Call for papers

Global Youth

Latin American student internationalism from the nineteenth century to the present day: mobilization, organization, militantism

Coordination

Nicolás Dip, División de Historia, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (Mexico)

nicolasdip@filos.unam.mx

Romain Robinet, Université d’Angers, TEMOS (CNRS UMR 9016) (France)

romain.robinet@univ-angers.fr

From the late nineteenth century until today, analysis of student movements, organizations, and militantism has become a legitimate field for social science research in Latin America and the Caribbean. As shown in major research in sociology in the 1960s and 1970s–in particular, contributions by Aldo Solari (1967), Marialice Mencarini Foracchi (1969 and 1972), Juan Carlos Portantiero (1971 and 1978) and Sergio Zermeño (1978)–the systematic study of student movements has experienced growing interest, notably as a result of ‘university reform’ in 1918 and the 1968 protests. Currently, a wide range of researchers in this region and other geographical areas are producing valuable contributions in various social science disciplines in the form of local studies or broader analyses in which national and continental levels are studied within the framework of historical experiences, not by merely exploring classic markers, but by covering, in fact, a wide range of cases and time scales in the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries (González Marin and Sánchez Sáenz, 2011; Markarian, 2012; Bustelo, 2018; Pensado, 2018; Ordorika, 2022; Dip, 2023; Robinet, 2023; Donoso, 2024).

This progression has had to take into account past debates and unresolved debts. One of the current issues is the need to extend transnational research as the only option for reconfiguring the vast and ever-changing “geography of student protests” which have characterized Latin America and the Caribbean since the late nineteenth century. This is not an easy task, given that it involves developing and multiplying research projects that can reconstruct trajectories, networks and circulation of student militantism in various countries in the region, while also making connections with other continents and world areas. In this regard, research on the “student world”, from the Latin American/Caribbean perspective, calls for a multi-disciplinary approach that can link transnational history to different attitudes towards the global through social sciences.

This infers an interrogation of representations and practices used by “globalised students” together with those of other social, political, and cultural groups of various types, such as political parties, trade unions, intellectuals, state officials, publishing houses, armed organisations, and the world of avant-garde art. Finally, in this tapestry of networks, the role of international student organisations cannot be ignored. Less active today than in the past, they have nevertheless played, in previous centuries, a structural role in the emergence of the figure of the student as transnational actor, not only during the “Belle Epoque”, but also during the “global cold war”.

In order to contribute to strengthening comparative and transnational research with regard to student movements, this dossier invites the submission of articles from all social science disciplines (anthropology, sociology, history, geography, political science) which would focus on international and transnational protests, organisations and militantisms involving young students and connecting Latin America and the Caribbean with the rest of the world for the period of the nineteenth century to the present day. It should be noted that these reflections should take into account the multiple determinants and facets of social situations (the “class, gender, race” tryptic, as well as ethnicity, nationality, religious affiliation, and age as social constructs). In particular, we are looking for studies that deal with or are linked to one of the three following axes:

I. The era of international student organisations

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been marked by the emergence of major international student movements. Contacts between Latin American and European students have multiplied since the late nineteenth century, initially within the framework of the international student association “Corda Fratres” (1898). Later during the period between the two world wars, several national student organisations in Latin America joined the Confédération internationale des étudiants (CIE, 1919), thus expanding the network of “international student relations” which had previously been limited to the Old World. After World War II, the “global cold war” and the advent of the Third World highlighted the internationalisation of student militantism in Latin America and the Caribbean: in such a strongly bipolarised context, South America’s student organisations were able to join not only the International Union of Students (IUS, 1946), with its close links to the Eastern Bloc, but also the International Confederation of Students (ICS, 1950) which focused on “Free World’ values. Finally, studies relating to this first axis will obviously reflect on the specificity of religious affiliation: it is important to focus on the role of international Catholic student organisations (Pax Romana, International Movement of Catholic Students) and of similar Jewish and Protestant movements.

II. Going beyond Vietnam: students and “remote mobilisation”

The second research axis moves away from the question of organisation in order to explore the more volatile theme of mobilisation. To what extent have students in this region participated in various waves of global protests? Here contributions will obviously concentrate on student mobilisations relating to foreign wars: the 1914-1918 war, the Vietnam war as the great catalyst of the “global sixties”, or the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Nevertheless, the question of “remote mobilisation” could cover other forms of solidarity: transnational student solidarity with other peoples, victims of tyranny (for example, Latin American students’ solidarity with the victims of the Leguía regime (Peru) and the Machado regime (Cuba) between the two world wars) or with threatened political regimes (e.g. Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973). In addition to these forms of revolutionary solidarity, we should not ignore or minimise anti-communist solidarity and transnational mobilisation of right-wing students, notably during the cold war. It may also be of interest to analyse the ethnic implications involved in African and Asian decolonisation, in particular for students of native and African descent. For the contemporary period, another possible theme could be feminist student solidarity at both the continental and international level.

III. Conceptualising international student circulation and networks

For the third axis for research, we propose an interrogation of other aspects of the globalised student from the perspective of Latin America and the Caribbean. The figure of student-ambassador was, in this regard, particularly important during the first half of the twentieth century when exchanges between universities were almost non-existent and the student life experience was more bourgeois. Furthermore, an examination of the development of student exchanges could include questions such as changes in the mapping of major “student migrations”, both to other world regions (Europe, USA, USSR) and within the Latin American/Caribbean region. These human flows have considerably influenced, and continue to influence, the circulation of ideas, not only during the cold war, but also in the early twenty-first century. Finally, analysis could focus on an (almost) specifically Latin American figure, the student in exile. In all these cases, the three facets of the “world student” (student-ambassador, exchange student, student-in-exile) could also be analysed from the perspective of gender, race and social class, interpreted as unstable and mutable social constructions.

Submission of articles: https://ojs.openedition.org/index.php/cal

For further information, please contact: romain.robinet@univ-angers.fr and nicolasdip@filos.unam.mx

Deadline for submission: July 20, 2025

Bibliography

Bustelo, Natalia (2018). Todo lo que necesitás saber sobre la reforma universitaria. Buenos Aires: Paidós.

Dip, Nicolás (2023). Movimientos estudiantiles en América Latina. Interrogantes para su historia, presente y futuro. Buenos Aires: CLACSO.

Donoso Romo, Andrés (2024). “Los movimientos estudiantiles desde la historia: un modelo de interpretación de alcance latinoamericano”. Trashumante. Revista Americana De Historia Social, (24), 306–328.

Foracchi, Marialice (1969). “1968: el movimiento estudiantil en la sociedad brasileña”. Revista Mexicana de Sociología, 31 (3).

Foracchi, Marialice (1972). A juventude na sociedade moderna. São Paulo: Pioneira Editora.

González Marin, Silvia y Sánchez Sáenz, Ana María (2011, coord.). 154 años de movimientos estudiantiles en Iberoamérica. Mexico: UNAM.

Markarian, Vania (2012). El 68 uruguayo. El movimiento estudiantil entre molotovs y música beat. Bernal: UNQUI.

Ordorika, Imanol (2022). “Student movements and politics in Latin America: a historical reconceptualization”. Higher Education, (83), 297–315.

Pensado, Jaime (2018). “Entre perdigones, provocadores y noticias apócrifas: Un caso comparativo a la represión estatal durante el movimiento estudiantil del 68 en México y Uruguay”. En Markarian, Vani (coord.). Movimientos estudiantiles en América Latina. Rosario: Humanidades y Artes Ediciones – HyA Ediciones.

Portantiero, Juan Carlos (1971). Studenti e rivoluzione nell’ América Latina. Dalla Reforma Universitaria del 1918 a Fidel Castro. Milan: Il Sagiatore.

Portantiero, Juan Carlos (1978). Estudiantes y política en América Latina 1918-1938. El proceso de la Reforma Universitaria. Mexico: Siglo XXI.

Robinet, Romain (2023). La revolución mexicana: una historia estudiantil. Mexico: Bonilla Artigas Editores, 2023.

Solari, Aldo (1967). “Los movimientos estudiantiles universitarios en América Latina”. Revista Mexicana de Sociología, 29 (4).

Zermeño, Sergio (1978). México: una democracia utópica. El movimiento estudiantil del 68. Mexico: Siglo XXI.

Nicolás Dip has a doctorate in History from the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP). He currently lectures at the División de Historia of the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) and the Colegio de Estudios Latinoamericanos de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).

Romain Robinet has a doctorate in History from the Institut d’études politiques de Paris and is a lecturer (HDR) in Contemporary History at the Université d’Angers and member of the TEMOS research laboratory (Temps, Mondes, Sociétés, UMR CNRS 9016).

The Cahiers des Amériques latines also receive, throughout the year, proposals for the section “Études”.