The world is witnessing an accelerated and conflictive process of epochal transition, in which major global actors—state and non-state, national and transnational—are intensifying their struggle for a dominant or hegemonic role in the emerging new international system. In this context, Latin America and the Caribbean, along with other peripheries in Asia and Africa (and even marginalized parts of Europe), are emerging as key spaces for the reconfiguration of global power and the economy. This occurs in a world brimming with emancipatory opportunities, but also fraught with dangers—economic crisis, social disintegration, military conflicts, genocide, ecosystem collapse—especially for subordinate subjects and countries.

Key categories of critical academia, Latin American and Caribbean social sciences, and peripheral intellectuals, such as empire, imperialism, leading power, world-system, colonization, coloniality of power, neocolonialism, internal colonialism, dependency, hegemony, and interventionism, far from becoming obsolete, re-emerge with all their analytical potential as essential keys to understanding and interpreting the new "signs of the times." 

Despite the historical continuity of these phenomena, between the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of the 20th century (and even before) and the emergence of the so-called "war on terror" at the beginning of the 21st, the political economy, objectives, actors, narratives, doctrines, and mechanisms of imperial and neocolonial intervention were substantially modified. Fourth-generation warfare, hybrid warfare, cognitive warfare, color revolutions, the "new Operation Condor," and other concepts were developed to elucidate the pace, characteristics, and scope of these far-reaching transformations.

Furthermore, the ongoing hegemonic transition, the emergence of a multipolar world, and the decline of the United States (but also of other Western powers such as the European powers and Japan) in different areas of its economy, society, politics, diplomacy, and culture have forced the old hegemon to update its old imperialist doctrines and corollaries and its "national security" strategies (in reality, transnational intervention), with a hemispheric retreat that attempts to regain control of its dominion from Alaska to Patagonia, with projections toward the Antarctic continent, with new militarization movements that seek to respond to the challenge presented by emerging powers, progressive and left-wing governments, and the anti-imperialist resistance movements that were on the rise in the early years of this century.

Meanwhile, in other regions, such as Africa, policies of territorial balkanization are intensifying due to the intervention of Western powers and some Arab countries. We can consider the devastating military intervention in Libya in 2011 as a prime example, but we find precedents in the territorial fragmentation of the Democratic Republic of Congo during the wars of 1996-2003 and the secessionism of Puntland and Somaliland within the Somali conflict of the 90s. Currently, countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, with geostrategic interests in Sudan, have resorted to using foreign mercenaries and funding paramilitary groups that take the form of what is known as "armed Islamism." Conversely, we observe a series of "peace processes," such as in eastern Congo, where the United States, as a third party, seeks to obtain rare earth concessions through weak forms of security and arbitration. 

Simultaneously, a number of sovereignist military governments, through initiatives such as the Alliance of Sahel States, seek to guarantee the territorial integrity of post-colonial states through subregional agreements, particularly in the face of the advance of these same irregular armed groups, and to force powers like France to withdraw from their former colonial positions, abandoning their failed securitization project. Meanwhile, in North Africa, Morocco prolongs and intensifies its outsourced colonial policy in Western Sahara. Given the retreat of the United States and the European Union on the continent, and under the multipolar umbrella, a conflictive hegemonic transition is unfolding, framing the phenomena described above. This is manifested not only in the positions lost by the West, but especially in the growing presence of global powers like China and Russia, which have gained significant influence through trade, financial, infrastructure, and military cooperation agreements.

In West Asia, the escalating Palestinian genocide in the Gaza Strip is shocking the entire region, while settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is intensifying. Meanwhile, the Israeli colonial entity has been experimenting on the ground with new and advanced technologies of death through the mass use of drones, spyware, and artificial intelligence. With the complete devastation of Gaza now complete, new forms of "governance" are being tested through sham humanitarian aid organizations and the encouragement of local and external groups capable of managing the fragmentation of the territory, either to render it completely uninhabitable or to facilitate its future absorption by the Israeli colonial entity. Syria, following the fall of Bashar al-Assad and the rise of Abu Mohammad al-Golani and the HTS group, is another prime example of post-conflict territorial reorganization, which also reveals the close alliance between Western colonial powers, transnational terrorism, radicalized religious groups, and paramilitary structures. Meanwhile, Iran, the main regional power opposed to the West, is massively affected by sanctions and other mechanisms of economic warfare.

In Europe, the war in Ukraine, increasingly privatized and mediated by transnational mercenaries, has reconfigured all the balances of power. In response, the European Union has initiated a massive rearmament process and increased military spending to meet the new targets demanded by NATO, foreshadowing scenarios of growing regional conflict, a greater preponderance of the military-industrial complex, and a return to conscription. Meanwhile, industrial activity is plummeting in Germany and other countries, intolerant rhetoric against migration, feminism, and diversity is on the rise, far-right groups are gaining strength and attaining state power, and the "old continent" is condemning itself to complete geopolitical irrelevance, entirely subject to the directives of Donald Trump. Furthermore, the war has fostered new forms of cognitive warfare, greater media manipulation, and the proliferation of censorship mechanisms. In this scenario of militarization and rearmament, a full-scale war with Russia, which is also subject to extensive sanctions, cannot be entirely ruled out.

But the transformations in the field of doctrines and intervention strategies were not the only significant changes. Since the days of the Socialist and Communist Internationals, the Pan-Africanist Congresses, Pan-Arabism, the Non-Aligned Movement, and OSPAAAL, critical academia in the Latin American, Eurasian, and African peripheries has regressed considerably in its levels of dialogue, articulation, and political, intellectual, and institutional integration. Despite sharing some common ground based on categories such as the Global South, hegemonic transition, and multipolarity, emancipatory horizons are not necessarily clear or shared. 

In this context, several guiding questions arise: What is imperialism today? What kind of political economy is inherent to it? Who are its main actors? What do classical theories of colonialism shed light on? How have the mechanisms of intervention adapted to the latest cycle of capital accumulation and the new geopolitical moment? What kind of political regimes do these mechanisms and doctrines demand and encourage? What repertoires of resistance do they elicit as a counterweight from subordinate subjects and countries? What role do local vassal actors play? How can we define a coup d'état or an initiative for "regime change" today? Is it enough to consider contemporary interventionism through the classical paradigm of 20th-century counterinsurgency or the old Operation Condor? How does intervention proliferate in a moment of hegemonic transition? Can middle powers replicate interventionist practices? What has been the fate of the classical models of colonization that still survive?

In this context and with these thought-provoking questions, the Working Group proposes to work on seven major mechanisms of imperial and neocolonial intervention:

1) The processes of central and peripheral militarization, with the leading role of national military-industrial complexes and transnational military alliances such as NATO. This axis includes the maintenance or repurposing of bases, the development of military technologies in nuclear, ballistic, AI or drone matters, the deployment of troops in peripheral territories, cooperation agreements, training, equipment and technology transfer, or the carrying out of joint military exercises.

2) Parastatal phenomena and formations, which have adapted to new environments and circumstances, gaining increasing prominence. These phenomena range from classic paramilitary groups and organizations to the contemporary instrumentalization of drug trafficking structures, mercenaries, and (politically) organized crime, which operate as mechanisms of territorial and population control, or as instigators of international crises or state fragmentation. In turn, these parastatal mechanisms not only partially outsource the repressive functions of the states themselves, but also reconfigure local power structures, tend to destroy the social and community fabric, and co-opt and, in turn, stimulate certain forms of violent masculinity. 

3) So-called "humanitarian interventionism," ranging from the proliferation of neocolonial NGOs from the Global North, through the so-called "peacekeeping missions" of the UN, the OAS, and other supranational organizations, to specific cooperation mechanisms in the fields of food, health, and the rights of women and diverse groups. This interventionism is based on new concepts such as R2P (responsibility to protect), the "suspension of sovereignty," the "principle of non-indifference," and other similar ones. These mechanisms are generally correlated with the characterization of certain peripheral and over-intervened states as "fragile," "failed," or "decaying," or even as "chaotic, ungovernable entities." It is precisely in these countries, which suffer from health, food, migration or ecosystem crises, where the principles of national self-determination and state sovereignty seem to be suspended by humanitarian trickery.

4) “Cognitive warfare,” as defined in NATO manuals, is the attempt to “attack and degrade the enemy’s rationality, to exploit their vulnerabilities and achieve their systemic weakening” through “deliberate and synchronized military and non-military activities.” This involves a wide range of tactics, from the instrumentalization of media and social networks, the mass and targeted production of fake news, and the manipulation of perception through psychological warfare operations. It is within this framework that we can study the imposition of narratives legitimizing intervention by traditional media corporations and new digital platforms, where Big Tech wields almost absolute power to impose discourses and mechanisms of neo-censorship.

5) Lawfare, the politicization of the judiciary and the consequent demonization, persecution, criminalization, demoralization, and imprisonment of political dissent, is a phenomenon associated, or not, with the achievement of "institutional" coups d'état. Lawfare is not only directed at top-level political leaders and supporters, but also at a wide range of social and popular movements. Here, the co-optation and training of judges and magistrates in the United States is a central mechanism for securing the loyalty of these actors and using them as vassal agents and battering rams of intervention.

6) Economic warfare, another age-old phenomenon that has mutated in the current financialized phase of capital and under the auspices of neoliberal policies. Here we find several sub-phenomena, such as the manipulation of external debt on behalf of private creditors and multilateral lending institutions; the attack on and destabilization of sovereign currencies, which can lead to hyperinflationary processes; the freezing or theft of assets; financial strangulation and the exclusion of certain countries from access to credit or international interbank networks; extraterritorial economic embargoes and blockades; "legal" economic sanctions; and unilateral coercive measures.

7) The instrumentalization of certain religious denominations, from neo-Pentecostalism in Latin America and the Caribbean to some radicalized variants of Islam in Africa and West Asia, visible in the not always well-characterized phenomenon of "jihadism." But we also find the encouragement and deployment of new ultra-right-wing political formations, vassal forces geopolitically aligned with the interests of the Global North, articulated at a planetary level.

In turn, the study will examine how these seven predominant mechanisms pursue seven major objectives. 1) To carry out the much-discussed “regime changes,” deposing popular, sovereignist, progressive, and leftist governments and replacing them with others aligned with the great hegemon, the United States, and its allies. 2) To maintain control over certain specific colonial enclaves or non-self-governing territories, as is the case in the Greater Caribbean and some African and Eurasian regions. 3) To establish “imperial exclusion zones,” which seek to limit the presence and competition of rival powers in the ongoing hegemonic transition, whether China, Russia, Iran, or any other. 4) To dominate geostrategic areas such as trade routes, interoceanic passages, borders, human mobility corridors, or spaces of military value. 5) To deprive peripheral regions of critical resources and ensure their secure, yet dependent, access to captive markets and common goods such as hydrocarbons, minerals and rare earth elements, water, food, and biodiversity. 6) To fragment, balkanize, and render unviable certain territories or nation-state formations, either through direct military intervention or by instrumentalizing non-state civilian or armed actors. 7) To control insubordinate territories, popular leaders, and organizations opposed to the mechanisms of subordination, intervention, and exclusion. It is important to note that no intervention mechanism operates without encountering resistance; therefore, building alternatives based on anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles will be a cross-cutting theme.

We will investigate these problems not only from our region, but from a South-South effort, with intellectuals from Africa, West Asia and Europe, or with those from our region who investigate these scenarios.