Drawing on fresh research from a large ESRC-funded team project in Mexico, I will address the challenges faced by activists or rights defenders within contexts where they are not only fearful of violence but also frustrated by the inadequacy of institutional channels. In such difficult contexts, where state institutions may well be part of the problem, it would seem that activist groups have a vital role to play. How can they make headway in the struggle for institutions that offer a real guarantee of justice?

What are the long-term political consequences of counterinsurgent violence? An emerging literature analyzes the socio-political consequences of civil war. Yet, while the bulk of this research focuses on individual-level effects, we still have little knowledge about how these results aggregate up to collective outcomes. This study analyzes the electoral consequences of the genocidal counterinsurgency in Guatemala’s three-decades long civil war (1966-96). Previous studies claimed that the violence has drawn the affected indigenous communities away from leftist parties into the fold of neo-authoritarian clientelism.

In September 1969 the Nixon Administration launched Operation Intercept along the U.S.-Mexico border and at each of its crossing points. Intercept's stated aims were to end trafficking of marijuana and pills from Mexico to the United States. Intercept brought more than 2,000 federal agents to the border, most of whom were involved in searching every single person, vehicle or plane as they crossed northwards. With Intercept, the border bottleneck was born, and the people who waited in the long lines of cars -- and people in cities and towns along the Mexican border -- began to experience a new found separation that created a new border-crossing people.

Dr. Aleida Guevara, Cuban paediatricain, and daughter of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara, delivers this lecture - Cuba sends medical brigades in response to disasters, and has established health centres in low-income and remote areas and trains medical practitioners from across the developing world. Dr Guevara, who has participated in international missions in Angola, Ecuador and Nicaragua, will explain the internationalist philosophy that underlies this work, as well as its challenges and achievements.

Jill Hedges (Oxford Analytica) - 2017 marks the 70th anniversary of female suffrage in Argentina. Although Eva Perón has often been credited with being the driving force behind the granting of women's suffrage in 1947, in fact it was the culmination of a long struggle by women’s rights lobbyists. However, Evita’s role in organising and using the women's vote, and in giving women a political model, was crucial at the time and perhaps also had longer-term effects.

This panel discussion assesses the outcome of Argentina’s legislative elections on 22 October 2017. For some, the mid-term elections is a gauge of the chances of former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to stage a political comeback, as well as a vital political test for the agenda of current president Mauricio Macri. Given the highly polarised context of contemporary Argentine politics, the election comes at a crucial moment.

50 years after his execution, this seminar explores some of the many facets of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s extraordinary life and legacy.

Chaired and introduced by Dr Paulo Drinot (UCL Americas). Speakers in order of appearance: Professor Dirk Kruijt (Utrecht), Professor Elizabeth Dore (Southampton), Richard Gott, Dr Helen Yaffe (LSE), Dr James Scorer (Manchester), Nikolaos Souslous (UCL)

Reflecting on the recent experience of writing (with Christian Høgsbjerg) a biography of Toussaint Louverture, I draw in the talk on Edouard Glissant’s claim – in his Caribbean Discourse – of the continued need to ‘argue around Toussaint’. The paper focuses on the domestication of the revolutionary implications of Louverture’s life by those who have presented him as an ancien régime figure, and detects the renewal of such thinking in what has been identified as a recent ‘conservative turn’ in global histories of the revolutionary age.

Many medieval and early modern Jewish calendars were based on the assumption that the calendar repeats itself exactly after 247 years. This lecture sketches the history of the 247-year calendar cycle based on evidence provided by a comprehensive corpus of medieval and early modern manuscripts from different geo-cultural areas.

Kevin Middlebrook, Professor of Latin American Politics at UCL Institute of the Americas, talks to BBC's Dan Damon about the rounds of NAFTA negotiations starting this week between Canada, Mexico and the United States.