Absolute Resolve and Its Aftermath: Assessing US Actions in Venezuela and What's Next

“Operation Absolute Resolve”—the recent US military operation in Venezuela resulting in the capture of its president Nicolás Maduro and his wife—marks one of the most consequential foreign policy developments in the Western Hemisphere in decades. Drawing on perspectives from political science, international law, history, and more, this panel discussion examined the origins, legitimacy, and consequences of US actions; the future of US–Latin America relations; and the crisis these actions constitute for international law.

This event was hosted by the Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs and the Weinberg College Center for International & Area Studies and its Latin American & Caribbean Studies Program.

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About the speakers

Ana Arjona, Associate Professor of Political Science, was the Director of the Center for the Study of Security & Drugs at Los Andes University in Bogotá, Colombia from 2018 to 2019, where she is now Associate Researcher. Her research investigates the dynamics and legacies of organized violence, especially civil wars and organized crime, local governance, state building, and the foundations of political order. She is the author of the award-winning book Rebelocracy: Social Order in the Colombian Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Lina Britto, Associate Professor of History, is a journalist and historian of modern Latin America and the Caribbean. Her work situates the emergence and consolidation of illegal drug smuggling networks in Colombia and the Caribbean in the context of a growing articulation between the region and the United States during the Cold War. She is the author of Marijuana Boom: The Rise and Fall of Colombia's First Drug Paradise (University of California Press, 2020) and is one of the authors of Cambios y continuidades en el conflicto (Changes and Continuities in the Conflict), the second report of Colombia's Historical Commission of the Armed Conflict & Its Victims, which was published by the Office for the High Commissioner for Peace.

Edward Gibson, Kenneth Burgess Professor of Political Science, is a co-founder of Northwestern's Comparative-Historical Social Science Program. His research addresses the politics of democratization and authoritarianism, problems of federalism, and party politics. His recent work explores subnational dynamics of authoritarianism and democratization in the US and Latin America.  He is the author of the award-winning book Boundary Control: Subnational Authoritarianism in Federal Democracies (2012). He is also the author of Class & Conservative Parties: Argentina in Comparative Perspective (1996) and editor of Federalism and Democracy in Latin America (2004).

Daniel Immerwahr, Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities and Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence, is the author of Thinking Small (Harvard, 2015) and How to Hide an Empire (FSG, 2019), both of which have won scholarly awards. Immerwahr is a contributing writer for The New Yorker and his essays have also appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Harper's, The New Republic, and the New York Review of Books, among other places. He is writing a fire history of the United States.

James Mahoney, Gordon Fulcher Professor of Decision-Making and Professor of Political Science and Sociology, is a comparative‐historical researcher who works on national development, political regimes, and methodology. He is known for his historical research on Latin America, his theoretical contributions to the study of path dependence and institutional change, and his methodological work on small-N and comparative research. His current project focuses on the role of global idea systems as causes of long-run political dynamics in Latin America.

katrina quisumbing king, Assistant Professor of Sociology, studies racial classification and exclusion from a historical perspective that foregrounds the state’s authority to manage populations. She is particularly interested in the ways state actors conceive of and make decisions around race and citizenship. Her research recenters empire as a key political formation. In the US context, she focuses especially on how the state defines colonized populations and how these people fit into the US racial order.

Peter Slevin is a contributing writer to The New Yorker who spent a decade on The Washington Post’s national staff. At the Medill School, he teaches classes on politics and the media; the US role in world affairs; and reporting strategies on current events, from presidential campaigns to the intersection of policing, race, and reparations. Slevin’s career as a reporter has taken him around the country and the globe, where he has covered events and personalities of every description, taking particular interest in telling stories rich with the voices of the people involved. His  biography of Michelle Obama was voted one of the best biographies of the year by PEN America and Booklist, and was translated into Chinese, Korean, and Dutch.