2026.09.30 Call for papers for the Special Issue "Social Evolution in Latin America"
C A L L F O R P A P E R S
Social Evolution & History
Special Issue
Social Evolution in Latin America
Long-Term Dynamics, World-Systems, and Socioeconomic Complexity
Guest Editor: Daniel Barreiros, Institute of Economics, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro
Contact: daniel.barreiros@ie.ufrj.br
Abstract deadline: 15 October 2026
Latin America offers an exceptional setting for the comparative study of social evolution. Mesoamerica and the Andes were among the few regions of the world where cities, complex societies, and states arose independently, and research in Amazonia and other lowland regions continues to broaden our understanding of the range of pathways toward sociopolitical complexity, including heterarchical and non-state forms. From the sixteenth century onward, the region was incorporated into an expanding global system in ways that proved decisive for both: American silver, plantation economies, and the Atlantic slave trade helped shape the early modern world economy, while conquest, demographic catastrophe, and colonial institutions generated new and hybrid social formations.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Latin American societies experienced state-building and recurrent cycles of political instability, export booms and busts, import-substituting industrialization, authoritarian and democratic waves, rapid urbanization and demographic transition, and deep integration into, as well as contestation of, the global order. The region thus combines a remarkable depth of independent social evolution with a long history of peripheral and semi-peripheral incorporation into larger systems.
Latin America is also the birthplace of influential intellectual traditions, such as ECLAC structuralism, dependency theory, and Latin American social archaeology, which anticipated and nourished world systems analysis and the wider study of core-periphery relations. Nevertheless, Latin American cases remain comparatively underrepresented in the newer quantitative and theory-driven approaches to long-term social dynamics, including cliodynamics, structural-demographic analysis, the mathematical modelling of historical processes, and globalistics. This special issue aims to bridge these traditions, bringing scholars of Latin America into dialogue with those developing general models of social evolution.
Thematic Axes
We particularly welcome contributions in, but not limited to, the following areas:
1. Cliodynamics and Latin American societies
Applications of cliodynamic and structural-demographic approaches (secular cycles, population-resource dynamics, elite overproduction, state fiscal capacity, and sociopolitical instability) to pre-Columbian, colonial, and modern Latin American societies. Possible topics include:
• mathematical and computational models of the rise, crisis, and collapse of Mesoamerican and Andean polities;
• structural-demographic analyses of colonial rebellions, wars of independence, and nineteenthcentury civil conflicts;
• quantitative analysis and forecasting of revolutions, coups, protest waves, and sociopolitical destabilization in contemporary Latin America;
• the construction and use of long-term datasets (demographic, fiscal, price, wage, and conflict series) for the study of Latin American historical dynamics.
2. Long-term historical social evolution
Studies of the trajectories of Latin American societies across centuries or millennia, attentive both to general mechanisms and to regional specificity. Possible topics include:
• the origins of sociopolitical complexity: chiefdoms, early states and their alternatives and analogues, heterarchy, and urbanism in Mesoamerica, the Andes, Amazonia, and the Caribbean;
• collapse, reorganization, and resilience of complex societies (e.g. the Classic Maya, Tiwanaku, Wari);
• colonial social formations and secondary politogenesis, including indigenous polities under colonial rule and maroon communities;
• the long-term evolution of states, institutions, inequality, and well-being from the colonial era to the present;
• Latin America within the framework of production revolutions, big history, and the phases of global social macroevolution.
3. World-systems analysis of pre-modern and modern Latin America
• pre-Columbian world-systems: core-periphery relations, prestige-goods exchange, and interregional networks in Mesoamerica and the Andes;
• the incorporation of the Americas into the Iberian, Atlantic, and Pacific circuits of the early modern world economy;
• core, semi-periphery, and periphery: the upward and downward mobility of Latin American states in the world-system, and the region’s place in hegemonic cycles;
• Kondratieff waves, commodity super-cycles, and the long-term dynamics of Latin American economies;
• dependency and structuralist theories revisited in the light of world-systems and global macroevolutionary approaches.
4. Global phenomena and their Latin American dimensions
How processes of planetary scale have unfolded in, been refracted through, or originated in Latin America.
Possible topics include:
• epidemics and pandemics, from the Columbian Exchange to COVID-19;
• climate variability and change (e.g. ENSO, megadroughts) and their societal consequences;
• demographic transition, urbanization, and international migration;
• global waves of revolution, democratization, and authoritarian resurgence;
• technological transformations, including the Cybernetic Revolution, digitalization, and artificial intelligence;
• the Great Divergence and the Great Convergence seen from Latin America.
5. Globalistics applied to Latin America
Globalistics, understood as the interdisciplinary study of global processes, systems, and problems, applied to the region. Possible topics include:
• Latin America in the transformation of the world order and in emerging multipolar configurations (e.g. BRICS, China-Latin America relations);
• regional integration projects and global governance;
• global problems with a Latin American epicentre: the Amazon, the energy transition and critical minerals, food security;
• scenarios and forecasts for Latin America in the twenty-first century.
6. Socioeconomic complexity in Latin America
• economic complexity, productive structures, and the middle-income trap; premature
deindustrialization and informality;
• long-run inequality, social stratification, and social mobility;
• complexity-science approaches: networks, agent-based models, and nonlinear dynamics of Latin
American societies;
• comparative measurement of social complexity, including Latin American cases in cross-cultural and global historical databases.
Comparative studies that place Latin American cases alongside other world regions, as well as theoretical and methodological contributions relevant to the themes above, are also welcome. We especially encourage submissions from authors based in different countries and from transnational teams of coauthors.
Types of Contributions
• Research articles: generally no longer than 8,000 words.
• Review articles: up to 2,500 words.
• Brief reviews and book reviews: up to 600 words.
Proposals will be selected on the basis of originality, theoretical contribution, methodological rigour, and fit with the profile of the journal. All manuscripts will undergo peer review.
Social Evolution & History – Call for Papers: Social Evolution in Latin America | 4
Timeline
Manuscripts must be submitted by 15 December 2026.
Manuscript Preparation
Full manuscripts must follow the journal’s guidelines, available in the “Manuscript Preparation” section at
https://www.sociostudies.org/journal/seh/. In summary:
• manuscripts are submitted in DOCX (Word) or RTF format and written in clear and concise English;
• the title page includes each author’s full name, degree, affiliation, email, and mailing address, the designated corresponding author, a one-paragraph abstract of 150–200 words, and 3–8 keywords;
• text is single-spaced, in 10- or 12-point type, with 1-inch margins;
• references follow the author-date system in the text, e.g. (Lee and Devore 1968: 236), with a complete alphabetical reference list at the end of the article;
• figures are not embedded in the Word file but submitted as separate high-resolution files (minimum 300 dpi, JPEG, TIF, EPS, PSD, or PDF) and must remain legible in black and white;
• authors are responsible for obtaining permission to reproduce previously published material.
Why Publish in This Special Issue
Social Evolution & History is an open access journal with no fees for authors, a DOI for every article (prefix 10.30884/seh), and a long-standing international and interdisciplinary readership in anthropology, history, sociology, archaeology, and global studies. Its editorial board and council bring together leading
scholars of social evolution, state formation, world-systems analysis, and the archaeology of Mesoamerica and the Andes, offering an especially suitable forum for work that connects Latin American research with global theoretical debates.