Fernanda Conforto de Oliveira

HPI182 Latin America in the World

Geneva Graduate Institute

This course examines Latin America’s historical trajectory from the early nineteenth century to the present, focusing on the region’s political, social, and economic transformations and its changing position within the global order. Rather than treating Latin America as a passive recipient of external pressures, the course emphasizes the interaction between global forces and local agency: how Latin American actors responded to international constraints while also shaping regional and global developments.

The course begins with independence movements, slavery and abolition, the construction of postcolonial states, and Latin America’s insertion into the world economy. It then turns to postwar economic integration, Cold War alignments, authoritarian regimes, and relations with institutions such as the International Monetary Fund.

The final part of the course examines neoliberal reforms, the Pink Tide, persistent struggles over gender, class, and race, and the more recent return of conservatism. The course concludes with a round-table discussion on the present and future challenges facing the region.

The course will also feature guest lecturers with regional and thematic expertise, who will lead discussions based on their own research. Through these encounters, students will engage with ongoing scholarly debates, reflect on the agency of Latin American actors, and consider the practical challenges of historical research.

Natural Language Processing for the Analysis of Diplomacy and Multilateralism

This interdisciplinary course explores the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyse the language of diplomacy, international negotiation, and multilateral governance. It is designed for graduate students in international history, political science, digital humanities, and other related fields who are interested in combining computational methods with the study of global institutions and international relations.

The course introduces core NLP techniques, such as named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, topic modelling, and document classification, through hands-on applications to historical and contemporary corpora of diplomatic documents. Students will also engage critically with the epistemological and methodological challenges of applying computational tools to the study of international politics.

A basic working knowledge of Python is required; however, technical instruction will be provided throughout the course to support students in developing and applying their skills. By the end of the term, students will complete an independent project using NLP methods to analyse a self-curated or provided corpus related to diplomacy or multilateral institutions.