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Zara Albright | Between the Great Powers: South American Non-Alignment in an Era of Great Power Competition

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Lecture

Tue, Feb 3, 2026

12 PM – 1:15 PM EST (GMT-5)

Aaron Burr Hall, Room 216 (open to students, faculty, visiting scholars and staff)

Princeton, NJ 08544, United States

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South American countries are increasingly facing pressure to choose a side in geopolitical competition between the United States and China, but most are refusing to do so. Why are these smaller, less powerful states not aligning with either side? What strategies are they pursuing instead? Drawing on fieldwork in Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador, this project theorizes three non-alignment strategies and explains the conditions under which countries choose each. Interviews with decision-makers, policy documents, and newspaper articles show that outcomes are driven by ideas about the degree to which the rising power, China, is a security concern, and about whether the international system is a positive- or zero-sum game. These ideas are the product of interactions between the material preferences of powerful domestic interest groups and the identities held by the political elites in office.

ABOUT OUR GUEST SPEAKER

Zara Albright (Ph.D., Boston University) is a political scientist whose research explores the causes and consequences of growing political, diplomatic, and economic links between Latin America and China. Methodologically, Zara’s work incorporates qualitative case studies, semi-structured interviews, process tracing, text analysis, and statistical analysis. Her research has been supported by the Boston University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Boston University Center for Latin American Studies, and the Núcleo Milenio sobre los Impactos de China en América Latina, among others. Previously, Zara was a Global China Fellow at the Boston University Global Development Policy Center. While at Princeton, Zara will work on her book project, Between the Great Powers: South American Non-Alignment in an Era of US-China Competition, which examines the domestic political and discursive foundations of Argentina, Chile, and Ecuador’s foreign policy strategies for US-China competition.

DISCUSSANT

Naima Green-Riley, Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University
 

This event is open to students, faculty, visiting scholars and staff.

Sponsorship of an event does not constitute institutional endorsement of external speakers or views presented.

Where

Aaron Burr Hall, Room 216 (open to students, faculty, visiting scholars and staff)

Princeton, NJ 08544, United States

Speakers

Hanna Garth's profile photo

Hanna Garth

Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Princeton University

Hanna Garth is a sociocultural and medical anthropologist focused on the anthropology of food. Garth’s scholarship is broadly focused on the ways in which marginalized communities struggle to overcome structural inequalities and prejudice as they attempt to access basic needs. Garth studies these questions in Latin America and the Caribbean, and among Black and Latinx communities in the United States. She has focused on the ways in which the global industrial food system affects food access inequalities. Her first book "Food in Cuba: The Pursuit of a Decent Meal" (Stanford University Press, 2020), is based on ethnographic research in Santiago de Cuba, the island's second largest city. Her research reveals the ways that even food distribution systems, which ostensibly supply sufficient nutritional needs, can also have detrimental effects on individual and community wellbeing. Her next book project will draw on ethnographic research she has conducted on the Los Angeles Food Justice Movement from 2008-2021. This project analyzes the work of organizations that are trying to improve access to healthy food in South Los Angeles. Based on this work she co-edited the volume Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). She is also conducting new research in South Los Angeles on emergency food programming during and after COVID-19, and developing future work on fish and seafood in the Caribbean.



Prior to arriving at Princeton she was an assistant professor in Anthropology at UC San Diego from 2016-2021. She received her PhD in Anthropology from UCLA, an MPH from Boston University, and was a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine in Anthropology.


Hosted By

Program in Latin American Studies | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies