The proposal presented below aims to continue the research and knowledge exchange work developed by the Working Groups (WGs) “Anti-imperialism: Discourses, Practices, Imaginaries” (2013-2016) and “Anti-imperialism, Democracy, and Modernization” (2016-2019), adding members of the WG “Post-Counterinsurgency and Security” (2016-2019). In both cases, the groups brought together researchers from different countries, academic institutions, and disciplines, interested in studying the anti-imperialist imaginary in different national contexts and historical moments. The discussions in all their diversity (which are reflected in the essays collected in the book “The anti-imperialist imaginary in Latin America”, published by CLACSO in 2015, the thematic dossier published in the Journal of the Inter-Chair Network of Contemporary Latin American History, year 4, no. 6, December 2017, as well as the articles compiled in the book “Confrontation of imaginaries: Anti-imperialism, democracy, modernization”, currently being edited by the “Dr. José María Luis Mora”, Mexico, and CLACSO, show that the revitalization of anti-imperialist thought and discourse in recent years is based on the recovery of topics, images and discourses of historical anti-imperialism. His study responds to the needs of a global and regional context that has shown, from the end of the Second World War to the present, that anti-imperialism has become an articulating axis and generator of identities for social movements, networks of intellectuals and political parties –most of them associated with left-wing and/or progressive political identities, not only Latin American but also African and Asian–, which recognize themselves as adversaries/critics of liberalism or neoliberalism. This political and cultural duality of “imperialism versus anti-imperialism” is compounded by the “center-periphery” contradictions, where the countries of the south – the “Global South” – have objectively rethought their place, their imaginaries, and the economic-political links that have prevailed in the implementation of the modern world-system. The system of representation imposed hegemonically by the North/West has been debated, where race, politics, modernity, religion and culture have become taxonomic devices that have generated opposing identities. Unlike the classic view of this concept, anti-imperialism has also been an organizing principle used to detract from and criticize, factually or discursively, processes that are identified in the collective imagination as "progressive or left-wing," such as the political-commercial relations that the former USSR maintained with Cuba and/or some parties in Latin America between 1960 and 1989, the participation of Cuban troops in the struggle for the liberation of the peoples of Asia and Africa, the current geo-strategic links that Russia has with countries in the region such as Venezuela and Bolivia, or simply the positions of China and India in markets outside their natural area such as the African and Latin American markets. The appropriation and use of anti-imperialism in these cases demonstrates that its appropriation and use is not exclusive to any particular ideology. What influence has anti-imperialism had on the shaping of identities in countries of the Global South? From what perspectives has it been analyzed? Who have been the main social actors that have legitimized the anti-imperialist discourse? How have other social and political actors – critical or openly opposed and hostile to the left and to the “progressivism” of the countries of the south – positioned themselves in the face of these discourses? To what extent has anti-imperialist discourse influenced the global left? What historical events and/or processes best exemplify this? Based on these questions, we propose the renewal of the GT for the period 2019 to 2022, with the purpose of reflecting on continuities, ruptures and adaptations of the anti-imperialist imaginary as an articulating axis of identities and legitimacy—opposed or not—from a transnational perspective from the Global South. The time frame chosen to explore the theme ranges from the final years of World War II to the regional scenarios that are present today. During the years of the world conflagration, there was a revival of anti-imperialist ideology in all the countries of the Global South – Latin America, Asia and Africa – placing the question of identity and sovereignty on the political and cultural agendas of most nations. Later, with the end of “bipolarity”, strong geopolitical, economic, and cultural changes occurred, thus creating new scenarios that inspire the identification and analysis of reconfigurations, problems, and the formulation of solutions both in the area of ​​government public policies, as well as in the political agendas of parties, social movements, and civil organizations. The time frame for the research and discussions to be carried out within the GT would begin in the mid-1940s, a time when relations between the United States and Europe with the countries of the Global South took a significant turn based on a series of historical events and processes that inevitably marked the future of these nations. The Korean War in Asia (1950-1953), the coup against the presidency of Jacobo Árbenz (1954) in Latin America, as well as the Algerian War of Independence (1950-1953) in North Africa - events mostly assisted by the covert and open intervention of the US and European colonial powers in each case - produced an anti-imperialist reaction in countless intellectuals, politicians, cultural expressions and social organizations in the countries of the Global South. Years later, the Cuban Revolution, and its socialist turn in 1961, as well as the beginning of the decolonization process in Asia and Africa, became moral forces that helped to revive that same idea (Ansaldi and Giordano, 2014; Montes de Oca, 2009, Sánchez Porro, 2016). Anti-imperialism, however, does not constitute a corpus elaborated in isolation from other ideas, but rather it was articulated and strained with other priority ideas for the subcontinents, such as modernization and democracy (Ansaldi and Funes, 1998; Rodney, 2011; Montes de Oca and Jiménez, 2016), and much less has it been exclusive to left-wing ideologies since it has been associated, for example, with the defense of “anti-Americanism” by far-right transnational organizations, such as the Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation (CAL) (Rostica, 2019). Later, with the beginning of the “post-Cold War” era, events such as the electoral defeat of Sandinismo in 1990, the peace processes in Central America, and the structural and political changes carried out by leading left-wing and progressive countries such as Russia, China, and Cuba, seemed to render anti-imperialist discourses obsolete, causing the notion of imperialism to lose relevance in the face of the spread of notions such as “empire,” “multitude,” and “alter-globalization,” all coined to characterize political subjects that would express the new logics of sociopolitical confrontation (Hardt and Negri, 2002: 15). Similarly, alongside the range of social actors who continue to redefine the cultural and identity corpus that has historically established anti-imperialism as a cohesive discourse, various approaches and analyses were added, especially with a transnational perspective on historical processes of conjuncture that marked the ideological development of the Global South – namely revolutions, social movements, integration bodies, political thought of some leaders, etc. Thus, the Global South and transnational perspectives on historical and social phenomena expose a field of solid, objective knowledge production, which has given it its own identity based on the use of specific methodologies different from classical approaches. An academic approach from such perspectives will allow the expansion of knowledge and guide interests along the always necessary path of knowledge that is achieved only collectively and in groups, with teaching and research benefits.

The central focus of the GT is on imaginaries, defined as a set of ideas and premises about the social order that combines assumptions about the factual and the normative, about how things "really" work and how they should work (Taylor, 2006), which would allow us to make visible the confrontations of ideologies in political projects, agendas and public policies, as well as in proposals from social movements and other actors in civil society. The aim is to work with a flexible conceptualization of anti-imperialism, temporally and spatially broad, that allows the analysis of currents of thought, discourses and practices that reconfigured identities in the Global South, as well as political projects – identified with progressivism or not – that had a marked influence outside their natural borders. In all cases, the aim is to make accurate descriptions and properly circumscribe the scope of anti-imperialism as a body of ideas contrary to the imperialist interests of the North – the United States, financial capital, commercial and communication oligopolies, etc. – in complicity with national elites, military forces, and the subordination of states and the economy. Thinking about anti-imperialism as an imaginary allows us to transcend the study of ideologies and social theories, and take into account the images, histories and collective conceptions that make common practices and shared feelings of legitimacy possible (Baczko, 1991; Taylor, 2006). The GT's general objective is to explain and critically interpret how different social, political, and cultural actors – seeking legitimacy and consensus – have articulated or confronted anti-imperialism from the Global South in a transnational perspective. Specifically, the objectives we set ourselves are: 1) To describe how various social, political and cultural actors have used the anti-imperialist imaginary, from the Global South, based on interdisciplinary, multi-spatial and multi-methodological research. 2) To study the identity reconfigurations that have occurred in the Global South, based on the emergence of an anti-imperialist discourse and the ideologies of the social, political and cultural actors investigated. 3) Explore those historical events, figures, and processes that became references for anti-imperialist discourse and imagination in the Global South. 4) Study anti-imperialism from a transnational perspective, attempting to establish similarities and differences between national cases, as well as determining ruptures and continuities based on the historical dimension. The objectives outlined above are attempted to be met from a vision that recognizes the importance of reflecting on and writing from our own perspective an alternative history of internationalization, hegemony and its asymmetries, its silences and injustices, from transnational perspectives. They express the aspiration to build analyses that go beyond the local-national framework, taking into account, among other things, the circulation of practices, discourses and networks beyond the narrow borders of the nation-state (Weinstein, 2013). This leads to an alternative spatial framework to acknowledge the mediation of the international context in national realities, recognizing multiplicities, but also connections, intersections and links, which allow us to overcome the limitations of comparative studies and studies on globalization, in order to capture the specificities inherent in the phenomenon of simultaneity. Here, the experience of modernity and modernization disregards traditional binaries, based on notions such as global and local, development and underdevelopment, North and South, also opting for a vindication of particularities that emphasizes the need and importance of building, developing and vindicating a vision from the South (Devés Valdés, 2003; Altamirano, 2010; Acosta, Ansaldi, Giordano and Soler, 2015). This reflection is imperative in order to relativize and challenge the unidirectional and homogenizing nature of capitalist globalization; the so-called “peripheral contexts” of Latin America, Asia and Africa offer divergent questions and answers, in line with their needs and aspirations, and capable of impacting, enriching and recreating new interpretive paradigms and other ways of being and doing in the world. Finally, it is important to emphasize that, even though the proposed topics, debates, and knowledge exchange have a broad scope, focusing these events from a Latin American perspective is crucial. This is because the dual role of many members of the Working Group—as social scientists, but also as observers and co-participants in some of the topics and processes to be analyzed—places us as exceptional protagonists in the production and promotion of knowledge.