History and international relations in the Guyana Region

“History and international relations in the Guyana Region”

Among the various regions that make up the subcontinent of South America, the Guyanas is the least studied in the composition of the Transnational Amazon and the American continent in general. Thus, this set of articles is an important piece of research to better understand a place inhabited by great biodiversity, cultures, peoples, languages, flows of people and a rich history.
The region is located inside the "Transnational Amazon" and represents five from nine of the countries that share an Amazonian space. Native peoples, colonization, establishment of borders, migrant flows are some of the elements that makes a potential to be explored in the study of history and international relations in the region.
The delimitation of the Amazon can establish different criteria and this form will present different compositions. It is comum the reference in texts on the "Transnational Amazon". It is a general definition that includes physical, environmental and political-administrative criteria in French Guyana, on the other hand, is not an independent country and responds directly to mainland France. This meant that research institutions in the region were generally structured only in recent decades and often in a precarious way.
The Université de Guyane in Cayenne did not have university status until 2015. Until then, its link was as an educational pole linked to the Antilles (Martinique and Guadalupe). Since its new Diálogos, Maringá-PR, Brasil, v. 24, n. 2, p. 1-5, mai./ago. 2020 2 moment, the hiring of scholars and establishments for research and teaching projects have brought greater focus to studies on the territory itself and its geographical surroundings.
In the Cooperative Republic of Guyana and Suriname, the only two universities present, "Anton de Kom" and "University Of Guyana", respectively, face low investments and a drain of specialized labor to other countries. However, some initiatives have been taken place in the search to bring regional studies closer.
At the Federal University of Roraima (UFRR) in the 2000s it was sought to approach the Guyanas as an object of history and international relations. Reginaldo Gomes de Oliveira is one of the pioneering academics in these studies and he pointed out the idea of a "Caribbean Amazon" as a differential in looking at the region. Among his works, we highlight "Amazônia Caribenha: a regionalização, os caminhos históricos e culturais" where it is located historically the concept of the "Caribbean Amazon". Gomes says that the concept is "linked to the relative character of the Caribbean territory as a cultural region, marked by a different ethno-historical process from the other regions of South America, which is clearly defined as a singular Iberian cultural process As mentioned above, the migratory flow in the Guyanas region is intense and differs in some aspects from the migratory processes present in some other areas of South America. Handerson Joseph's work has as object the Caribbean migratory trajectories, more specifically Haitian, and the Guyana as part of that system. In "The Haitian migratory system in the Guyanas: beyond the borders" we can better understand the practices and trajectories of migrants that cross national borders in the Guyanas region, as well as see an analysis of the migratory system, its documents and papers and the problems that different Haitian migratory generations arise in space and time.
The low population density that characterizes the Transnational Amazon, more intensely in the Guyana region did not mean the absence of a rich history of different peoples who live there. On the contrary, as we can see in the approaches of this set of works, cultural diversity characterizes the This set of works is launched at a time of a global pandemic that the historian Lilia Schwarcz points out to be the mark of the 20th century. A turbulent moment in which perspectives on societies, technologies, consumption, rights and history are being revised. We hope articles that address a region that has not been studied much in history and in international relations can contribute to the expansion of knowledge in such a multiple region as the Guynas.