Deputy Director of the Centre for War and Diplomacy, Dr Thomas Mills, has been appointed an Associate Fellow of Canning House, the UK’s leading think-tank on Latin America.

Established in 1943, Canning House works towards building positive relations between the UK and the countries of Latin America. It regularly hosts heads of governments at its meetings and works closely with UK policy-makers and leading business executives concerned with UK-Latin America relations.

Dr Mills recently took part in Canning House’s flagship annual conference. The meeting, held on 10 November 2020, marked ten years since the announcement by the then Foreign Secretary, William Hague, of the ‘Canning Agenda’, a broad-ranging government policy aimed at rejuvenating British links with Latin America. As well as an update on the policy from William Hague, the conference featured contributions from Ranil Jayawardena MP (Minister for International Trade) and Mark Menzies MP (Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Latin America).

Dr Mills took part in a panel reviewing the record of the Canning Agenda, alongside Joanna Crellin (Her Majesty’s Trade Commissioner for Latin America and the Caribbean), Jeremy Browne (Former Minister of State for Foreign Affairs) and Rebeca Grynspan (Ibero-American Secretary General and former Vice-President of Costa Rica).

In 2018 Dr Mills published the only scholarly assessment of the Canning Agenda in the leading journal, 'International Affairs'. His recently published collection of essays, 'Britain and the Growth of US Hegemony in Twentieth Century Latin America', explores Britain’s role in Latin America in an era typically depicted by historians as one dominated by the influence of the United States.