Puerto Rico and the Postcolonial Challenge to the Study of US–Latin American Relations in IR

Abstract Puerto Rico’s political status strains against a “liberal international order” that proscribes colonial subordination. More fundamentally, Puerto Rico unsettles IR, the academic study of international relations, particularly its subfield of US–Latin American relations, which mostly elides or denies Puerto Rico’s extant colonial relationship with the United States. The analytical problems that Puerto Rico poses derive from a Eurocentric IR that reduces US–Latin American relations to relations among states. By problematizing IR’s Eurocentrism, however, postcolonialism transcends its state-centrism. This allows postcolonialism to foreground Puerto Rico’s colonial status and to situate it alongside informal empire in the Americas. From there, postcolonialism highlights how empire animates co-constitutive social relations as well as discourses that authorize and conceal imperial practices. Postcolonialism thus puts Puerto Rico squarely within the study of US–Latin American relations by recovering within those relations broader patterns of imperial hierarchy.