Managing Latin America: US power, North American knowledge and the cold war

Introduction: US Power, North American Knowledge and the Cold War There is now a substantial literature which seeks to situate the influential Latin American theories of development which emerged during the Cold War in their wider political and historical context. And there is a large number of articles which look at the North American historiography of Latin America and at the study of inter-American relations. Unlike most of these studies, however, this article focuses more directly on the relationship between US power in, and the production of a professional North American knowledge about, Latin America during the Cold War. Building on imperial state theory, recent international relations theory derived from Gramsci, and discourse theory, it emphasises the need to locate the emergence and subsequent consolidation of Latin American studies at the height of the Cold War, in the context of the rise of the historical and social science professions and the vicissitudes of US foreign policy in Latin...