No End in Sight: The Unwinding and Afterlife of the Cold War in Latin America

Overview

No End in Sight represents a unique collaboration organized by scholars across four universities: Gil Joseph (Yale), Jennifer Adair (Fairfield), Alison Bruey (University of North Florida), and Juan Ignacio Arboleda (Johns Hopkins). The project will culminate in a three-day international conference at Yale and Fairfield Universities and give rise to an edited volume submitted to Duke University Press that will reassess the end of the Cold War from a Latin American perspective. Too often, this "end" is framed by global events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the Soviet Union, or, in Latin America, reduced to “transitions to democracy” brokered by national elites. Instead of a single rupture marking the triumph of U.S.-led liberal democracy, No End in Sight explores how the Cold War's conclusion in the region was neither top-down nor uniform, and certainly not complete. The conference will convene over 30 scholars, journalists, and a documentary filmmaker from Latin America, the United States, and Europe to grapple with pressing questions: How should we understand the Cold War's conclusion in a region where violence and repression continued to reach into everyday life? How did struggles for democracy, burdened by Cold War legacies, nonetheless, open new political possibilities? And what does it mean to speak of an "end" when viewed from Latin America--especially as the growing presence of China and the aggressive posture of the current U.S. administration have fueled talk of a "new Cold War"? The project's organizers represent senior (Joseph and Bruey), mid-career (Adair), and emerging (Arboleda) historians who have engaged in an 18-month planning effort.

The three-day international conference at Yale and Fairfield will take place on October 15-17, 2026 (Days 1 and 3 at Yale, Day 2 at Fairfield) and is organized around 6 sessions featuring research and discussion by leading and emerging scholars of the Cold War from Latin America, the US, and Europe. To complement these presentations of original research, the conference features two keynote lectures at the beginning and end of the event, a special roundtable bringing distinguished hemispheric journalists into dialogue with academics about Cold War legacies and democratic struggles, and a Historians’ Dialogue bringing Latin Americanists into conversation with scholars working on other regions of the world. Above all, the No End in Sight project seeks to expand hemispheric scholarly networks, exchange ideas about interpretations, methods, and pedagogies, and chart future directions for collaborative research. The conference and the collective volume that will follow aim to be of interest not only to scholars of Latin America, but also to faculty, students, and those engaged with the dynamics of cold wars past and present, U.S. foreign relations, and the study of democracy and authoritarianism more broadly.