The field of International Relations (IR) developed in response to the major international political phenomena of its time: the end of the First World War fostered the formation of the first areas of reflection on international affairs in Anglo-Saxon universities. International studies began in 1919 at Aberystwyth University with the aim of studying ways to prevent another war (Burchill & Linklater, 2009). This same objective led other institutions to begin developing IR, such as the Imperial War Museum in England. During the interwar period, IR study centers were established at various universities on both sides of the Atlantic, drawing on political science, international law, and history. As a result, IR has had an Anglo-Saxon character from its inception. Indeed, Esther Barbé (2007) states that the field's beginnings had a clear practical orientation, as its founders sought to combine theoretical analysis with (political) advice for guiding state foreign policy. Research agendas and theoretical reflections were associated, in their terms, “with the needs of humanity at each moment” (Barbé, 2007: 26). This also explains the fact that all the theoretical production of the first stage of the discipline was mainly of a normative type.

The link between academia and policymakers was based on the systematization of the field after World War II, where the disciplinary core would be what S. Hoffmann (1977) called "an American social science." That is, a science rooted in the realist tradition and based on the assumptions of the division (a product of the anarchic condition of the international system) of other social science disciplines. Thus, International Relations established its academic community thanks to the tools that realism offered as a mental map for understanding international affairs in the new (at that time) scenario of the Cold War. Furthermore, the close ties between the world of power and academia, whose researchers were at the "kitchen" of power, and the network of foundations that funded academia and served as a bridge between it and Washington, strengthened the central role of the United States.

However, this explanation of the origin and centrality of the US in this process can be refuted. Del Arenal (2015) argues that the dominant interpretation of IR as an "American social science" is more of a socially constructed image than an objective truth, derived from the fact that the discipline explains itself in the world following the Western and canonical narrative, which constitutes its mainstream, imposed as the only valid perspective, and which responds to the interests of US foreign policy. Therefore, he considers it necessary to consider the intellectual and institutional foundations of the discipline, which can be found in the second third of the 19th century, in the form of "pre-theories," situated not exclusively in the West (del Arenal, 2014).

Today, the construction of "global IR" It is a demand from the field that is linked to the process of making visible and denouncing Western and Westphalian centrism from Marxist, critical and postcolonial positions, as well as from the academy of the "Global South". (mainly, peripheral knowledge construction networks) (Tickner, 2002; Tickner & Waever, 2009). In fact, these criticisms are relevant and the call to transcend the North-South / East-West divisions allows for the development of all disciplines. In this sense, it is asserted that the distinction between the West and the "rest" is becoming less and less relevant in the distribution of real power. Therefore, the call for global IR was proposed as a disciplinary objective to incorporate pluralistic and inclusive perspectives, respectful of diversity, based on world history, integrating regions, regionalisms and area studies, and to avoid exceptionalism (Acharya, 2014). It is argued that IR faces new problems, actors, and voices that demand a significant rethinking and expansion of its theories, methods, and empirical horizons: not only because of the changing centers of power or the emergence of new powers, but also because of the importance of global problems, such as human rights violations, the subjugation of women and minorities, racism, financial crises, forced migration, terrorism, diseases, and climate change. The growing role of transnational actors such as international and regional institutions, social movements, terrorist networks and cross-border criminal gangs must be analyzed from the perspective of "global IR". On the other hand, other positions that acknowledge the criticisms point to the limitations of the proposals that are still emerging, since IR has not yet modified its central theoretical and methodological assumptions (Hurrell, 2016). Likewise, the fragmentation of peripheral circuits (whether due to their heterogeneity and cultural singularities, their geographical dispersion, diversity of interests, among others) prevents the development of a non-Western narrative that breaks with disciplinary ethnocentrism and the canonical gaze (Del Arenal, 2014:172). In other words, the debate about "globality" The discipline [...] is resolved between making visible a set of demands that are not new to those who produce knowledge from peripheral positions and the call to maintain the set of problems and central constructions of the field without challenging the conditions of knowledge production? (Perrotta, 2018, p. 30). Therefore, the current visibility of local IR academies is the result of the impact of global knowledge production, circulation, and consumption patterns in the field. This geopolitics of knowledge has given rise to local academia to influence the mainstream, which can lead to demands for greater inclusion in the core network. This greater presence of local academies in central discussions is structured in the regime of validation of academic knowledge, which is what shapes the current geopolitics of knowledge (Perrotta, 2018).

In the case of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), the development of International Relations (IR), despite the significant contributions of a number of academics, has been characterized by a meager development of autonomous theoretical frameworks. Initially, it focused on engaging with dominant theories from the global center (which in some cases involved editing and translating relevant texts for dissemination) and their "creative adaptation" (Tickner, 2002: 61) according to the region's interests and perspectives, concentrating on their instrumental use. It is worth noting that Latin American and Caribbean social theory has made a substantial contribution to the study of international affairs and that, once the discipline of IR was institutionalized, its need to differentiate itself from other social sciences led it to follow a path of specialization based on an Anglo-Saxon-Western perspective, relegating these local contributions to a secondary role.

Thus, this GT proposal aims to investigate how IR is currently developing in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), foster self-reflexivity within the field, and advance the visibility of our own body of thought. We propose to answer the following questions: What are the specific developments of IR in LAC? What is its relationship with the disciplinary mainstream? What characteristics do knowledge production patterns acquire in this particular field? How are IR students trained in LAC? How do IR social scientists influence the public agenda in our region?

In terms of their relevance, Tickner and Wæver (2009) argue that IR studies in Latin America and the Caribbean are constrained by US and European models. However, Devés Valdés (2013) identifies a distinct agenda for the field, focusing on issues such as development, the pursuit of autonomy, integration and cooperation, the challenges of state centrality, neoliberalism, and globalization as both challenges and opportunities. Raúl Bernal-Meza (2013) points out that structuralism, ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean), dependency theory, autonomism, and peripheral realism are trends that should be recognized as creative proposals with a current relevance in the regional landscape.

Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is a region marked by a dual identity: (a) it is faithful to enduring Western values, and (b) it embraces the aspirations of the developing world, such as peace, the democratic ideal, human rights, the social market economy, and adherence to the basic principles of international law (Russell & Tokatlian, 2002). These ideas help explain why IR theory in the region focused on the problems of international integration and development (Porcelli and Lagar, 2022). To a large extent, LAC literature, particularly in the 80s, bridged the conceptual gap between dependency analysis, autonomy, and traditional IR theories, while transcending the pessimistic conclusions derived from dependency (and realism) in terms of the possibility of autonomous action by weaker countries within the international system, developing a “Latin American hybrid” model (Tickner, 2002:56).

The emergence of Latin American contributions to International Relations (IR) is based on two sources: the Second Paradigmatic Debate and Center-Periphery theories. The first event marks the beginning of the decline of classical realism, due to the loss of state homogeneity in IR, a perspective adopted by the authors analyzed. The second source is linked, firstly, to ECLAC's reflections on the division of the international system into Center and Periphery and the need for endogenous strategies for regional development; and secondly, to Dependency Theory, which understands this phenomenon as a social, political, and cultural issue (Simonoff, 2012).

Therefore, it is necessary to recover a notion hitherto absent from the debate: understanding the disciplinary field of IR as a contested scientific field [as a system of objective relations between positions is the site of a competitive struggle, whose specific aim is the monopoly of scientific authority (?) defined as technical capacity and as social power (?) understood in the sense of the capacity to speak and act legitimately in matters of science, which is socially recognized to a given agent? (Bourdieu, 2000:76)]. Consistently, the current conditions of intellectual production must be understood within the framework of a geopolitics of knowledge, which has central and peripheral networks. Indeed, in the field of social sciences, the plurality of reality that could be considered Norths and Souths has already been made visible; there has also been reflection on the imposition of a colonial/modern/Eurocentric pattern on the different ways of knowing (Lander, 2003; Quijano, 2010). For this reason, we ask ourselves about the conditions of production of these concepts, and the consequences that this has had for the development of IR and its reproduction. Tickner and Wæver warn that "a division of labor has occurred in International Relations, whereby the US, the Anglo-Saxon world and a few places in Europe concentrate the production of theory, and the rest simply do not." (Tickner and Wæver, 2019:35). Indeed, as Peter Kristensen (2012) points out in his analysis of publication circuits, two phenomena occur in parallel: on the one hand, the proliferation of specific publications; on the other, the concentration of a set of publications—all of American origin. which group the largest number of citations referring to texts from the theoretical core. Also noteworthy is the scarce presence of European journals and the absence of non-Western journals within the analyzed universe. Finally, for Acharya and Buzan (2017) the discipline remains Western. Despite the efforts made, it ignores issues related to race and pre-Westphalian civilizations, does not deal with regions relevant to international society such as the Middle East, concentrates mainly on security issues and focuses on the US and Europe. Furthermore, it still fails to recognize the total marginalization of the Global South in the mainstream. On this issue, Del Arenal emphasizes that the Atlantic order manifests itself both in normative terms, postulates, values ​​and principles of the mainstream, and through "power structures, prevailing in the intellectual sphere, universities, research centers, publishing, private and public institutions, among which we include the US administration." (2014: 43). Therefore, the central knowledge production circuits of the discipline frequently validate the work of Latin American academics dedicated to autonomy, the link with the US, and regionalism. In contrast, theoretical contributions that aim to help understand international society as a whole are relatively invisible. Furthermore, the links with feminisms, decolonial studies and other disciplinary intersections, such as with cultural studies and education.

Thus, with the visibility of local IRs, the opening of (mainstream) disciplinary centers and the strength of networks of researchers in ALC, there is a process of self-reflexivity of the discipline that enables the encounter between different knowledge production networks.

The overall objective is to analyze the field of International Relations in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) to account for its local particularities and how it engages with the mainstream. The aim is to highlight the past and present local contributions of LAC to global IR. In this process, it is crucial to maintain a focus on its connection with other social sciences and epistemologies, especially those that incorporate diverse voices and perspectives into the disciplinary framework.

The specific objectives (SOs) are:

1- To analyze the formation of the disciplinary field in IR in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) to account for the existence of local and/or regional contributions to IR. The aim is to map autonomous theoretical developments (authors, concepts, institutional spaces and/or networks of knowledge production and circulation) and to evaluate the existence of "Schools" specific to the region.

2- To investigate the current state of IR in ALC by analyzing the institutionalized spaces of knowledge production and dissemination - undergraduate and postgraduate training in IR - with a view to analyzing the presence/absence of "local" schools and the disciplinary mainstream; to detect emerging themes (theories and concepts used) and the methodologies used.

3- Study the practices of the actors based on the analysis of research groups in RI to detect the strategies of intra-regional articulation and with extra-regional knowledge networks (mainstream & peripheral).

4- Investigate how researchers in International Relations in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) characterize the usefulness/usability of the knowledge produced. Establish professional integration profiles and typologies of social uses of science.

These objectives are linked across discussions on knowledge assessment in Latin America and the Caribbean (see Perrotta and Alonso, 2020, 2021) for this field and seek to articulate with the FOLEC. For these reasons, articulation with two working groups that analyze other knowledge production and its assessment is proposed.