Russia and Latin America

Today, extensive, intensive, and interconnected global processes provide non-state actors with a degree of agency, power, and significance that a 'System of States' paradigm cannot account for by itself. Using Russia-Latin America relations as a case study, this work explores alternative international mechanisms and principles of order and organization, charting and analyzing the emergence of complex cooperative networks in interstate relations. Applying a Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) perspective, the authors argue that, as a tool of statecraft, networks present challenges and opportunities for states that reside in an international system of states dominated by realpolitik. Fusing the local and the global and integrating states' interests to an unprecedented degree, networks create alternative bases for interstate engagement based on cooperation. Russia-Latin America relations exemplify the impact that emergent complex cooperative networks are having on international order and organization because present engagement is explicitly premised on the goal of establishing long-term networks of cooperation that will ground interstate relations.