This is a multi-authored report by social science experts of Venezuela that reflects on the possibilities to shape a democratic transition in the context of the post-US intervention of January 3rd 2026. Without a clear plan for a democratic transition, or pressure from other stakeholders, the Trump administration and the Delcy Rodriguez interim government will continue developing a permanent tutelary relationship or a friendly but authoritarian petrostate. Our guiding assumption is that democracy consists of more than economic stabilization and more than elections, and will require a much broader process of economic, social, and political transformation. We do not aim to provide a recipe or roadmap for change, but rather to contribute to the discussion by bringing to bear some of the leading ideas and analyses of Venezuela’s transition.
In this presentation, we discuss the role of multilateral institutions and middle powers like Canada in supporting a democratic transition in Venezuela. We broaden the discussion of economic reforms to include pressing issues of social reproduction and equitable development, while highlighting some of the key challenges for a transition, which focus on the pacification of armed actors and the enactment of an inclusive framework of transitional justice.
About the Speakers
Rebecca Hanson is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Latin American Studies at the University of Florida, where she also co-directs the International Ethnography Lab. Her research examines policing, violence, criminal governance, and authoritarianism in Latin America, with a particular focus on Venezuela. She is the author of Policing the Revolution: The Transformation of Security and Violence in Venezuela during Chavismo (Oxford University Press, 2025), winner of the American Society of Criminology’s 2026 Division of International Criminology Outstanding Book Award, and co-author of Harassed: Gender, Bodies, and Ethnographic Research (University of California Press, 2019). Her work combines ethnographic and comparative research to examine the relationships among state power, security institutions, armed groups, and communities.
Masaya Llavaneras Blanco is Assistant Professor at the Centre for Global Social Innovation at Huron University College (Western University, Canada). Her research centres human mobilities, care work, and social reproduction in the Caribbean and South America. Her work has been published in Political Geography, Global Social Policy, and Environment and Planning C: Space, among others. Her most recent work includes “Embodying the Cost of a Predatory State: Depletion via Social Reproduction in Venezuela’s Crisis (2013–2021)” coauthored with Antulio Rosales (Social Politics, 2025) which explains the interdependence between the decline of Venezuela’s democracy and women’s reproductive and political rights.
Antulio Rosales is an Associate Professor in the Department of Social Science, at York University in Toronto, Canada. His research focuses on the political economy of energy, development and new technologies in Latin American. His work pays special attention to the collapse of Venezuela’s rentier economy and the expansion of new extractive frontiers, in a wider context of social and political tension, economic crisis and international sanctions. His research has appeared in journals such as New Political Economy, Review of International Political Economy, Development and Change, Energy Research and Social Science, among others.
