Description
In the field of IR, the state and sovereignty claims are frequently regarded as ideal-types, which are central to the myth of political modernity. Dominant and revisionist approaches often ontologise these categories and assume them as fixed and stable entities derived from overarching models, which leads to empirical challenges in capturing historical specificities and concrete political practices. Using the framework of Geopolitical Marxism, this project seeks to move this static ontology of IR by offering a metatheory that reconstructs an account of Mexico’s international historical sociology over the longue durée. Over four substantive chapters, this project demonstrate how this approach allows for a theoretically-rigorous and empirically-grounded socio-political analysis, which situates state formation and renegotiated sources of sovereignty in a class-relational perspective which is, geopolitically mediated, and unevenly projected across territorial space. The research first explores the formation of a colonial polity (1521–1821), shaped by haciendas, merchant networks, and a silver-based economy that enabled imperial sovereignty over vast territories within a broader context of geopolitical rivalry across the Americas, altering spaces and class contradictions. It then examines the complex dynamics of the 19th century, where struggles over sovereignty among México profundo (Indigenous), México imaginario (liberal), and México señorial (colonial-like) shaped a postcolonial state struggling to survive amid the rise of the United States. The thesis concludes with an analysis of the Porfiriato (1870s–1910) as a reassertion of México señorial, still reliant on extra-economic appropriation while integrating foreign capital and expanding institutions of dispossession. The thesis examines the key drivers of predominantly pre-capitalist social property relations and the renegotiated strategies of reproduction, accumulation, and appropriation that were central to the making of pre-revolutionary Mexico. It consistently situates state formation and sovereignty not as fixed entities, but as highly contingent on their geopolitical context.
