"Sentencing the Monroe Doctrine to Death?: Latin American Legal Anti-imperialism in the Face of the Modern US and Hemispheric Redefinition of the Monroe Doctrine, 1880?1933

JUAN PABLO SCARFI

Nottingham

Conferencia; Sixth Junior Faculty Forum in International Law; 2017

University of Nottingham

The Monroe Doctrine was originally formulated as a U.S. unilateral policy principle, but in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century it began to be redefined in relation to both the hemispheric policy of Pan-Americanism and the unilateral and interventionist policies of the U.S. in Central America and the Caribbean. Although historians of Latin America have devoted a great deal of attention to Latin American anti-imperialist ideas and movements, there was a distinct influential legalist tradition within the broader Latin American anti-imperialist traditions especially concerned with the nature and application of the Monroe Doctrine, which has been largely overlooked by historians of international law and of Latin America. At the same time, in recent years a new critical and revisionist body of research has emerged exploring the complicity between the history of modern international law and imperialism, as well as Third World (and anti-imperialist) Approaches to International Law. This coincided with the rise of the field of comparative political theory and non-western political and legal thought. The purpose of this paper is to trace the rise and decline of this Latin American anti-imperialist legal tradition situating it in its historical context and more importantly assessing its legal critique of the Monroe Doctrine.