Political psychology, since its origins in the 19th century, has been dedicated to the study of power from a multidirectional perspective—individual and collective—focusing on the triad of man, government, and state (Alvarez, 1894; Bastian, 1860; Le Marquis de Castellane, 1888). From this focus of interest, several themes emerge that demand attention and require research, training, exchange, and cooperation. As a relatively unknown field within the social sciences, political psychology has generated interest among a significant group of researchers from diverse fields within the social sciences, humanities, and economics (Rodríguez Kauth, 1992; Silva and Furlan, 2025; Hur, 2019; Hur and Sabucedo, 2017; Magaña et al., 2016). Faced with the rise of conservatism, we must reflect on how emotions and feelings are influencing forms of political mobilization, social struggles, political awareness, as well as gender relations and educational processes (Silva, 2023; Silva and Euzébios Filho, 2023). In fact, this is often segmented, and the challenge is to think about it in an integrated way, articulating social agents and the transformations experienced by each of them, whether individuals or groups.

Thus, the contribution of Political Psychology emerges as relevant to the promotion of a more just society, as it can remove the obstacles that hinder the transformative political action of public policy managers, social organizations, unions, and so on. The community and territorial experiences that each country undergoes are invaluable sources of knowledge exchange among researchers and break down the artificial boundaries of disciplines, strengthening the idea of ​​interdisciplinary fields of knowledge. Political Psychology itself presents itself in this way: as a field of knowledge. A field is a fertile space for encounters and exchanges that demand evidence-based, critical, and situated knowledge management (Martín-Baró, 1991; Dorna, 2004). Without this, good governance, which is participatory and democratic, cannot be consolidated as an alternative. The Working Group aims to be this transformative space with a high impact on social change; it aims to be able to influence policy definition and the public debate that acts in defense of democracy.

The perspective of Latin American political psychology is forged in a territory historically defined by the persistence of colonialism, structural inequalities, state violence, and social struggles that have generated their own knowledge, community practices of resistance, and unique forms of political experimentation (Martín Baró, 1988, 1991; Montero, 1987). These tensions have shaped the very essence of existence; therefore, recovering the meaning of politics and its expression within the subjectivities that inhabit these territories means recovering a situated and critical Latin American thought and forging epistemologies woven from the Global South. Thinking from this perspective, political psychology in Latin America and the Caribbean requires situating knowledge within a region where daily life is marked by profound power asymmetries (Fernández-Christlieb, 2004), framed by histories of conflict, wars, dictatorships, and democracies amidst the tension of complex dynamics of human mobility, structural racism, patriarchy, and the neoliberalization of life (Dorna, 1994). From this perspective, the Working Group on Political Psychology: Power, Territorialities, and Democracies is based on the premise that the subjective and emotional processes that shape politics—memory, identity, fear, hope, legitimacy, participation, distrust, solidarity—are inseparable from the historical and material frameworks that have shaped the societies of the Global South. Therefore, to approach political psychology from these latitudes with its own methodologies (Martín Baró, 1991; Montero, 1991; Oblitas and Rodríguez Kauth, 1999; ).

Latin America and the Caribbean constitute a distinct epistemic space, from which concepts, methods, and practices emerge that destabilize hegemonic interpretations of the Global North. As argued by the Epistemologies of the South (Martin-Baró, 1986; Santos, 2010; Grosfoguel, 2011), understanding the region entails recognizing the plurality of situated knowledges, practices of resistance, and modes of political subjectivation that arise from subalternized and racialized territories. Regional critical perspectives, with exponents such as Liberation Psychology (Martín-Baró, 1986–1989) and Latin American Critical Social Psychology (González Rey, 2007), have demonstrated that addressing psychopolitical processes requires starting from epistemologies rooted in territorial knowledges (González Suárez, 2008). It is essential to analyze how the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000) structures social relations and subjectivities; to recognize the key of emancipatory pedagogies (Freire, 1970) for grassroots political organization; and to understand memory as a living field of dispute and resignification (Jelin, 2002).

A critical perspective integrates the analysis of the affective economies that shape contemporary politics, where emotions such as fear, anger, and hope mold support, disputes, and repertoires of collective action (Ahmed, 2004; Mouffe, 2018). These dynamics are intertwined with long-term struggles led by Indigenous, feminist, Afro-descendant, student, peasant, and migrant movements, which have contributed critical frameworks (Lugones, 2008; Segato, 2016) for understanding how politics is articulated from gendered and racialized bodies. The Southern approach allows us to understand that psychopolitical phenomena in the region cannot be addressed outside of the historical structures of inequality, nor outside of the forms of resistance and political creativity that emerge on the margins. On the contrary, it is precisely in these spaces that knowledge and languages ​​are produced that can challenge the discipline's traditional paradigms.

Incomplete democratic transitions have left deep marks on political subjectivity. Collective traumas, unresolved grief, and tensions between justice, forgiveness, and forgetting persist, shaping the relationship with institutions. Experiences such as those of transitional justice in Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Colombia, and Brazil show that memory operates as an affective, cognitive, and political field (Ansara, 2008; Cortés Millan et al., 2025; Jelin, 2002; Acuña, 2010). In these contexts, collective emotions are part of historical processes that organize identities and disputes over the meaning of democracy, determining which narratives become hegemonic. Likewise, persistent economic inequalities and the precariousness of life have intensified institutional distrust and affective radicalization. Regional studies indicate that fear and the perception of threat influence support for authoritarian alternatives (Pérez-Liñán, 2007; Waiselfisz, 2015). From a Southern perspective, these emotions should be interpreted as responses historically conditioned by structural violence and the everyday experience of exclusion, and not as mere "irrationalities." Despite these complexities, the region has been a laboratory for democratic innovations—participatory budgeting, popular assemblies, community forms of self-governance—that allow us to understand alternative political subjectivities centered on cooperation, reciprocity, and care.

Its contribution is therefore necessarily comparative, intersectional and decolonial, aimed at understanding how political subjectivities are articulated in societies traversed by multiple forms of violence, but also by powerful traditions of community organization, political creativity and collective construction of life.

The theoretical, social, and intellectual relevance of studying political subjectivities, public affects, and the dynamics of human mobility in Latin America and the Caribbean is grounded in the region's specific historical and epistemic context. Analyzing these processes from a situated perspective implies recognizing that the political and emotional experiences of Latin American populations are inseparable from persistent structures of coloniality, inequality, and violence, as well as from practices of community resistance and political imagination that have shaped their own critical traditions.

The study of this topic is theoretically grounded in traditions that question the universalization of social and psychological knowledge and that reclaim Latin American experience as its own epistemological space: understanding political subjectivity requires decentering the Eurocentric view and incorporating situated knowledge, community practices, and memories of struggle (Grosfoguel, 2011). This perspective is reinforced by Liberation Psychology (Martín-Baró, 1986–1989), which emphasizes the need to interpret psychosocial life based on concrete conditions of oppression, internal conflict, dispossession, and resistance.

At a theoretical level, the analysis is also articulated with studies of the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000), of being (Maldonado-Torres, 2007), and of gender (Lugones, 2008), which allow us to understand how racial, patriarchal, and capitalist inequalities structure both institutional practices and ways of feeling, fearing, desiring, and belonging. The Latin American decolonial feminist perspective—Segato (2016), Cabnal (2010)—provides keys to analyzing how racialized and gendered bodies become political and affective territories marked by multiple forms of violence and by powerful practices of collective care.

Furthermore, contemporary politics cannot be understood separately from its affective economies. Authors such as Ahmed (2004) and Berlant (2011) have shown how emotions like fear, hope, and affective precarity become organizing forces for communities and political identities. These frameworks engage with regional analyses of insecurity, social trauma, and affective radicalization (Waiselfisz, 2015; Pérez-Liñán, 2007), allowing us to link subjectivity, violence, and political legitimacy in the context of fragile democracies.

The social relevance of this topic is evident in a continent marked by forced displacement, humanitarian crises, and security policies that transform both territories and ways of feeling and perceiving the "other." Migrations in Mesoamerica, the Caribbean, and South America—marked by criminal violence, racism, borders, and precarity—constitute a privileged laboratory for understanding how alterities, solidarities, and exclusions are constructed. As suggested by critical literature on borders (De Genova, 2013; Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013), migration policies produce not only physical movements but also racialized subjectivities, public emotions of threat, and moral hierarchies about who deserves protection or punishment. In this sense, collective affects play a central role. Fear, compassion, indignation, or radical hospitality shape public opinion and state decisions. Judith Butler (2020) has pointed out that lives considered "mournable" or "unmournable" These factors determine distinct political and humanitarian responses; this framework is particularly useful for analyzing the media dehumanization of migrants in the region. Social struggles—feminist, Indigenous, Afro-descendant, student, peasant, and migrant—also generate affective pedagogies that challenge notions of nation and citizenship. Movements such as the Zapatista, Mapuche, community feminisms, and the Latin American green movements have built repertoires of collective action that articulate memory, affect, care, and resistance. These practices demonstrate that affect is not residual, but rather a central vector of political organization.

From an intellectual standpoint, the study of this topic contributes to a larger project: the construction of situated knowledge capable of challenging hegemonic narratives on subjectivity, democracy, and human mobility. In a field historically dominated by Anglo-Saxon theories, Latin American research offers new conceptualizations of violence, precarity, citizenship, and public affects. Authors such as Achille Mbembe (2011) provide keys to understanding necropolitical practices that permeate the region, while Stuart Hall (1996) delves into the cultural and historical character of political identity, which is central to analyzing national imaginaries marked by racism and exclusion. Furthermore, the region has produced critical methodologies—such as feminist ethnography (Dietz, 2011), action research, social cartography, and the ch'ixi methodology (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2018)—that illuminate practices and meanings that would otherwise remain invisible from conventional perspectives. This epistemic plurality strengthens the field of political psychology and enriches global debates on public emotions, political conflict, and subjectivity.

By converging, the theoretical, social, and intellectual dimensions allow us to understand how political subjectivities are shaped in societies marked by violence, inequality, borders, and practices of resistance. This topic is relevant because it illuminates processes that define the Latin American political landscape today: democratic crises, disputes over memory, the securitization of everyday life, affective radicalization, transnational movements, community care, and the creation of new forms of grassroots political action.

Studying these phenomena from a situated, critical, and decolonial approach contributes not only to a better academic understanding, but also to the construction of tools to strengthen social justice, democratic coexistence, and the defense of human rights in the region.