Dr Rowan Lubbock

Profile

After receiving my PhD in International Relations from Birkbeck, University of London in 2017, I joined the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary in 2019.

My research interests centre largely on the agrarian dynamics of international relations. My previous research examined the politics of food sovereignty within Venezuela and the Latin American regional institution, the ALBA-TCP (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América-Tratado de Comercio de los Pueblos – Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America-Peoples Trade Treaty), as well as the historical sociology of Latin American regionalism more broadly.

My current project expands on these topics, with a critical analysis of agriculture in the making of international (dis)order. With specific focus on the historical formation of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, this long-term archival research project aims to shed much needed light on the ways in which humanity’s transformation of the earth simultaneously transforms ‘the international’.

Undergraduate Teaching

Convenor:

POLM059 (Sem A)

POL257 (Sem B)

POL318 (Sem A/B)

Research

Research Interests:

• International Relations
• Latin American politics
• Regionalism
• Marxian political economy
• Critical Agrarian Studies
• Global Governance
• Historical Sociology

Examples of research funding:

I recently completed a Junior Research Fellowship at the Corvinus Instutite for Advanced Studies, Corvinus University (Budapest). This year long fellowship (2022-23) supported the first phase of my long-term research project on agriculture and the making of international (dis)order. 

Publications

Books

(2024), Cultivating Socialism: Venezuela, ALBA, and the Politics of Food Sovereignty, Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Edited Books

(2023) co-edited with Ernesto Vivares, The Reconfiguration of 21st Century Latin American Regionalism: Actors, Processes, Contradictions, Prospects, London, New York: Routledge.

Special Issues

(2022) co-edited with Ernesto Vivares, ‘The Reconfiguration of 21st Century Latin American Regionalism: Actors, Processes, Contradictions, Prospects’, Globalizations, 19(4).

Peer-Reviewed Articles

(Forthcoming) ‘Fields, Frontiers and the Making of the Food and Agriculture Organisation’, Geopolitics.

(2024), ‘Movement without a Movement: Food Self-Provisioning in South-Eastern Europe as Emergent Transformation Towards a De-Growth Mode of Living’, Journal of Political Ecology.

(2024) ‘The Geopolitics of Passive Revolution and the Ghost of Malthus in the American Century’, European Journal of International Relations, DOI: 10.1177/13540661241258 [Open Access].

(2023), ‘Arrighi’s Pendulum: (Re)Reading The Evolution of International Society in the 21st Century’, International Politics, Special Issue: ‘Adam Watson: A Contemporary Reassessment’, Filippo Costa Buranelli and Yanni Stivachtis (eds.), DOI: 10.1057/s41311-023-00500-5 [Open Access].

(2023, with Kieran Andrieu), ‘European Regional International Society and the Political Economy of the Global Sugar Regime’, International Studies Review, 25 (2), pp. 1-24 [Open Access].

(2022), ‘Capitalist Geopolitics and the Long Road to Latin American Regionalism’, Globalizations, 19(4), pp. 536-554, Special Issue: ‘The Reconfiguration of 21st Century Latin American Regionalism: Actors, Processes, Contradictions, Prospects’, Rowan Lubbock and Ernesto Vivares (eds.)

(2020), ‘Imperialism and the Geopolitics of COVID-19 in Venezuela’, Textos E Debates, 1 (34), pp. 153-176 [Open Access], in Special Issue: ‘Venezuela: passado, presente e futuro’, Fábio Barbosa dos Santos and Rodrigo Pereira Chagas (eds.)

(2020), ‘Rights, Recognition and Norms in the Making of Latin American International Society: An Historical Materialist Interpretation’. Journal of International Relations and Development, 23 (2), pp. 237-261.

(2020), ‘The Social Contradictions of Regional Development in the ALBA-TCP: The Case of Food Production’, New Political Economy, 25 (2), pp. 213-230.

(2020), ‘The Hidden Edifice of (Food) Sovereignty: Rights, Territory and the Struggle for Agrarian Reform in Venezuela’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 20 (2), pp. 289-310.

Book Chapters

(2023), ‘Capitalist Geopolitics and the Long Road to Latin American Regionalism’, in Rowan Lubbock and Ernesto Vivares (eds.), The Reconfiguration of 21st Century Latin American Regionalism: Actors, Processes, Contradictions, Prospects, London, New York: Routledge.

(2018), ‘Development and Imperialism’, in Ronaldo Munck and Honor Fagan (eds.), Handbook on Development and Social Change, Massachusetts: Edward Elgar.

(2018), ‘From Magical State to Magical Region? Ecology, Labour and Socialism in ALBA’, in Asa Cusack (ed.), Understanding ALBA: The Progress, Problems, and Prospects of Alternative Regionalism in Latin America and the Caribbean, London: Institute of Latin American Studies.

(2017, with Giulia Carabelli), ‘Neoliberalising Mostar: Governmentality, Ethno-nationalism and Everyday Forms of Resistance’, in Jonathan Louth (ed.), Edges of Identity: The Production of Neoliberal Subjectivities, Chester: University of Chester Press.

Supervision

I would be happy to supervise PhD projects along the following themes and topics:

Critical IR/IPE

Marxian theory

Latin American Politics

International Development

Global Governance