China’s expanding presence in Latin America and the Caribbean has reshaped trade, investment, infrastructure, and technology ties. As competition between China and the United States intensifies, countries across the region face new opportunities, pressures, and constraints on their international choices.
This panel examines how Latin American and Caribbean actors navigate relations with China and the United States, and how domestic politics shape—and are shaped by—these relationships.
We welcome theoretical, comparative, and empirical contributions on:
China–US competition in Latin America and the Caribbean: competing economic and security agendas, pressures for alignment, and strategies for preserving autonomy.
Trade and economic dependence: commodity exports, market diversification, supply chains, and the effects of tariffs and sanctions.
Resources and industrial policy: critical minerals, the energy transition, electric vehicles, and opportunities for industrial development.
Infrastructure and technology: ports, logistics, digital networks, and competition over strategic assets.
Finance and development: Chinese lending, investment, debt, and competing development initiatives.
Cooperation and diplomacy: the Belt and Road Initiative, China–CELAC Forum, BRICS, and diplomatic competition between Beijing and Taipei.
Domestic interests and political actors: labor markets, deindustrialization, agribusiness, and the role of elites, parties, business groups, and subnational governments.
Democracy and electoral politics: public perceptions of China and the United States, political polarization, and foreign policy under governments across the ideological spectrum, including the radical right.
By connecting great-power competition with regional agency and domestic political contestation, the panel addresses the Congress theme of uncertain democracies in a changing global system.
