Project: Science, Technology and Society in North America. A Comparative Perspective on Science and Technology Policies and Regulations

Edit Antal Fodróczy

Synopsis
This project proposes using a multidisciplinary framework to study the dynamic of advanced technology in order to understand how it results in the restructuring of societies in North America. It seeks to identify the essential causes that permit rapid technological development, especially of biotechnology, and to pinpoint the factors that in the Mexican social context block or facilitate that advance. It takes into consideration the complex interaction and communication among the entrepreneurial, scientific and institutional-legal spheres, fundamentally on the least studied level: the intermediate plane. The first phase of the study consists of empirically analyzing scientific policies, regulations and risk management, as well as the dynamic of public debates in North America compared to European Union biotechnology policies.

Regulation and politics of influence in biotechnology. A comparative perspective between Canada and Mexico (sub-project)

Project: Security and Geopolitics in North America

Raúl Benítez Manaut

Synopsis
Since NAFTA came into effect in 1994, it has been said that greater economic, social, cultural and political integration of the United States, Canada and Mexico will necessarily change security doctrines and policies in all three countries. This project seeks to gather documents, do interviews and participate in seminars and other academic activities dealing with the issue of security in each of the three countries and the possible commitments, links and cooperation of their armed forces, border protection agencies, intelligence services and other institutions around security matters.

Project: National Security and the Armed Forces in Late-Twentieth-Century Mexico

Synopsis
The object of this research project is an analysis of the Mexican armed forces, taking into account historical, political and organizational elements as well as those of doctrine in order to pinpoint the relationship with the Mexican political system, power relations within the state itself and Mexico’s contribution to the regional and international security system. In particular, the project looks at the army, air force and navy’s professionalization and structure in the context of their being institutionally divided between two ministries: the Ministry of National Defense and the Ministry of the Navy.

Project: Security and Governability in North America: National Agendas and Integration

Leonardo Curzio Gutiérrez

Synopsis
This research project will look at the way in which economic reforms and their effect on Mexico’s democratization and its projection abroad have evolved. Today’s Mexico, a product of these reforms, is on its way to economic integration with North America. It has therefore left behind the nationalist visions that drove development strategy for several decades as well as, of course, the Latin Americanist bent that the country exhibited for the entire last century.

The starting point is that in some spheres of the relations among the countries of North America, integration has advanced considerably, while in others, obstacles and prejudices are enormous and, for the moment, insurmountable.

The two crosscutting themes that articulate this work are governability and security. Governability is understood as the capacity to legitimately and effectively deals with the growing number of common issues and at the same time each country’s agenda, very often exclusionary and incompatible with the others’. Security is understood as the creation of conditions to guarantee satisfaction of common interests and objectives as well as those that are exclusive and exclusionary for each nation.

Project: Origins and Development of the U.S. Founding Fathers’ Republican Ideal (The Originally Democratic Vocation of American Federalism)

Ignacio Díaz de la Serna

Synopsis
Given the homogeneity imposed on every aspect of social life by globalization, the vindication of national and regional identities has become a constant in recent years. Because of their importance, it is appropriate to re-discuss the historical process that they have undergone in our culture in order to formulate possible ways forward as an alternative to that homogeneity.

In that sense, there is no doubt that the U.S. and French nations that emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century are exemplary for many reasons.

There is a need, then, to recover the historic memory that will allow us to create the foundations for up-dating the political-social values that were part of the origins of U.S. democracy. Among these values, perhaps the most important is the sovereignty of the people operating as an authentic “method of equality” among the members of society, which resulted in the installation of a pragmatic democracy situated at the opposite end of the spectrum from the dogmatic democracy conceived in Europe.

Democracy not as a something decreed by reason, but as a concrete proposition regulating individuals’ customs and traditions was a U.S. invention that would articulate all its social and political practices. It was also a proposition that made the American experience original and unique.

The great historical lesson that the creation of the United States as an independent nation offered the world lies in having shown that democracy as a political system presupposes already existing democratic customs and a collective feeling of equality immanent to society.

Therefore, the topic of this research project, the influence of the thinking of the Enlightenment on the American founding fathers, aims to open up a new line of thinking in the Center for Research on North America, since it will make it possible to understand the modern, contemporary reality of North America (Mexico, the United States and Canada) in a broader framework, that is, on an intercontinental scale, as a participant in a long European-Western tradition.

Project: Human Rights and Global Citizenship: A Comparative Analysis of Exclusion Linked
to Migratory Flows in Great Britain, Spain and North America

Ariadna Estévez López

Synopsis
The objective of the research is to examine whether a relation exists between the lack of confrontation between immigrants and the receiving society, and the recognition of human rights, social agency and immigration policy. Such research requires both empirical work and creativity in theoretical terms. On the one hand, empirical data will indicate paths for establishing the foundations of a global citizenship proposal, which is the normative definition that will be used to measure the maximum validity of human rights in receiving countries. On the other hand, global citizenship is a theoretical proposal based on a sociopolitical definition of human rights that recovers their permanent social construction, the centrality of social subjects and their political potential for the management of demands.

Based on this definition of human rights, global citizenship considers rights from the point of view of those who demand these rights and not those who fail to grant them. It also highlights those elements guaranteeing the agency of immigrants for the construction, from below, of their social, economic, cultural, political, individual and collective rights. Since the emphasis here is on agency and not on attribution or the distribution of resources, global citizenship does not oppose so much as complement national citizenship. Its basis and legitimacy is the commitment of States to abide by international human rights legislation and not an abstract universal morality. From the perspective of the political sociology of human rights, this research offers a contribution to the debate concerning the definition of an alternative citizenship that responds to the agency and human rights of international immigrants at a time when they are adapting to the dynamics of globalization and questions concerning the relevance of the Nation State.

Project: Political Power in North America: Designing Policy in a Pluralist System

César Pérez Espinosa

Synopsis
If we are interested in understanding the changes in strategic vision and geopolitics in North America, politics is key. Because of what happened September 11, 2001, once again the modern world system is convulsed and uncertain about the future. Very little work has been done to analyze the importance of the actors who have an impact on the formulation of ideas that are initially part of domestic policy but could be applied in the sphere of foreign policy and how they do that. In this regard, this research project seeks to answer the following questions: What importance to U.S. and Canadian private and governmental projects related to Mexico have, particularly strategically? How can the political change Mexico is going through be explained? What importance do private and governmental groups have for Mexico-U.S. relations? What type of groups work on issues relating to Mexico in the U.S. Congress?

Project: The United States and Democracy in Latin America. Political and Social Transition: Gobernability and Security

José Luis Valdés Ugalde

Synopsis
This research project aims to identify the historical keys to U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, focusing on two aspects: The relations between foreign policy and democracy and/or authoritarianism and the relationship between foreign security policy and the social changes in Latin America. The examination of the problems facing the hemisphere’s countries’ economic and political processes leads us to case studies and the tracing of concrete historical periods. The idea is to scrutinize the degree of influence that Washington’s foreign policy has had on the tendency toward authoritarianism in Latin America vis-à-vis the endogenous conditions that allowed those changes to take place.

Project: Globality and Conflict. The United States and the September Crisis

Synopsis
The September 11 attacks brought conflict front and center in a context of a globalization process as incomplete as it was deficient. The United States has put more emphasis on the defense of its security and has subsumed many other issues on its agenda. This has made for a blurring of the bilateral and multilateral agendas of many state actors and Washington. This research project will detail the impact that the response to the attacks and possible renewed terrorist action will have on the international system’s arrangements.

Project: Analysis of the Effects of the Economic Opening and NAFTA on the Integrating Mexican Economy: a Sectoral Review

Synopsis
In the context of the evaluation of NAFTA’s impact on the Mexican economy, this study will do a sector-by-sector analysis and examine the logic of each economic entity. The sectoral analysis of NAFTA’s impact on Mexico was contingent on how the treaty itself was conceived. The study will suggest several scenarios that point in both a favorable and an unfavorable direction for the national economy’s most representative issues and sectors.

Project: Anti-Drug Policies in North America in the 1990s: Convergences and Divergences

Silvia Elena Vélez Quero

Synopsis
This research project focuses on each of the three countries of North America, seeking to discover the differences and similarities in their legal structures, the place each occupies in the drug production chain, their specific governmental policies and the reasons behind them. It also analyzes the extent to which government policies have influenced the consumption, trafficking and production of drugs in the region and seeks to discover how globalization has influenced the phenomenon and the results of these public policies.