Advanced Diploma in Critical Legal Thought in Our America

Class 1: The capitalist socio-economic formation and the state political form. Social forms, social and power relations. Derivation of social forms: commodity form, value form, state political form, and legal form. Relative autonomy of the state.

Teacher: Dr. Alysson Leandro Mascaro

Conceptual summary of the classThis class will address the topic of the State as a historically determined social form. As a political form, the State is a derivative of the capitalist socioeconomic formation. Under this system, political economy is not limited to the strictly economic but also constitutes a constellation of social relations of production and exchange, as well as legal and power relations, fundamentally underpinned by other social forms such as commodities and value. The class will also address the relative autonomy of the State and the class struggle that manifests itself within it. The State is thus viewed as a field of struggle.

Class 2: The State in Latin America and the Caribbean: The Chilean Experience 1970-73. Crisis of Liberal Democracy. Ultraliberalism and the Far Right. Contradictions under Latin American Progressivism. The State as a Field of Struggles. Domination and Hegemony.

Teacher: Dr. Beatriz Rajland. UBA and Foundation for Social and Political Research (FISYP)

Conceptual summary of the classWe will discuss current issues related to the State from a Marxist perspective, focusing particularly on the State in Latin America and the Caribbean. The capitalist state is a product of capital as a social relation, and is itself a specific social relation, which is the practical exercise of domination. But it is, at the same time, a space of struggle contested by the subordinate classes.
We will work on the Gramscian concept of relative autonomy that ultimately "succumbs" to the interests of the dominant class, in relation to its hegemonic reproduction.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, we must draw from our own original sources, from our own social makeup.
Nation-states whose governments attempt any profound change or any process that might affect the interests of big capital are harassed and/or blocked, causing great hardship for their populations. This situation is used by some progressive governments to justify their backsliding. There is another option, which involves the political decision to confront capital, with broad popular participation. Why is this option not generally adopted? 
Herein lie the contradictions of the conception of the State under Latin American progressivism. We need to delve deeper into the analysis of so-called progressive projects, their weakness, and their cult of pragmatism in the name of stopping a right wing that was already within their own ranks. The need to build an alternative, to create subjectivities willing to take structural measures and not merely discursive ones. Developing the crisis of liberal democracy. Counterinsurgency and counterrevolutionary state. Current trends of strengthening the right and even neo-fascist far right, with programs of liquidation of rights, conquests, and repression, privatizations and maximum adjustment.

The challenge is to ask ourselves, to analyze why and how we got to this point.

Class 3: The debate on the progressive transformation of the state's political form and the push for its increasing replacement by a communal or community-based form. The communal state of Venezuela, the community-based state of Bolivia, and the Cuban socialist transitional state.

Teacher: Dr. Mylai Burgos Maramoros (UAM)

Conceptual summary of the classThe State expresses itself as an institutional political mediation materially constituted by antagonistic social relations with economic, political, social, ideological, and cultural-symbolic expressions. The State, thus seen as a social and power relation, has a historical and dialectical character. Classical Marxism presented a typology for the State based on the modes of production, where it places, according to social relations and historical processes, the formation of States as slave-owning, feudal, capitalist and socialist, prescribing the abolition of state mediation in a communist society.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, between the second half of the 20th century and throughout the 21st century, revolutionary transformation processes have taken place that must be studied through the lens of social and power relations outlined above, characterized by transitions and/or the progressive extinction of modern or non-modern state political forms. Examples include Cuba following the 1959 revolutionary process, and Venezuela in 1999 and Bolivia in 2006 after the so-called progressive governments came to power through electoral processes.

The Cuban socialist transitional state, which has been under construction for 65 years, is a constant process of economic, political, and legal transformations where cycles of transition, consolidation, and crisis can be studied. Today, it has the characteristics of a socialist state governed by the rule of law and social justice, as regulated in the Cuban Constitution recently approved in 2019. In Venezuela and Bolivia, two far-reaching constituent processes were carried out, establishing a different set of principles for that state social relationship, based on communal power and the communal form respectively.

The objective of this session is to account for the transformative praxis from these socio-political processes and their state political forms, taking into account their real configurations, between advances and limitations.

Class 4: The right

Teacher: Dr. Carlos Rivera Lugo

Conceptual summary of the classContrary to the prevailing conception of law in bourgeois society, in which law seems to arise from law itself—an abstract law reduced to a formal norm divorced from its historical and social context—this approach will address law as a social form that, on the one hand, is derived from capital and, on the other, also serves to order the social and power relations required for its reproduction. It begins with an understanding of the intimate relationship between fact and law: law as the formal recognition of facts with normative force. The real character of the prescription, interpretation, or application of law is the result of the actual balance of power among legal subjects, who are, in fact, social subjects constituting specific social and power relations. Hence the urgency of putting an end to the pernicious fetishism of legal form as if it were something natural, neutral, and eternal. In recent times, we have seen how the subsumption of legal form to the interests of capital has been laid bare. This has plunged legal form into crisis. From the bourgeois state of law, we have moved to a de facto or state of exception. The ever-increasing indeterminacy experienced by legal norms leads to their growing inability to mediate conflicts, and instead, they have been openly supplanted by the effectiveness of force as the criterion of validity. More than the abstract rights of each legal subject, what ultimately prevails is the actual balance of power. Hence the renewed debate surrounding the concrete conditions assumed by the historical process of the progressive extinction of the legal form as the predominant mode of social regulation and the rise of a new non-legal and communitarian mode of normativity as the expression of a new non-capitalist socioeconomic formation.

Class 5: Legal production in the context of accumulation by dispossession: privatization of public law and legal structures of dispossession

Teacher: Dr. Aleida Hernández Cervantes. Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Sciences and Humanities, UNAM

Conceptual summary of the classThe purpose of this class is to offer an analytical and critical overview of the production of regulations resulting from the processes of economic globalization, especially those related to the current phase of capitalism (accumulation by dispossession).
The normative plurality of our times has given rise to new producers of law, including international financial organizations, transnational lobbies, and organizations that contest the meaning and content of current legal regulations. These are material sources of law born from processes of accumulation by dispossession, which place the privatization of the public and the commons at their center. This has brought about substantial changes in the relationship between the public and private spheres; it is possible to speak of a public-private partnership, the privatization of public law, and legal structures of dispossession, to mention just a few of the legal manifestations of these changes.
From a critical legal perspective, we are obliged to account for the characterization of these new transnational legal productions of a neoconservative nature, as well as the consequences they generate for the existence and full exercise of social, collective and natural rights.

Class 6: The legal war

Teachers: Dr. Carlos Rivera Lugo (University of Puerto Rico) and Mg. Marcelo Maisonnave (National University of Rosario)

Conceptual summary of the classThe original use of the concept of “lawfare” by John Carlson and Neville Yeomans in 1975 essentially constitutes a critique of the adversarial, instrumental, and commercial nature inherent in law itself, at least in its Western form. As such, law becomes a weapon for waging war by other means. That is “lawfare”: adversarial and accusatory words, laws, and judicial processes. And, according to these authors, to overcome the structural limitations of law, it would be necessary to promote an alternative mode of social regulation, anchored in societal, communal, and consensual norms. Subsequently, the concept of “lawfare” followed a different path, far removed from this initial critique of the very form of Western law. On the one hand, beginning in 2001 in the United States, “lawfare” has been characterized within national security doctrines as a weapon at the service of insurgent movements. It is also used as a tool by progressive movements or groups against right-wing governments, rulers, former rulers, and others, or those allied with the US, to hold them accountable for crimes against humanity. Another aspect of this exclusive attribution of legal warfare or “lawfare” to a single political sector is its current use in Latin America to refer to the “misuse” of the liberal-capitalist rule of law, including its judicial system, to persecute rulers, former rulers, or representatives of the left in general. However, beyond the conceptual disputes surrounding “lawfare,” if we consider the reality of the material deployment of legal warfare in the contemporary world, it is, fundamentally, nothing other than the strategic and combative use of the law by both sides. We must overcome the legal fetishism that leads to the denial of this strategic understanding of “lawfare” and legal warfare in general.

Class 7: The constitutionalism of Our America in dispute.

Teacher: Dr. Alejandro Medici

Conceptual summary of the classIn this session of the diploma course we will address the emergence of a “new transformative regional constitutionalism” based on popular constituent processes generated from social conflict resistant to the neoliberal financial and extractivist accumulation modality of the world system of modern historical/colonial patriarchal capitalism.
These processes are condensed into attempts to refound the modern/colonial capitalist state in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, embodied in new constitutions that, at least in their texts and in the political intent of the projects they mediate, justify the adjectives "new" and "transformative" to describe this stage. Undoubtedly, beyond the difficulties, advances, and setbacks, due to the experience of social and constituent struggle from which they arise and their content, these constitutions mark a stage in global and regional constitutionalism. Today we find ourselves in a scenario of contested projects where the liberating and decolonizing project of the new regional constitutionalism stands out.
We are witnessing a clash of projects (those of modern/colonial capitalism in its current phase) versus those of the people. Regional constitutionalism is strained by these competing projects across the diverse chronotopes of Our America.

Class 8: Venezuela's combative constitutionalism against coups and foreign intervention. The constitutive impulse of the communal form as a new power structure ("new geometry of power") beyond the State.

Teacher: Dr. Sonia Boueiri Bassil. University of Los Andes of Mérida-Venezuela

Conceptual summary of the classThe Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela was the first and only one in its history to be the product of an intense participatory process involving diverse sectors of society, which imbued it with a strong sense of belonging and legitimacy that seems to endure to this day. Approved in a referendum with 72% of the vote, it was undoubtedly the most widely read document of its time. This December 15, 2024, marks its 25th anniversary.
The Bolivarian Revolution's bold questioning of capitalism as a "successful model" has been met with multiple and fierce attacks during that same time: military coups, assassination attempts, oil and electricity sabotage, psychological operations and media manipulation, economic warfare (and sanctions) and other forms of interventionism.
In its maturation, with the strengthening of Popular Power based on the principles of participatory and protagonistic democracy, this historical project has as its closest horizon the construction of the Communal State (EC), leaving behind the old State model.
According to the Organic Law of Communes, the EC is the “Form of political and social organization, founded on the democratic and social State of law and justice established in the CRBV, in which power is exercised directly by the people, through communal self-governments, with an economic model of social ownership and endogenous and sustainable development, which allows the achievement of the supreme social happiness of Venezuelans in socialist society. The fundamental cell of the EC is the Commune.”
This evolution involved testing organizational structures within the framework of Participatory Public Management to refine the conditions for direct participation in the exercise of power. The principle of self-government, the structure of the Communal Parliament, and the proposal for Communal Justice are also integral to the Commune. A critical analysis of this political development will be the objective of this class.

Class 9: Other refounding processes: assessment and perspectives. New developments in Cuban constitutionalism in defense of socialism. The constitutional crisis in Bolivia. Constitutional regression in Ecuador.

Teacher: Dr. Albert Noguera. University of Valencia (Spain).

Conceptual summary of the classSince the early 1990s, Latin American countries have experienced a strengthening of the idea of ​​constitutionalism and the emergence of constituent processes that have led to new constitutions in countries such as Colombia (1991), Venezuela (1999), Ecuador (1998 and 2008), Bolivia (2009), Mexico City (2016), and Cuba (2019). These texts, along with other failed constitutional projects such as Chile's 2022 constitution, create a unique and original constitutional form, recognizable in many elements that are clearly different from, and especially provocative of, what had traditionally been considered politically correct in liberal constitutional doctrine.
The objective of this session is to see what are the various factors that allow the emergence of a new constitutionalism in Latin America, what are the characteristics that make this an original model clearly differentiated from European constitutionalism and what we can say are, ten years later, the main limits or problems that these texts have encountered for their deployment in each of their respective countries, with special attention to the cases of Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador and Chile.

Class 10: International law in a period of geostrategic transition

Teacher: Dr. Carlos Rivera Lugo

Conceptual summary of the classThis paper will analyze the challenges facing international law today, particularly its weakening in the 21st century. It will begin with the theoretical proposal of Eugeni B. Pashukanis (1891-1937) regarding the nature of international law in periods of transition, such as the present, in which a restructuring of power relations is taking place at the international level. Historically, international law has been de facto a law of domination at the service of capitalist powers and states, although it has also been a field in which class and people struggles against that domination have unfolded. Legal relations, both national and international, are in this sense ultimately mediated by force. However, periods of transition are characterized by a series of conflicts and crises resulting from the fact that those who have dominated until now are no longer able to maintain absolute dominance, while the new pole or poles of power emerging and pushing for a new balance of power in the world have not yet managed to consolidate and impose themselves. Even if international law no longer serves the dominant powers to impose their will as it has until now, it begins to experience a problematic existence. Hence the current insistence of the United States and the European Union on unilaterally imposing a new and biased “rules-based international order” in place of international law. From this conceptual framework, the nature of the current conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine will be critically examined, as well as their growing geopolitical impact on Latin America and the Caribbean in the face of the current reconfiguration of power relations in the world.

Class 11: Unconventional warfare and the law: the case of Unilateral Coercive Measures against Venezuela.

Teacher in charge: Dr. Sonia Boueiri Bassil. School of Criminology, Faculty of Legal and Political Sciences, University of Los Andes, Mérida, Venezuela

Conceptual summary of the classIn recent years, other forms of warfare, distinct from traditional warfare (or sometimes combined with it), have been intensifying worldwide, expressed in various terms: hybrid, multifaceted, multidimensional, asymmetric, and comprehensive warfare. So-called economic, commercial, and financial wars, which are carried out especially through Unilateral Coercive Measures (UCM)—misnamed sanctions—seek to neutralize the attacked state, preventing it from defending itself or implementing a development model different from the imperial one, and to cause the material and psychological deterioration of its society, with the aim of gradually provoking widespread collapse (Angiolillo, 2020).

UCMs are measures applied by states, groups of states, or regional organizations without the authorization of the Security Council, or exceeding its authorization, against states, individuals, or entities, to compel them to do what they do not voluntarily wish to do. They violate international principles (the right to development, non-interference, self-determination of peoples, and freedom of trade and navigation). Currently, almost one-third of the world's population is a victim of them to a greater or lesser degree.

Since 2015, Venezuela has received 930 MCUs and other restrictive and/or punitive measures. The U.S. State Department said on January 9, 2018: “The pressure campaign against Venezuela is working…it is a total economic collapse. So our policy is working.”
As a consequence, almost all socioeconomic indicators have been affected: increased maternal and infant mortality, malnutrition, resurgence of diseases that had already been overcome, deterioration in the quality of services, and with a working class receiving the lowest basic salary in Latin America.

We will address, from a critical perspective, how these mechanisms operate, their characteristics and consequences, their effectiveness despite their extraterritorial nature and violation of human rights, and their opacity within the 'international order'.

Class 12: The US hybrid war against Cuba

Teacher in charge: Dr. Mylai Burgos Matamoros. Academy of Law, National Autonomous University of Mexico.

Conceptual summary of the classCuba has been subjected to a multidimensional war waged by the United States, employing both conventional and unconventional methods, since the triumph of the revolutionary process in 1959. Between the 60s and 90s, it was subjected to terrorist actions, mostly orchestrated by or with the acquiescence of U.S. government agencies. These included invasions, assassinations of political leaders, and attacks on economic and social targets through arson, explosions, and biological weapons, all with the consequent impact on the Cuban population. Noam Chomsky has argued that Cuba has been the country most subjected to terrorist violence since 1959, with the U.S. government acting as its principal aggressor (Chomsky, 2005: 29-42).

This has always been accompanied by the economic and trade war waged through the US embargo against the island since 1962. The embargo has limited Cuba's economic relations with all types of economic actors, whether from the US or not, imposing countless sanctions on anyone with commercial ties to Cuba. The accumulated damages from all these unilateral coercive measures amount to $147,853.3 million (almost $1,378,000,000 today due to currency depreciation). The total human cost is incalculable (National Group for the Implementation of the 2030 Agenda; 2021).

But it doesn't end there. Simultaneously, the island has been subjected to media and psychological warfare during the same period, waged by the very hegemonic power structures of information and communication. The objective has been to create imbalances, confusion, and tension through lies, stigmatization, and manipulation, in order to generate degrading opinions about the island's political and economic system externally, and internally, to attempt processes of social rupture.

The objective of this session is to address the actions of the US against Cuba, within the conceptual framework of hybrid warfare, by making a relational analysis from a historical, political and legal perspective.

Class 13: The ongoing restructuring of the international order

Teacher in charge: Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein. UNFA, Venezuela.

Conceptual summary of the classFor five centuries, the Atlantic Ocean, and Europe in particular, has been the center of global power. The emergence of the United States as an imperialist power at the end of the 19th century began to reshape this dominance. The two shores of the North Atlantic became the centers of power. This was definitively established after the United States purchased Europe through the Marshall Plan.

At the end of the war, consensus was reached in the political and economic spheres, but not in military and security matters, so the United States created NATO in 1949, which meant the military occupation of Europe by peaceful means and the obligation of the countries of the Old Continent to pay Washington for its security.

This process of expansion, control, and global dominance, which, now without the counterweight of the Soviet Union, proceeded relentlessly over the last three decades, reached a breaking point when the West directly threatened the security of Russia, another nuclear power. Its inevitable response in February 2022 has definitively shaped the dynamics generated by these events.
It is in this context that a new era and a new world are taking shape. The primary center of global power is shifting from the North Atlantic to the vast Eurasian landmass, where the United States has no influence. Eurasia is advancing in the development of instruments of cooperation and integration without US interference, employing methods that do not aim for subjugation or underdevelopment, while simultaneously guaranteeing peace based on respect for self-determination and sovereignty.
In a broader context, the BRICS (which already have a higher GDP than the G-7) have received expressions of interest from around 20 countries to join, forming the primary link of the emerging world.

Class 14: The growing delegitimization of the OAS and the emergence of CELAC, and other non-tutelage forums in our America

Teacher in charge: Dr. Luis Lorenzo Córdova Arellano. Faculty of Law, UNAM

Conceptual summary of the classCritics of the inter-American system see in the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) a real possibility for the region to (progressively) become a relevant actor at the international level, without the "tutelage" of the US.

Can the subcontinent be integrated by establishing an institutional framework within CELAC? If so, what type of institutional framework should it adopt? Would it inherit the institutional framework of the OAS, similar to how the UN inherited that of the League of Nations?

CELAC: is a regional mechanism for integration, the most important since the Amphictyonic Congress of 1826 convened by Simón Bolívar; the most important integrationist forum of the 16 existing forums in the region, the only one that brings together all 33 countries of the region (the 34th country should be Puerto Rico); a superior mechanism for political coordination, which arose as a result of the Rio Group; a pre-integrationist forum that functions through summits, meetings and pro tempore presidencies, without the presence of Canada and the US; a relevant geopolitical fact partly motivated by the 2008 financial crisis.

Its mere existence is already relevant, especially in the face of the collapse of the OAS.

CELAC is a pre-integration forum of independent strategic regionalism that adheres to the principle of ideological pluralism, primarily because it is not subject to the limitations of a "Cold War" situation, as was the case with the founding of the OAS; a forum in a pre-integration stage due to the lack of intergovernmental and supranational bodies, but a relevant geopolitical fact for bringing together all the countries of the region without the tutelage of the US; a forum with integrationist aspirations, founded on principles of complementarity and non-duplication and of democracy with peaceful development and social justice for all, and therefore, for its operation, it does not require replacing any regional mechanism.

Class 15: The power of money in global hegemony: The fall of the petrodollar and the reconfiguration of a new global monetary and financial architecture based on respect for international law, the self-determination of peoples, and multipolarity.

Teacher in charge: Pasqualina Curcio Curcio. Simón Bolívar University of Venezuela

Conceptual summary of the class: For 75 years, the United States has maintained monetary and financial hegemony since the 1944 agreement that the dollar would be the world's reserve currency. In 1971, the US government unilaterally decided to suspend the dollar's convertibility to gold and announced the creation of "trust-based" currencies. In 1976, together with Saudi Arabia, the United States created the petrodollar. They decided that oil could only be purchased in dollars, which allowed them to consolidate monetary and financial hegemony through the SWIFT payment system. This system has given the US the power to unilaterally apply coercive measures and financially blockade hostile nations.
However, the economic and financial crisis in the United States, the fall of the petrodollar, and the need for global economic, monetary, and financial restructuring are becoming increasingly evident.

Since 1970, the United States has maintained a trade deficit and the world's highest debt, exceeding $35 trillion—an amount unpayable even with all the gold in the world. Its reserves cover only 2% of its debt, while Russia has enough to pay 125% of its debt, and China has reserves covering 142%. The dollar has been losing confidence for several years now.
In this context, initiatives for global monetary and financial reconfiguration have emerged, proposed by the BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Latin America (the SUCRE), among others, to which we must add Saudi Arabia's decision to abandon the petrodollar and sell oil to China in yuan, among others.

The objective of this module is to review and analyze the initiatives to reconfigure the global monetary and financial system within the framework of international law, the self-determination of peoples and multipolarity.

To participate, it is essential that you register using the online form.

Upon completion of the registration process, you will receive a confirmation in your email.

Classes will begin in June and will conclude in September 2024.

All registered participants will receive the necessary instructions to access the classes, bibliography and discussion forums through the CLACSO Virtual Training Space.

Accessing and navigating the Virtual Learning Environment is very simple and user-friendly. In any case, a technical and academic support team will always be available to you.

Exceptional criteria: In exceptional cases, and within the first month of the start of the Advanced Diploma program, students may request to withdraw from the cohort and rejoin the following year. In all cases, the reasons for the request must be submitted in writing. After that period of time has elapsed since the start of the course, no requests will be accepted.

Money paid will only be refunded in cases where the organizing institutions decide to cancel the activity. 

Payment can be made in one installment by credit card, bank deposit, or bank transfer. We also offer the option of paying in 3 installments.

Yes. There will be discounts for students belonging to CLACSO Member Centers and CLACSO Associated Centers, for CLACSO Associate Researchers, and for all those who pay within the discount period.