Date: Wednesday 13 July 2016
Time: 6.30-8pm
Venue: CLM 7.02, Clement House
Speaker: Professor Adriana Erthal Abdenur
Chair: Professor Chris Alden

China’s presence in Latin America has been intensifying over the past decade, and the Chinese government has recently announced new plans to boost investment, trade, and other forms of cooperation in the region. The flow of goods, people, and ideas between these two places has prompted new political debates in Latin America about cooperation and agency, with the idea of dependency being invoked by several stakeholders involved in Latin American development. How do contemporary relations between Latin America and China differ from the power relations described by dependency theorists during the Import Substitution Industrialzation (ISI) era? This lecture focuses on Chinese investments in the Latin American extractive sector to argue that there are significant differences both in context and internal dynamics of dependency between these two periods. More specifically, whereas the earlier debate emphasized the cultural and institutional “rootedness” of dependency, current cooperation ties with China are highly asymmetric yet mechanical, in that they remain (so far) relatively disembedded from cultural linkages. In addition to proposing a conceptual differentiation, the lecture suggests that analysis of Chinese investments abroad must consider China’s impact on the range of policy options available to stakeholders in partner states.

Adriana Erthal Abdenur (@AAbdenur) (PhD Princeton, AB Harvard/Peking University) is a Fellow at the Instituto Igarapé, in Rio de Janeiro. Her research focuses on the role of rising powers, especially the BRICS countries, in international development and security. Recent publications include articles in Global Governance, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Third World Quarterly, International Peacekeeping, Journal of Peacebuilding and Development, and IDS Quarterly. She co-edited, with Thomas G. Weiss, the book Emering Powers at the UN (Routledge, 2015). She is on the Advisory Board of several UN initiatives, including the internal review of the Department of Political Affairs, as well as on the Horizon2020 EUnpack project on conflict response mechanisms.

Chris Alden is Professor in International Relations, LSE; and a former Programme Head, Global Powers and Africa, South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA). He is author/co-author of numerous books and reports, including The South and World Politics (Palgrave 2010), China and Latin America (CLSA 2009), China in Africa (Zed 2007), and co-editor of China Returns to Africa (Hurst 2008), Japan and South Africa (Ashgate 2003) as well as articles in internationally recognised journals. He has contributed to research, conferences and publications on the South African foreign policy since 1991, the changing role of China and Africa since 1992 and China and Latin America since 2007. He has conducted consultancies for the World Bank, the African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, CLSA, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Standard Bank (SA) and Rand Merchant Bank (SA) amongst others.

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