRI

Border Management & Technologies Summit AMERICAS 2027

LAAD Defence & Security 2027

IAME Brazil 2027 Conference

Frequently asked questions