As soon as Trump took his seat in the Oval Office that (distant) January of 2025, he signed his first 26 executive orders, one of which initiated the process of classifying eleven Latin American cartels—many of them Mexican—as terrorist organisations. Since then, collective psychosis has erupted, fuelled by speculation about possible military interventions. Although the political, economic, and diplomatic costs make a military incursion into Mexico unlikely, Venezuela appears in the equation as a more feasible and less geopolitically risky target, and one more profitable in the political calculations of MAGA’s interlocutors. On the 3rd of September, the Pentagon bombed Venezuelan unarmed and small ships in international waters in the Caribbean, allegedly and speculatively, belonging to the Cartel of the Soles. How far a potential military advance aimed at destabilising Nicolás Maduro’s government in the name of combating the grotesque figure of narco-terrorism could escalate remains unknown and politically contingent, but this tension illustrates a deeper geopolitical and historical problem: sovereignty in post-colonial Latin America has always oscillated between fantasy and fragility.
Who is truly sovereign in the region? How is sovereignty constructed, both domestically and regionally, when attempts at intra-regional solidarity—from ALBA and CELAC initiatives to MERCOSUR—have been continually constrained by US Großraum projects? Here, Großraum refers to large regional spaces organised as spheres of influence dominated by central powers, following Carl Schmitt’s transformation of Lebensraum (‘living space’) into a political-geographical logic that subordinated smaller states to the authority of a regional hegemony, thereby undermining the principle of sovereign equality among all states, by sublating this principle ‘upwards’ among all pan-regions. These projects have been reinforced through an overlapping and cumulative set of geopolitical strategies: from the Monroe Doctrine (19th century) and the Rio Pact (1947), to Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress (1961), and NAFTA (1994). Within this framework, Rowan Lubbock’s book Cultivating Socialism: Venezuela, ALBA and the Politics of Food Sovereignty proffers a sharp reflection on the scaffolding of sovereignty, state formation, and regionalism as different scales of the “international” in Latin America under the contested hegemony of the American Großraum.
Lubbock identifies two dominant trends in historical sociology that conceptualise and problematise sovereignty as a heuristic tool for understanding political power. On the one hand, classical IR theories have constructed an ontology of the “international” and an epistemological order grounded in myths, stable models, and ahistorical abstractions. These approaches treat sovereignty as a fixed, absolute, and discrete attribute of the state: a legitimate, uninhibited authority that governs the fate of its territory and population. Sovereignty is thus conceived as a thing in itself. This reification, deeply embedded in the disciplinary canon, functions more as a narrative and legitimising device within the field than as an accurate description of reality. Methodologically, it has produced narratives—such as those in neo-Weberian historical sociology focused on Latin America—that emphasise deviations of ideal-types, hybridisations, and late-comer cases, rather than foregrounding the historical, sociological, and geopolitical specification that constitute the sui generis form of sovereignty projected by a given political entity.
On the other hand, critical narratives not only question the very concept of sovereignty, viewing it as a chimera incapable of fully engaging with the forces of globalisation, but also seek to construct counter-models to the substantialist and reified vision. As Lauren Berlant argues, sovereignty is a relative fantasy. Yarimar Bonilla, meanwhile, analyses “non-sovereign archipelagos”, the mosaic of military bases, free trade zones, and tax havens in the Caribbean, as examples of the practical erosion (or non-existence) of full state authority. Yet all of these authors, as reviewed by Lubbock, tend to base their critiques on the unacknowledged acceptance of traditional ontologies, namely, that “sovereign power is absolute, indivisible, and permanent”.
Cultivating Socialism is a particularly valuable contribution for those of us who work on the characteristics of sovereignty and on the global historical sociology of state formation from a macro-sociological perspective, even if not necessarily linked to the “politics of food sovereignty”. From this work, it is possible to extract a methodological proposal inspired by Marxian historical sociology to construct an edifice of sovereignty as it is, and as it is exercised, that is, in an agentic way that captures motion, recognising its sociological, historical and geopolitical constitution. Based on these guidelines, two major steps can be drawn from Lubbock’s account that allow us to read the case study in the book and understand the initial ‘puzzle’: how the scaffolding of sovereignty and state formation in Latin America has been constructed, reconsidering endogenous and exogenous agentic interactions.
Step one: the socio-relational dimension of sovereignty
The first axis that Lubbock proposes for understanding the scaffolding of sovereignty is the socio-relational dimension of class. Drawing on Marxist and Foucauldian insights from Nicos Poulantzas, Bob Jessop, Jaques Bidet, and the Political Marxist tradition, he argues that class analysis should not be reduced to the economic sphere or market dependence but understood as a political and territorial issue. Relations of exploitation map onto relations of sovereignty, as they define specific ways of exercising political authority over people, while political technologies define the ensemble of techniques that mediate the exercise of political authority over territory. From this perspective, Lubbock claims, it becomes possible to “uncover the social sources of sovereignty” and identify the strategies through which rural and working-class movements can assert or reclaim political authority and thus opening the analysis to grasp the composition of a given domestic/national formation.
In the case of Venezuela, Lubbock recounts how the contradictions of Carlos Andrés Pérez’s neoliberalism during the 1990s, and the class struggles that proceeded it, paved the way for Hugo Chávez’s victory in 1999 as a project that aimed, inter alia, to dismantle the enduring power of colonial-era landed estates (latifundios). The creation of communal councils, agricultural cooperatives, and state regulation of the food system sought to rebalance the “sources of sovereignty” relative to corporate capital. These processes, however, were not linear, but rather marked by negotiation and conflict: peasant movements managed to decentralise some decision-making and secure collective rights, demonstrating that sovereignty, far from being a fixed attribute, is historically constituted through a social praxis.
Step two: geopolitical articulation and mediation
A recurring criticism of Marxist historical sociology is its alleged methodological nationalism, that is, the tendency to present political, economic, and territorial development as if it occurred in a geopolitical vacuum, confined to processes internal to the nation-state. Various Marxian-inspired approaches have attempted to overcome this limitation, from World-Systems theory and Dependency Theory to Uneven and Combined Development and Geopolitical Marxism. Lubbock’s contribution consists in revisiting Latin American regionalism as a meeting point between the domestic the regional, and their intersection with the geo-economic. He does so in a way that recalls strongly what Maia Pal terms “outward internalism”: locating the socio-relational, i.e., agentic, aspect within a political entity without isolating it from the transnational flows that traverse and shape its dynamics, capturing how these flows extend outward through regional solidarity policies and initiatives but also constraints.
Lubbock thus analyses ALBA as a platform for regional solidarity promoted by the state and diplomatic elites of Latin America’s 2000s Pink Tide. More than a trade bloc, ALBA functioned as an institutional mediation for a more radical form of sovereignty, harking back to José Martí’s “Nuestra América”: an effort to assert political control over Latin American territories in the face of the underpinning US Großraum and the dynamics of global capitalism that proved fatal during the 2008 crisis. Its manifestations were manifold: exchanges of oil for doctors, infrastructure projects (housing, roads) financed by Petrocaribe, literacy campaigns, social programmes, and food sovereignty initiatives such as the Empresa Grannacional. However, as Lubbock notes, “ALBA’s attempt to build a participatory regime of food sovereignty has remained limited and contradictory”. Internal tensions—from the decline in agricultural production that undermined decentralisation efforts to the state-led concentration of large capitalist producers—illustrate dynamics akin to a “passive revolution”, though a concept that was conspicuously absent in the book.
Viewed this way, ALBA’s trajectory points to a form of radical historicism: a process that cannot be reduced either to external ‘dependence’ or to internal social property relations. What stands out instead is the role of contingent interactions among regional state strategies, transnational political alignments, and class relations. The bloc’s gradual disarticulation, signalled by Ecuador’s departure in 2018 and the coup in Bolivia in 2019, was not the outcome of a single structural cause, but rather of a historically specific and contradictory constellation of pressures.
In short, attempts to build sovereignty, whether through class-based projects at the national level or through regional geopolitical solidarity, are constantly challenged, mediated, shaped by the broader geo-economic and geopolitical context. Returning to the scenario that opened this analysis, the rhetoric of “narco-terrorism” appears as a reinvention aimed at reasserting American power in the region and reconstituting the weakened Großraum, in a context in which China has become the largest trading partner of almost all Latin American countries. This tension places sovereignty—oscillating between fantasy and fragility—once again at stake. Lubbock’s work enables us to apprehend two central dimensions of this entangled order: first, it provides tools to understand Latin America’s geopolitical position under American Großraum, revealing mechanisms of solidarity that have been achieved and offering glimmers of hope; and second, it develops an agential and historicised methodology for conceptualising sovereignty not as a structural illusion or essential attribute with fixed qualities, but as an open-ended field of political strategies, social and geopolitical struggles in constant contestation.
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