Virtual Panel “International Law and (In)Justice: Venezuela, Extrajudicial Force, and Caribbean Impacts”
This panel will be a conversation that situates the contemporary crises in Venezuela within their deeper historical and geopolitical contexts, offering insights that go beyond standard media narratives. Our speakers will connect the U.S.-Venezuela case to broader tensions concerning governance, colonial inheritances, and Caribbean racial politics. They will also reflect on how to negotiate diverse constituencies across both U.S. and non-U.S. settings.
The panel will be moderated by Vierelina Fernández, Postdoctoral Scholar at Rutgers University’s Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS).
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Speaker Bios
Percy C. Hintzen
Professor Emeritus of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former Professor of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. He earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Political Sociology from Yale University. His scholarship examines relationships among modernity, globalization, and postcolonial political economy with a particular focus on the Caribbean, Africa, and North America. His publications include The Costs of Regime Survival: Racial Mobilization, Elite Domination, and Control of the State in Guyana and Trinidad. Cambridge University; West Indian in the West, New York University Press; Problematizing Blackness: Self Ethnographies by Black Immigrants to the United States, Routledge; and Global Circuits of Blackness: Interrogating the African Diaspora. Univ. of Illinois Press and over seventy articles in journals and chapters in edited volumes. His latest book, Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State, was published by the University of Mississippi Press in 2022
Mellissa Ifill
Senior Lecturer and multidisciplinary scholar in the Department of History and Social Studies and former Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Institutional Advancement at the University of Guyana (August 2020 - July 2025). Her research interests include Democratic Governance and Ethnicised Politics, Gender and Citizen Security, Violence, Crime and Incarceration – with a focus on Guyana and the English-speaking Caribbean. She is currently engaged in research on gendered crime and violence, incarceration, and coloniality. Her research interests include Democratic Governance and Ethnicised Politics, Gender and Citizen Security, Violence, Crime and Incarceration – with a focus on Guyana and the English-speaking Caribbean. She is currently engaged in research on gendered crime and violence, incarceration, and coloniality.
Timothy Gill
Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee as well as Chair of Global Studies. He has published on topics involving U.S. foreign policy, Venezuelan politics and human rights, and sociological theory. His work has been published in several academic outlets, including Sociological Forum, Social Currents, and Sociology of Development. He also has published his work in several public outlets, including The Washington Post, The Nation, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Contexts. Finally, he is the author of the book Encountering U.S. Empire in Socialist Venezuela: The Legacy of Race, Neo-Colonialism, and Democracy Promotion.
Rebecca Hanson
Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law and the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Florida. She is an internationally recognized scholar of state repression, criminal violence, and policing in Latin America, integrating comparative research across the region with sustained, in-depth research in Venezuela. Her most recent book, Policing the Revolution: The Transformation of Coercive Power and Venezuela's Security Landscape During Chavismo, examines how Chavista governments approached issues often eschewed by the left, including policing and crime. The book draws on ten years of ethnographic, interview, focus group, and survey research to analyze how a first leftist and later authoritarian project produced security outcomes most often associated with neoliberal policies and transitions to democracy. Her current project with Veronica Zubillaga traces relationships between the government of Nicolás Maduro and competing armed actors in the country, including the police, gangs, and colectivos.
This event is co-sponsored by the Criminal Justice Program, the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies, the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies, the Department of Sociology, and the Center for Latin American Studies.