Please join us join as Gustavo Glodes Blum presents "Normalisation, escalation, and intervention: The Trump Administration and the Regional Governance of International Spaces."
Gustavo Glodes Blum, is a Post-Doc Researcher at the Geography Department and Graduate Program at the Geosciences Institute of Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp) in Brazil.
About the Seminar
In an era increasingly defined by a "return to geopolitics," how should we conceptualize the regional strategies of major powers? While much attention has been paid to Russia's "Near Abroad" doctrine, the regional governance proposals of the second Trump Administration remain theoretically under-examined.
This paper argues that the United States' recent proposals for international spaces in its immediate vicinity are not ad-hoc foreign policy shifts, but rather reflect a deeper restructuring of the Liberal International Order. Drawing on Carl Schmitt's concept of the Großraum (Big Space), I contend that the Administration is actively reshaping its regional order where sovereignty, freedom of movement, and access are not negotiated multilaterally, but are instead imposed through a spectrum of graded and shared sovereignty. By systematically analysing the Administration's discourse on international spaces—particularly its policies of normalization with former adversaries, escalating tensions with traditional allies, and direct interventions toward non-peer states—this paper traces the mechanisms through which a major power reasserts control over its "regional setting.”
This research challenges us to move beyond a purely U.S.-centric analysis of foreign policy and instead situate American actions within a broader comparative framework alongside other revisionist powers. It raises critical questions for scholars of international order, questioning if "graded sovereignty" is gradually becoming the new norm for regional governance despite foundational principles such as territorial integrity and equality amongst sovereign states.
About the Speaker
Gustavo Glodes Blum, PhD in Geography, is a researcher with more than ten years of experience in geopolitical analysis, and has been working on the connecting issues between International Relations, Geography and International Public Law. He is currently a Fellow at the Institutional Program for Post-Doctoral Researchers (PIPD-Capes) at the Geography Department and Graduate Program at the Geosciences Institute at Unicamp, as well as a Visiting Fellow at the Center on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding (CCDP) at the Geneva Graduate Institute (Switzerland).
Discussant: Vassily Klimentov is a Research Associate with the Centre on Conflict, Development & Peacebuilding, and a SNSF Ambizione Principal Investigator and Lecturer in the History Department of Centre for Eastern European Studies, University of Zurich.
About the Seminars
Each semester, CCDP hosts a series of internal seminars to give our faculty, staff and affiliates the opportunity to present their work and receive feedback. The goal of the seminars is to have an informal and frank conversation about the research presented, and exchange ideas across disciplines and expertise, going beyond academic silos. Speakers at the seminars are both early career and senior scholars.
Eliza Urwin is organising the seminars for the academic year. For further information, get in touch at eliza.urwin@graduateinstitute.ch.