Bolivarian globalization? The new left’s struggle in Latin America and the Caribbean to negotiate a revolutionary approach to humanitarian militarism and international intervention

Within a critical globalization theory framework, this article analyses the military dimension of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America–Peoples’ Trade Agreement (ALBA-TCP) and its agenda of ‘peacekeeping’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Haiti. Since its launch in 2004, the ALBA-TCP has established itself as an increasingly institutionalized, multidimensional, and pluriscalar counter-hegemonic Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) regionalism and globalization project. Integral to the pursued transformation of world order is the launching of a counter-hegemonic military agenda. Grounded in the Bolivarian philosophy of regional union, the article explores the ALBA-TCP collective defence policies, institutionalized in the Permanent Committee of Sovereignty and Defence, and the ALBA-TCP-Haiti cooperation before and after the earthquake of January 2010. By interrogating the nature of the military alliance and its humanitarian agenda, I propose that the ALBA-TCP’s revolutionary approach to internationalism, peacekeeping, and intervention may be understood as employing an ‘enlarged conception’ of humanitarianism that means neither militarized humanitarianism nor humanitarian assistance as isolated, short-term technical disaster relief, but as long-term emancipatory structural transformation. Military alliance, however, is necessary to defend the project against imperialist aggression.