1 The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization, First Edition. Edited by George Ritzer. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Organization of American States GORDON MACE The Organization of American States (OAS) is considered by many to be the oldest regional institution in the world. A successor to the International Union of American Republic, established in 1890, it was formally created in 1948 on the occasion of the Ninth International Conference of American States, held in Bogota, Colombia. The constituent document of the inter-American system, the Charter of the Organization of American States, identified the main organs of the OAS as being the Inter- American Conference, later replaced by the General Assembly, the Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs, the OAS Council (now Permanent Council), the General Secretariat, and the Inter-American Economic and Social Council (now Inter-American Council on Integral Development) (Connell- Smith 1974: 202). Membership includes all countries of the Hemisphere, but the govern- ment of Cuba was excluded from participation in OAS activities in 1962 by a majority vote. As the main political forum of the region, the OAS came into existence amidst a context of great expectations with regards to US–Latin American relations. United States’ interventions in the region, however, particularly in Guatemala and in the Dominican Republic, soon weakened considerably the legitimacy of the regional insti- tution. From the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s, the OAS was more or less moribund. It was given a second life with the new context of hemispheric relations at the start of the 1990s and with the advent of summitry in 1994. The reintroduction of summitry, however, somewhat weakened the role of the OAS as the central political forum of the region in favor of the Heads of States, who started to meet regularly and take the major decisions with regard to inter-American affairs (Mace & Loiseau 2005: 124–129). The OAS has basically four central missions. Already included in the Charter of 1948, the promotion of representative democracy has been renewed and reinforced first with the Protocol of Cartagena de Indias in 1985, and then with a series of declarations leading to the Inter- American Democratic Charter adopted on September 11, 2001. Now regrouped in the Secretariat for Political Affairs, the organs of the OAS involved in electoral observation and diffusion of best democratic practices have been quite successful over the past 25 years. A lot more needs to be done, certainly, but the activities of the OAS in that area are in good part responsible for the prevalence of the dem- ocratic norm in the Americas since 1990. As Monica Serrano wrote, “the idea of human rights has long been part of the politi- cal and social landscape in the Americas” (Serrano 2010: 1). It is not surprising therefore that the mission of protecting human rights was assigned to the OAS as early as 1948 with the signing of the “American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man” by the States of the Americas. But it was only in 1959 that the hemispheric human rights regime became a reality, when the Fifth Meeting of Consultation of Ministers of Foreign Affairs approved the drafting of a Convention on Human Rights and the establishment of two regional bodies: the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (1960) and the Inter-American Court for the Protection of Human Rights (1979). The inter-American human rights regime still faces significant challenges, related among other things to the implementation of decisions of the commission and the court, but it has suc- ceeded in developing regional human rights standards concerning major problems affect- ing the Hemisphere (Duhaime 2007: 148). A third mission of the OAS deals with secu- rity. As identified in Chapters V and VI of the Charter, the OAS has originally been preoccu- pied mostly by traditional security matters such as collective security, conflict prevention,