ABSTRACT
Security scholarship is playing catch up in Latin America. Latin America is tailor made for testing and refining theoretical positions in such areas as human and environmental security. Its history, recent experience of democratization, and high profile in global environmental diplomacy all provide deep wells from which to draw examples to illustrate the security agendas. Critical scholarship has drawn attention to the role that security plays in maintaining forms of political order to ensure the perpetuation of states and economic systems. Dalby noted that conceptualizations of security remain a matter of state power and political order, and that the ways in which security is invoked and what is designated as a threat are unavoidably political exercises. The developmental role assigned by Latin American security policies to its militaries will be increasingly tested by climate change. Greater engagement with Latin America offers potential benefits to the discipline of security studies and perhaps even to take it in an entirely new direction.
