Regionalism and social differentiation in Latin America

Research on geographical issues in International Relations - especially the renewal of such traditional concepts as territory and region - has been driven in recent years by the introduction of the theory of social differentiation associated with the work of Niklas Luhmann. This has also been the case with research on the social and political structures of Latin America. The proposal of this project is to unite these two tendencies in an investigation on the functional distinctions employed in discourses on political regionalism in Latin America. As the terminology of concepts such as "Latin America" or "South America" has traditionally been accepted without major doubts, this research project aims to arrive at a more empirically founded understanding of how academic elites in Colombia and, potentially, other Latin American countries use different regionalist terminologies, and what functional references they imply.

Geografía política, regionalismo, América Latina, teoría de la diferenciación, diferenciación social, estructura social