Introduction
The centenary of the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University in 2019, which many consider the official academic birth of International Relations (IR), gives scholars worldwide the opportunity to critically and contextually engage with the history of this field of social and human sciences. Reflecting on this particular ‘institutional moment’ in the academic study of International Relations also allows researchers to highlight historical facts, national institutional trajectories, intellectual traditions, and theoretical framings of the ‘international’ that have been excluded from IR's official stories and celebrations.Footnote 1 As Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan argue, contemporary mainstream IR is still ‘an abstraction of Western history interwoven with Western political theory’.Footnote 2 Hence, tracing IR's institutional history and traditions of thought from non-Western and non-central perspectives contributes to shaping new contours of a rejuvenated field where concepts, approaches, and methods travel across social sciences and humanities from different regions of the world.
For instance, accounts of this IR anniversary have so far overlooked the history of Pan-Americanism before the First World War and Latin American thinking on non-intervention in the nineteenth century, such as the Calvo and Drago doctrines. This is by no means a surprise, since in general Western IR has neglected historical facts and relevant thinking associated with Latin America's early history of regionalism in the aftermath of national independences. The Panama Congress convened by Simon Bolivar in July 1826, which is considered to be the initial milestone in the history of Pan-Americanism, or the US-led Pan-Americanism of the late nineteenth century, when then Secretary of State James Blaine convened all nations of the hemisphere except Canada for an international conference held in Washington from October 1889 to April 1890, are examples of historical events that seldom find a place in IR's imagination of the ‘international’.Footnote 3
Bearing in mind that interpreting the history of IR according to a master narrative frequently generates and reproduces processes of exclusion and distortion, this article aims to contribute to a critical understanding of how IR was built as a social science driven by the unfolding of modernity in Brazil. Assuming the significance of Brazil's nineteenth-century diplomatic thinking in shaping the country's conceptions of modernisation and sovereignty,Footnote 4 the thrust of my main argument is twofold. First, that the development of IR in Brazil in the twentieth century builds on previous foreign policy practices and thinking about the ‘international’, thus reflecting the contradictions of a national development project rooted in an external search for recognition, prestige, and autonomy, but also in a domestic structure of inequality and social exclusion that belies this ambition. Second, that IR in Brazil also draws on national and endogenous geopolitical thought crafted mainly by the military, the foundation of which dates back to the 1920s. After an expansion in the aftermath of the Second World War, Brazilian geopolitics went through an epistemological renewal in the 1980s, and since then it has influenced framings of sovereignty, strategic interest, and national identity in the broader field of IR.
Methodologically, this article builds on preceding scholarly work of several historians, political scientists, sociologists, and diplomats who have systematically analysed IR's historical trajectory in Brazil since the early twentieth century.Footnote 5 Such works have included, among others, the analyses of domestic and systemic determinants, historical accounts of wars, peace-building and international negotiations, the study of the components of state power and diplomacy, as well as public policy approaches to the analysis of decision-making processes and, to a much lesser extent, cognitive concepts and methods. Previous accounts of IR in Brazil have tended, however, to describe the field in a somewhat fractured way, disconnecting geopolitics, defence, and strategic studies from traditions and inquiries of diplomacy, foreign policy, multilateral relations, and regional integration.Footnote 6
This article addresses this limitation firstly by viewing IR as a consolidated field of studies within Brazil's social sciences, institutionally situated across Political Science, History, Sociology, Diplomacy, International Political Economy, Defence Studies, and International Relations. Consequently, moving beyond institutional shrines and disciplinary boundaries, this article presents a more pluralistic albeit brief account of the field, from its foundation to its more recent institutionalisation and expansion processes. It is organised around three sections. In the first, I discuss the role of diplomat-intellectuals and the Itamaraty (as the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs is known regionally and globally), as well as key contributions from social and human sciences in the early stages of IR's development in Brazil. The second section presents a brief history of the geopolitical tradition in Brazilian IR, recalling the main authors as well as the most relevant thematic and conceptual contributions of Geopolitics in shaping the field at the national level. In the third and final section, I present some data on the institutionalisation and expansion processes of IR as an encompassing academic field. In each of these sections, I elaborate on the institutional, academic, and intellectual developments in the field of study whose self-identification as IR can only be considered of a relatively recent vintage.
Diplomats, intellectuals, and the first generations of IR scholars: Debates, concepts, and institutions
One cannot understand the unfolding of IR as a contradictory project of modernity in Brazil without making reference to the country's historical background in the nineteenth century. In the first years after independence in 1822, Brazil's empire negotiated its recognition as a sovereign state and the definition of its borders, not without conflicts in the La Plata Basin. Nevertheless, the country's tiny national elite was too often interested in simply maintaining a domestic structure profoundly rooted in inequality and exclusion: one third of the young nation was made up of illiterates, slaves, and criminals. In this regard, in a different way when compared to the classical liberal perspective according to which society creates the state, in Brazil society per se did not actually exist when the sovereign state emerged from the colonial era under the auspices of an illustrated monarchy. It was up to the state to shape the Brazilian nation.Footnote 7
In its bilateral relations with Great Britain and the rising US, Brazil had to negotiate trade treaties to open the Amazon River for navigation, but also to preserve and manage the trafficking of African slaves in the Atlantic. Mainly due to the interests of plantation owners who associated their profits with the maintenance of the status quo, it was only in 1888 that the Brazilian empire abolished slavery. Regionally, the country's quest for recognition and status coexisted with military and economic conflicts with neighbouring countries that tended to look at the lusophone giant with defiance. Until 1889, Brazil was the only monarchy in South America surrounded by what politicians and key decision-makers based in Rio de Janeiro considered with contempt as unstable republics.Footnote 8
In this scenario, politicians, the military, and diplomats took the lead in defining the nation, setting up its boundaries (of inclusion and exclusion) and its identity, but also in assessing and planning how the country should relate to its neighbours and the major powers. There was no separation between political thought and discourse: politicians themselves expressed their thinking through parliamentary speeches, news articles, pamphlets, and sometimes books. In the transition towards the early years of the twenthieth century, these personalities continued to play a leading role in nation-building: Baron of Rio Branco (minister of foreign affairs from 1902 until his death in 1912), Ruy Barbosa (who articulated the legal basis of sovereignty as a basic concept in the construction of multilateral organisations, regionally and globally), Oliveira Lima (who was against excessive American influence in Brazil and South America), Joaquim Nabuco (who advocated for close relations with Washington), and Pandiá Calógeras (the first civilian to serve as war minister between 1919 and 1922) are among the most prominent examples.Footnote 9
Knowledge inherited from the long nineteenth century was subsequently articulated by the first breed of researchers in different fields of study (such as history, geography, law, and diplomacy), and only much later this body of literature would be considered as belonging to the broader field of IR. This thinking about the ‘international’ was often connected to the formation and consolidation of national identity, the country's territory and the first settlements. What many of these thinkers had in common was a utilitarian perception of knowledge about Brazil's international relations that should be applied in negotiations and disputes. As a consequence, not only did they lack an explicit theoretical underpinning to explain what they were studying, they also tended to focus on temporary circumstances of foreign policy agendas. This emphasis on the present moment and the utilitarian nature of knowledge are features that, to some extent, still characterise today's IR academy in Brazil, even if in a much more sophisticated style.
In a different vein, but as part and parcel of how modernity and development were conceived in other semi-industrialised Latin American countries, well-known Brazilian authors such as Ruy Mauro Marini, Theotônio dos Santos, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso adopted structuralist perceptions of the international system in order to analyse the possibilities and limits of action by peripheral countries. With a clear theoretical background, this original scholarship was obviously regional in its scope and influence. Many other Latin American scholars followed and supported the prescriptions of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), which proposed development models aimed at overcoming regional underdevelopment through industrialisation strategies and productive transformation, thus targeting greater autonomy for Latin American countries in the international system.Footnote 10
In the case of Brazil, Hélio Jaguaribe, who in 1954 founded the Brazilian Institute of International Relations (IBRI) and in 1958 created the Brazilian Review of International Politics (RBPI), was certainly the main thinker who emphasised the concept of autonomy as a tool for political understanding of national social and economic models and justification for Brazil's foreign policy. Rather than following mainstream Western IR, which emphasised anarchy as the main feature of the international system, Jaguaribe constructed his vision of autonomy, national development, and foreign policy on the assumption that the main feature of the international system is its hierarchical organisation and its asymmetric structure. Likewise, Jaguaribe was not alone in the region, since at the same time Argentina's Juan Carlos Puig made similar arguments.Footnote 11 The regional semi-peripheral condition seemed to foster cross-country analyses that shared commonalities based on theoretical conceptions of autonomy and national development.Footnote 12
Although he considered autonomy and development to be distinct goals, Jaguaribe underlined that there was a strong interrelationship between the two. He criticised the ideological foundations of mainstream IR theories, which did not consider the transnational dimensions of the economic system, the processes of cultural and ideological hegemony, and the role of national actors and elites in foreign policy decision-making. According to Jaguaribe, autonomy was an implicit goal of various regional integration initiatives and regional cooperation projects. The relationship between autonomy and development became clearer when one thought of the concept opposite to autonomy, namely dependency. As José Briceño recalls, Jaguaribe argued that in the context of dependency countries are subordinate to exogenous decisions and to factors that are not under their own control. These countries are nominally considered as sovereign states that have their own governing bodies and are normally believed to be independent interlocutors with other states and international organisations; however, countries such as Brazil and many others in the Latin American region lack autonomy precisely because they depend on decisions emanating from countries that are endowed with global and regional primacy.Footnote 13
Countries such as Brazil would require national viability and international permissiveness in order to achieve autonomy. Both national viability and international permissiveness were structural concepts developed by Jaguaribe in his writings on political and social development since the late 1950s, which he then adapted to his explanation of autonomy and hegemony in the international system.Footnote 14 Therefore, while stressing issues related to the contradictions between hierarchy and autonomy, Jaguaribe showed how national experiences under the peripheral condition and the local trajectories of dependency would produce relevant effects in the way he had framed autonomy as a concept – a subject that is still meaningful in today's IR scholarship in Brazil and many other Latin American countries.Footnote 15
In the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s, years of political and cultural enthusiasm, researchers actively participated in public debates on nation building, Brazil's identity, the country's development model, as well as its international dimensions and constraints.Footnote 16 Among others, Helio Jaguaribe, Candido Mendes, Nelson Werneck Sodré, and Agostinho Silva contributed to landmark initiatives, such as: (1) the work of the Higher Institute of Brazilian Studies (ISEB), created in 1955 by the Ministry of Education and Culture; (2) the creation of the Center for Afro-Oriental Studies (CEAO) at the Federal University of Bahia in 1959; and (3) the publication called Independent Foreign Policy, which had only three edited volumes, between 1965 and 1966. Moreover, studies published abroad by experts on Brazilian society and politics and translated into Portuguese also had an impact in the field; it included contributions from Stanley E. Hilton, Wayne Selcher, Alfred Stepan, Frank Daniel McCann Jr, and others.Footnote 17
The coup d’état of April 1964 and the inauguration of the authoritarian regime resulted, to a large extent, in a discontinuation of these initiatives, or at least made them very difficult. Many researchers and professors were banished from public and private institutions, with some living in the political underground, and others living in exile in Chile, and later in Mexico, France, or Sweden. Even so, irrespective of all the stumbling blocks created by the authoritarian regime, IR scholarship carved out some space within public universities, with examples from the late 1960s and early 1970s including the work of Carlos Estevão Martins, Oliveiros da Silva Ferreira (offering courses at the University of São Paulo Paulo), and José Carlos Brandi Aleixo (at the University of Brasilia). In 1969 a group of researchers who could no longer work as university professors created the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP) in Sao Paolo, as a space for the production of critical and independent knowledge in Brazil. The former University Institute for Research in Rio de Janeiro (IUPERJ) also established its postgraduate programme in Political Science in 1969. In both cases, the Ford Foundation and its then director Peter Bell were crucial in providing institutional and financial support to further the development of autonomous, rigorous, and empirically-based social science research that has generated important linkages with IR agendas in both institutions. Five years later, in 1974, the University of Brasília (UnB) created its undergraduate course in International Relations.Footnote 18
At this time, prior to the institutional development of IR in the 1990s, politicians, lawyers, and ambassadors such as San Tiago Dantas and Araújo Castro, among others, engaged in the construction of IR analyses about Brazil's role in world affairs. San Tiago Dantas defended the strategic principles of the Independent Foreign Policy, defined by president Janio Quadros and deepened by his successor Joao Goulart, and the status of a non-aligned power to support political decisions and economic interests in Brazil's foreign policy towards Cuba and Eastern Europe. Heading Itamaraty for only ten months, between September 1961 and July 1962, San Tiago Dantas gave great conceptual density and intellectual development to Brazil's foreign policy. In defending the resumption of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, for example, he justified his decisions based on the need to open markets for Brazilian exports. While the socialist world could offer economic opportunities, it could not serve as an example comparable to democratic regimes, which he considered to be better equipped to realise individual freedoms. This belief and confidence in democracy underpinned San Tiago Dantas's vision of world peace, rooted in three pillars: (1) the rejection of a military solution to the East–West conflict; (2) the denunciation of a world order that was paralysed by the two great spheres of influence around the US and the Soviet Union; (3) the advantages of a ‘competitive coexistence’ resulting from the interaction between socialist countries and democracies.Footnote 19
Building on Rio Branco's encyclopedic tradition, some diplomats were powerful intellectuals who also belonged to the first generation of IR thinkers in Brazil. Ambassador Araújo Castro was certainly one of the most important among them, pointing out that Brazil had developed a foreign policy without a mature conception of international politics, that is without a broader and long-term understanding of the country's role in the world. In current terms, this would be equivalent to saying that the framing of the ‘international’ matters a great deal when it comes to decide which foreign policy strategies the country should deploy: conceiving of the world as a system under the hegemony of the US, as a system rooted in competition between the US and China (or, in the 1960s, the USSR), or as a multipolar system are possible framings of the ‘international’ that can result in different foreign policy strategies.
Such insightful perception by Araujo Castro of the cognitive and systemic dimensions of foreign policy demonstrates that, in spite of censorship under the military regime, thinking had not remained static. Ambassador Gelson Fonseca refers to the ‘cross-pollination between Brazilian diplomacy and academia’, of which Araujo Castro, diplomat and intellectual, would be one of the best examples. Among his intellectual contributions, the concept of ‘freezing of world power’ deserves special attention since it shows how and why the multilateral institutions created at the end of the Second World War reflected the views and the interests of the main victorious powers. Based on this, he believed that in the specific debates on disarmament, for instance, Brazil should rather join the multilateral dialogue without forcibly signing the 1968 nuclear weapons non-proliferation treaty.Footnote 20
In the transition years towards re-democratisation, relevant institutional initiatives took place, such as Itamaraty's decision to establish the Foundation Alexandre de Gusmão in 1971 and the International Relations Research Institute in 1987.Footnote 21 In the 1980s, a new generation of PhD scholars produced key contributions on Brazil's foreign policy, which were decisive to the early years of IR's institutionalisation. They have also been responsible for contributing to the creation of graduate and postgraduate courses, as well as for training Master's and PhD students since then. Scholars such as Amado Cervo, Celso Lafer, Clodoaldo Bueno, Gerson Moura, Maria Regina Soares de Lima, Ricardo Seitenfus, Sonia de Camargo, among others, came from different disciplinary backgrounds, including political science, history, and law. Although they came from different perspectives and evolved along different trajectories, they raised a set of critical questions about the real possibilities and limitations of Brazil's capacity to act autonomously in the world. They highlighted critical conceptual and methodological issues related to the history and the political underpinnings of Brazil's participation in the international order, the country's bilateral relations with the US, the political economy of Brazil's foreign policy, the history of regional integration, as well as the relevance of domestic factors in the decision-making process.Footnote 22 Through their intellectual contributions, they not only improved the field of IR in Brazil, they also bolstered its institutionalisation in the 1990s, when graduate and postgraduate courses were also set up in non-central regions of the country and several specialised academic journals were created.
Geopolitical thinking and strategic studies: Intellectual contributions and institutional linkages
The military have until recent times exercised a quasi-monopoly over geopolitical thinking in Brazil. Military officials and civilian researchers associated with national security institutions such as the Higher School of War (known as ESG, Escola Superior de Guerra) have, until not long ago, been the main contributors to the development of a Brazilian geopolitical school of thought. Perhaps not so differently from many other national experiences, Geopolitics in Brazil was also born as a science at the service of the state. Based on three main tenets, namely, the assumptions of anarchy, of statism, and of politics as the struggle for power and peace, the classical tradition of geopolitical thinking in Brazil has influenced conceptions of sovereignty, territory, national identity, external threats, and state power resources.Footnote 23 Nevertheless, geopolitical thinking has only recently been integrated into the broader field of IR. Building on a post-1988 practice of dialogue between civilians and the military within academic associations and policy research networks, geopolitical thinking has now been integrated into the broader field of IR. This is largely through to the creation of postgraduate and graduate studies in international political economy, defence, and strategic studies.
The first studies on the geopolitical dimension of Brazil's international relations came out after the country's participation in the First World War. Brazil had announced its neutrality in August 1914, a position that changed in October 1917, when the country declared war on the German-led alliance. The initial neutrality was rooted in the country's diplomatic principles and its commitments to The Hague conventions. It was also based on the pragmatic reasoning that the conflict could make it difficult for Brazil's exporters to find accessible markets for its main commodity, coffee. However, Brazil changed its position and was the only Latin American country to actually take part in the First World War, even if its participation was limited to action by the Naval Division in War Operations (DNOG, Departamento Naval de Operações de Guerra) mainly in the South Atlantic towards Cape Verde and the Strait of Gibraltar. Brazil also sent a military medical mission, which was hit by the Spanish flu before arriving in Europe. After its participation in the War, Brazil was invited to participate as a founding member in the League of Nations. However, after a few years, the country withdrew its membership in 1926 after being denied permanent membership in the League's Executive Council. This double experience of the war and the ensuing peace process generated domestic consequences, such as the modernisation of combat techniques within the armed forces, but it also brought about the first national publications on geopolitics.
As a result, engineer and geographer Everardo Backheuser launched the field of geopolitical studies in the 1920s. At the time he was the first researcher to organise all available information about Brazil's territory in a systematic way. In 1931, army officer and geopolitician Mario Travassos published Aspectos geográficos sul-americanos (South American Geographical Aspects), a crucial book for understanding Brazil's geopolitical thinking. Travassos revised it in several national editions, having translated it into Spanish in 1941, and also republished it a few years later with a new title, Brazil's Continental Projection. Mario Travassos roughly reflected the ideology of Brazilian military and geopolitical thinking of the first half of the twentieth century, having influenced conceptions around Brazil's international relations and development model between 1930 and 1980. His empirical work and normative constructions about how Brazil should engage with its neighbours is of significant documentary value, not only because the author reflects the ideas of his time and his institution, but also because he had prescriptive impact on the strategic directions of Brazil's foreign and defence policies. In fact, Mario Travassos considered Brazil the main power in South America, and his hypotheses dealt mainly with Brazil's role in the region in terms of how to counteract Argentina's foreign policy and defence strategies. His geopolitical thinking has influenced diplomatic decisions in regional relations and in bilateral negociations with the US to ensure investments in Brazil's first steps towards industrialisation.Footnote 24
In 1942, Brazil was again the first country among South American nations to join the Allies. Similar to the First World War, Brazil's initial position had been one of neutrality: President Getulio Vargas, based on what Gerson Moura later described as ‘pragmatic equidistance’,Footnote 25 sought to increase trade by negotiating advantages for Brazil with both Germany and the United States. But soon Vargas signed agreements with the US in order to strengthen the armed forces, in exchange for Brazil's participation in the conflict. The military collaboration between the two countries was formalised with the creation in May 1942 of the United States-Brazil Joint Defence Commission. Consequently, Brazil became the fifth largest beneficiary of US government resources, after the British Empire, the USSR, France, and China, and received more than 70 per cent of all military aid to Latin America during the Second World War. Cooperation with the US was not restricted to the military sector; it also had profoundly positive economic spillover effects. In addition to the implementation of several technical assistance programmes, there were investments in the production of strategic materials, in the modernisation of railways and infrastructure, in rubber production, and in the creation of steel industry in Brazil – with the establishment of Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional in Volta Redonda, funded by the US Eximbank. Brazil and Mexico were the only countries in the Latin American region that sent troops to war, and in the Brazilian case, the mobilisation of military officials and combatants was significant.
Once the Allies had won the war, Brazil was invited to join the postwar conference held in San Francisco, which resulted in the establishment of the United Nations. At that time, the Brazilian government expected to obtain a permanent seat in the Security Council, but its high expectations ended in disappointment and frustration. Immediately after the end of the Second World War, Herbert Canabarro Reichardt published an essay entitled A geopolítica e a consciência geográfica da nação (‘Geopolitics and the Geographic Awareness of the Nation’), arguing for the development of a mindset of large spaces and geopolitical thinking in state planning. The first training courses on geopolitics were then created at the national level: the Rio Branco Institute (the Brazilian diplomatic academy, set up in April 1945) pioneered courses on geopolitics in Brazil; the Brazilian Cultural Institute and the Comparative Law Institute of the Pontifical Catholic University in Rio de Janeiro followed suit in 1947 and 1948. All these courses were under the responsibility of Everardo Backheuser.Footnote 26
However, the creation of a Brazilian War College (ESG, Escola Superior de Guerra) in August 1949 was undoubtedly the most relevant effect stemming from Brazil's participation in the Second World War. The arrival of ESG in the domestic institutional setting represented a new stage in the field of geopolitical studies in Brazil. Internationally, the context was marked by the beginning of the Cold War; regionally, Latin America faced nationalist movements and the consequences of the US's politics of containment. Against this backdrop ESG started building doctrines in the field of security and defence, thus transforming geopolitics into a typical state science. ESG fostered the development of geopolitical studies, counting on a new generation of researchers, such as Delgado de Carvalho, General Meira Mattos, General Lyra Tavares, General Golbery do Couto e Silva, and Therezinha de Castro. During this time, Everardo Backheuser published two key works, posthumously: Geopolítica geral e do Brasil (‘General Geopolitics and Brazil’) in 1952 and Aspectos Geopolíticos do Mar (‘Geopolitical Aspects of the Sea’) in 1959. Similarly, Golbery do Couto e Silva published Aspectos geopolíticos do Brasil (‘Brazil's Geopolitical Aspects’) in 1957. General Meira Mattos, besides being the Commander-in-Chief of the Latin American Brigade of the Inter-American Peace Force that invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965, also provided major intellectual contributions on Brazil's projection of international power in the aftermath of 1964, Brazil's destiny in international geopolitics and projections of power in the Pan-Amazonian region.Footnote 27 ESG quickly became a laboratory of ideas at the service of the military; it also contributed intellectually and politically to the 1964 coup d’état in Brazil.
Under the authoritarian regime (1964–85), a new generation of historians, geographers, and IR experts started working on geopolitics in Brazil, focusing on how the military had intellectually contributed to the field. Moniz Bandeira published his research on the Brazilian presence in the La Plata Basin. Sônia de Camargo worked on the geopolitical thinking of the generals such as Meira Mattos and Golbery do Couto e Silva. Similarly, Gerson Guimarães was doing research on General Golbery's ideational contribution to conceptions of national security and sovereignty. In 1981 Shiguenoli Miyamoto published an important assessment of how geopolitics emerged and developed as part of Brazil's modern project, thus directly relating to national development models, territory, and identity. In addition, geographer Bertha Becker started publishing her research on Brazil's spatial structure, the expansion of the agricultural frontier and the geopolitics of the Amazonian region.Footnote 28
At the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, Brazil was going through a negotiated transition from military rule to electoral democracy, and it was during this transition that civilian researchers who were not affiliated with military schools for the first time analysed geopolitics not as a science at the service of the state, but as a proper field of international expertise. These scholars advocated for a new geopolitical conception that should be democratic, epistemologically pluralistic and academically autonomous from the state, but also theoretically rooted and of an interdisciplinary nature. The French geopolitical school (including geographers Yves Lacoste, Claude Raffestin, and Béatrice Giblin, among others) contributed to this movement of intellectual renewal.Footnote 29 As Gelson Fonseca recalls, until the mid-1950s studies of Brazil's international relations, foreign policy and diplomacy were largely marked by the absence of explicit theoretical bases, but that had not been the case for geopolitics, even if its theoretical contributions remained practically restricted to military circles.Footnote 30 As a result, in spite of its theoretical breakthroughs, geopolitical studies had a limited impact on IR in Brazil until its epistemological renewal in the 1980s.Footnote 31
In the aftermath of the 1988 constitution, Brazil's federal government published its first defence policy document in 1996, three years before the establishment of Brazil's Ministry of Defence, followed by a second national defence policy in 2005. Institutionally speaking, policy dialogues between defence and foreign affairs, but also between civilians and the military, were facilitated by the fact that, since 1999, two out of ten ministers of defence were career diplomats (José Viegas Filho between January 2003 and November 2004 and Celso Amorim from August 2011 to December 2014). Since then, Brazil has had two national defence strategies (2008 and 2016) and two white papers (2012 and 2020).
In this regard, the federal government also tried to bridge the gap between defence policy and civil society through financial and institutional support for the creation of graduate and postgraduate programmes, the establishment of the Brazilian Association of Defence Studies (ABED) in 2005, as well as the foundation in 2013 of the Pandiá Calogeras Institute aimed to promote and fund civil-military research networks, among other policy goals. In addition, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro set up the first graduate studies programme in defence and international strategic management in 2010, and several postgraduate programmes and research groups on strategic and defence studies were subsequently established in Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul and Sao Paulo.
Connected with the renewal of the geopolitical thinking previously mentioned, these institutional decisions have contributed not only to the strengthening of ties between different academic traditions within the broader field of IR, but also to a rejuvenation of conceptual, historical, and empirical research on regional integration, the Amazonian region, development models, the economic role of the defence complex, and Brazil's role in United Nations peace operations. Today, after its long trajectory as a state science under the aegis of the military, geopolitical studies in Brazil have opened up epistemologically and methodologically to analyse spatialised relations of power from local to global scales, considering state and non-state actors and different sorts of security threats within a much more pluralistic, interdisciplinary, and conceptually refined field of IR in Brazil.
Institutional expansion and intellectual diversification
From the onset of re-democratisation, Brazil's international relations have transformed, and so have the institutional and intellectual modes of studying them. The political opening connected with changes in the domestic regime was accompanied by the end of the Cold War era and the country's gradual economic liberalising reforms in the 1990s. Globalisation, economic reforms, re-democratisation of state-society relations, and the internationalisation of politics all progressed in parallel with each other, thus generating a critical juncture whereafter international players and domestic actors had to frequently publicly express their conflicting interests concerning different foreign policy agendas, such as on trade, regional integration, human rights, or environmental protection.Footnote 32 As Maria Regina Soares de Lima explains, the coincidence between economic liberalisation and a return to democracy has initiated a new phase in the country's international relations, which she calls ‘competitive integration’.Footnote 33 From this new stage onwards, foreign policy decision-making had to consider distributional effects and sometimes divergent sectoral stakes in global or hemispheric trade negotiations, as well as in the Mercosur economic agreements.
The onset of both political revitalisation and economic reforms directly affected the academic institutional setting, which was also under pressure to become more pluralistic in theoretical and methodological terms. Such a process was furthered not only by the advancement of postgraduate programmes, but also by an improved sense of professionalisation of the epistemic community and a progressive focus on capacity-building at both graduate and postgraduate levels.
More than ten years after the creation of the first IR graduate course at the University of Brasília, a second course was established at the Estacio de Sá University in Rio de Janeiro in 1985, and a third one at the Catholic University of Brasília in 1995. Nowadays graduate courses are numerically concentrated in private institutions, but major public universities in different regions of the country have also set up graduate courses in IR: the University of Sao Paulo (2001), the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (2006), the Federal University of Santa Catarina (2008), the Federal University of Sergipe (2009), the Rio de Janeiro State University (2013), and the Federal University of Amapa (2013), among others. In 1995, there were only three IR graduate courses in the whole country; in 2008, there were 85. In 1997, there were 81 students in 8 existing courses; in 2008, 1,985 students graduated in IR. According to Brazil's Ministry of Education, in early 2014 there were 140 IR graduate courses.Footnote 34 Several hypotheses may help to explain this considerable growth: (1) the expansion of the labour market in the 1990s and 2000s; (2) globalisation processes and a greater international integration between Brazil, South America and the world; (3) the expansion of Brazil's international trade and cooperation projects in Latin American and African countries; and (4) the appeal of IR to students in general and the attractiveness of a diplomatic career in particular.
However, I argue that the main contribution to the institutionalisation of IR in Brazil stemmed from the development of postgraduate studies and scientific journals in different regions of the country and the building of a community of researchers around professional associations, such as the Brazilian Association of Political Science (ABCP, in 1987), the Brazilian Association of International Relations (ABRI, in 2005) and, as mentioned in the previous section, the Brazilian Association of Defence Studies (ABED, in 2005). In 1984, the University of Brasilia created its Master's programme; it then set up its doctoratal programme in IR in 2002. The Institute of International Relations at PUC-Rio de Janeiro, founded in 1980 under the lead of Sonia de Camargo, created its Master's degree in 1987, and the PhD programme began its activities in 2001. Other universities and institutions also trained postgraduate researchers in Political Science with a focus on international relations, especially the former IUPERJ (currently IESP-UERJ), the University of Sao Paulo, and federal universities in Rio Grande do Sul, Pernambuco and Minas Gerais.
Since the 1990s there has been an increase and a diversification of IR research actors and agendas, a process that Antonio Carlos Lessa identifies as the ‘deepening of the Brazilian thinking of international relations’.Footnote 35 Within different sectors of society, some older but also some new actors embraced IR as a strategic policy-relevant research field, including governmental institutions, especially the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Education, the federal Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA); key subnational governments (such as Sao Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul or Bahia); non-governmental organisations dealing with human rights, development, gender, and environmental issues; business entities and trade unions; political parties that decided to invest in the creation of foundations and international cooperation sectors; research centres and universities situated outside the main capitals in Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, thus decentralising IR studies to localities in the northern, southern, western and northeastearn regions of the country. In 2001, for instance, the Ministry of Education launched the San Tiago Dantas programme to steer the establishment of IR postgraduate courses, and in 2006 the same ministry set up the Renato Archer programme that funded long-term projects and networks in different policy research areas related to international politics and foreign policy.
According to the most recent data published by the Ministry of Education (in 2017),Footnote 36 covering both Political Science and International Relations, the main trends between 2013 and 2016 were the following: first, growing numbers of postgraduate programmes in different institutions; second, increasing numbers of students and degrees obtained on a yearly basis, showing a 75 per cent increase in the number of theses per supervisor per year in relation to the previous period; third, a qualitative improvement in scientific production, with a 73 per cent growth in in relation to the previous evaluation exercise, and with more than one-third of the total production concentrated in the top strata of assessed journals according to the Ministry of Education's norms and criteria.
Based on the same report, the evolution of Political Science and IR postgraduate training, considering academic Master's programmes (AMP), professional Master's programmes (PMP) and PhD programmes, has also been impressive: there were 12 AMPs in 2004, compared to 24 in 2010, and 40 in 2017; there were 6 PhD programmes in 2004, compared to 12 in 2010, and 23 in 2017; and PMP increased from 1 in 2004 to 2 in 2010, 4 in 2013, and 11 in 2017. Moreover, the institutional nature of postgraduate programmes has also diversified, including military institutions, public agencies, along with a majority of federal, state-level, and private universities.
This significant institutional expansion translates into growing figures of Master's and PhD degrees recently obtained in Political Science and IR in Brazil. In the span of time between 2013 and 2017, there was a positive variation of 108.3 per cent in the number of completed PhD theses, 21 per cent in academic Master's dissertations and 117.1 per cent in the conclusion of professional Master's courses. In absolute terms, that has meant 594 Master's dissertations defended in 2007, 763 in 2013, and 923 in 2017; 105 PhD theses defended in 2017, 229 in 2013, and 477 in 2017; and finally, 73 professional Master's degrees concluded in 2003 and 228 in 2017. According to the Ministry of Education, in parallel with the expansion of the field, academic quality indicators have also improved. Until 2004, Brazilian Political Science and IR research lagged behind Argentina, Chile, and Mexico in indexed publications in Latin America. Since 2006, Brazil has consolidated a leading position in Latin America's Political Science and IR.
In 2016, Tullo Vigevani and his team published a study wherein they only analysed PhD and Master's dissertations coming from IR postgraduate programmes, also showing a significant quantitative change. In the period 2004–06 there were 10 PhD dissertations defended within IR postgraduate programmes in Brazil, whereas there were 46 in the 2010–12 period; 80 PhD dissertations were defended within IR postgraduate programmes between 2004 and 2012, whereas there were 438 Master's dissertations completed in this same period.Footnote 37 These quantitative and qualitative changes in Brazilian scientific production in the fields of Political Science and IR can be credited to several factors, such as expansion of higher education, evaluation processes known as the Qualis system (which is used to assess journals, books, individual researchers, and postgraduate programmes), as well as an improved indexing and internationalisation of main Brazilian journals.
However, the expansion of IR postgraduate programmes has not been followed ipso facto by an outburst of original theoretical approaches.Footnote 38 Despite the Brazilian traditional analysis based on centre-periphery relations (much of it embedded in Latin American schools of thought), the majority of IR studies still tend to focus on foreign policy and Brazil's relations with its neighbours, great powers, and international organisations. Taking into account FUNAG's database on PhD and Master's dissertations in the country, from 1992 to 2002, 15 per cent of them were about foreign policy, 19 per cent about regional integration, and 22 per cent about globalisation. Between 2003 and 2013, 23 per cent were about foreign policy, 14 per cent about regional integration, 12 per cent about international trade, and 11 per cent about human rights. Most of them focused on Brazil: between 1992 and 2002, 48 per cent of PhD and Master's dissertations dealt with Brazil, 15 per cent with Argentina, 13 per cent with Mercosur, and 8 per cent with the US; with figures remaining similar for the period between 2003 and 2013.Footnote 39
Within the specific research field of Brazilian foreign policy, however, the research agenda has gone through thematic, theoretical, and methodological changes since the end of the 1990s. Traditional research on decision-making processes has been expanded to include issues such as state-society relations and the role of new foreign policy actors (subnational entities, non-governmental and civil society organisations, business, media, and public opinion, and social movements), thus moving beyond the conventional focus on Itamaraty's bureaucratic insulation and its role as a gatekeeper. Scholars have reoriented their attention to under-researched foreign policy agendas, including human rights, environmental and climate change, regional security, south–south relations, development, and technical cooperation. They have also developed new conceptual frameworks to analyse foreign policy as a public policy, thus leaving behind structural realist assumptions that generally understand state behaviour only with reference to a unitary view of the national interest. Analysing foreign policy as a public policy coincided with the strengthening of presidential diplomacy under presidents Cardoso and Lula and has implied building clear conceptual and methodological bridges between foreign policy and domestic politics, which until then had not been an intellectual tradition in Brazil.Footnote 40
In addition, researchers have progressively deployed their efforts to foster comparative analyses between Brazil and the foreign policy trajectories and negotiation strategies of other Southern powers, mainly India, Mexico, South Africa, and to a lesser extent Turkey. By introducing methodological innovations in Brazil's IR (such as qualitative comparative analysis, speech content analysis through software, thematic cartography, and so forth), scholars working on comparative foreign policy have developed context-specific and empirically grounded understandings of states and regions, hence facilitating the understanding of similarities and differences between Brazil and other countries’ social, historical, economic, and political processes at various scales. An institutional initiative that illustrates the relevance of this emerging trend within Brazilian IR academia is the recent creation of a thematic seminar and working group on comparative foreign policy within ANPOCS in 2019 and 2020, as well as a round table organised by ABCP in 2020. Such studies and initiatives have so far produced two main impacts: first, to open the black box of Brazilian foreign policy, no longer considered a unique and insulated case, and therefore allow younger researchers to avoid a parochial mentality and to analyse Brazil within the wider context of countries of the Global South; second, to steer conceptual reflections and theory-building towards categories such as misplaced states, the graduation dilemma, and entrepreneurial powers.Footnote 41
It is true that intellectual and methodological efforts towards a more plurastic IR in Brazil have been possible mainly due to the increasing professionalisation of scholarship and the federal government's incremental funding to build institutional capacities in the higher education system. Today's IR research continues to benefit both theoretically and methodologically from Political Science, Sociology, History, Defence and Strategic Studies; however, its consolidation also stems from an improved dialogue across disciplines and fields of expertise, and from more frequent bridge-building initiatives linking centres from different regions of the country. In fact, the creation of working groups on IR issues and agendas by ABCP, ABRI, ABED, and ANPOCS has fostered regular and fruitful exchanges of ideas and therefore contributed to the advancement of interdisciplinarity, but also to conceptual refinement and methodological cross-fertilisation.
Since January 2019, the Bolsonaro administration has imposed budget cuts in higher education, science, technology and innovation, considerably strengthened the role of the military in science policymaking, and announced changes in the existing evaluation criteria of higher education and research programmes across the board of all disciplines. In an extended clash with the scientific community, this administration has contributed to justifying and disseminating a false equality between science and ‘commonsense’ on issues such as deforestation, climate change, global health, gender, race, and indigenous peoples’ rights. It has also widely endorsed regressive narratives of hate, polarisation, and obscurantism in opposition to visions based on human rights, tolerance, and scientific rigour. A more elaborate engagement with the impacts of Bolsonaro's government on the social sciences and humanities in general and on IR in particular is, however, beyond the scope of this article. Institutionally, academically and intellectually, IR has advanced a great deal in terms of diversification; it has consolidated a broad network of scholars portraying individual and collective capacities to resist, innovate, and persevere. However, it is important to qualify the institutional and academic developments of the discipline summarised in this section with a final cautious note. The 2019–20 policy changes may potentialy have serious consequences for the ability and willingness of future generations of scholars to stay, work, innovate, and critically engage with IR in Brazil.
Conclusion
Since the nineteenth-century pioneering thinkers-practioners from different disciplines have recurrently contributed, although not always in a systematic way, to the understanding of the international realm and Brazil's external relations. As has been analysed in this article, History, Diplomacy, Geopolitics, Political Science, International Political Economy, Sociology, among other disciplines, have furthered the foundation and development of IR in Brazil. Diplomat-intellectuals, thinkers, and professional researchers have been active agents of knowledge production, often aiming to inform or influence policymaking, not always based on cutting-edge theoretical frameworks.
However, just as in many other non-core countries, Brazilian researchers from different disciplines have not always identified their studies as IR per se. Neither have they constantly organised their thinking with a view to projecting a fully-fledged conception of the ‘international’. Because contexts are of great relevance in knowledge production, organising IR concepts and visions has more often been one of the major tasks accomplished by intellectuals from empires, superpowers, and great powers; their knowledge has played the role of a sort of justification of their nation's political project. In these intellectual-political processes, creative borrowing from (and very frequently exploitation of) other cultures has been fundamental to the rise of the West, and of others before it.
Brazil was born as an empire, a continental nation to be shaped by the state. Therefore, it is not surprising that IR thinking at the beginning was much more focused on Brazil's borders with its neighbours, foreign relations with great powers, as well as the external conditions of viability for the country's national development. The state has been at the centre of the foundation and the institutionalisation processes of IR: as Tullo Vigevani and his team recall, ‘the State is a concrete and symbolic reference’ of how IR research and training institutions have been built in Brazil.Footnote 42 Nonetheless, Brazil's aristocracy in the nineteenth century and, since the establishment of the republic, its strategic elite members have not engaged with in-depth economic, property, social, and educational reforms to sustainably reduce the well-known high levels of inequality that have since then characterised Brazil's development trajectory. Interpreting Brazil's external relations has also been an exercise in the justification of an internal unequal development model rooted in poverty, racism, and social exclusion. Intellectual efforts to frame the ‘international’ have dialectically been confined within these domestic contradictions.
From the onset of the professionalisation of scholarship and the actual building of academic institutions, IR research has gone through thematic diversification and developed some conceptual and methodological innovations. In fact, diplomat-intellectuals still contribute to IR thinking nowadays, but the expertise has moved away from the Itamaraty towards, mainly, academia.Footnote 43 NGOs, private foundations associated with corporations or political parties and research centres outside academic institutions may offer some expertise in specific IR agendas, such as human rights, environmental protection, and trade. Today's IR in Brazil is a consolidated interdisciplinary field, wherein contributions coming from different social sciences and the humanities coexist and imbricate in a theoretically and methodologically pluralistic environment. Its institutionalisation historically overlapped with regional trajectories; however, its recent growth points to a widening gap between Brazil and other main IR schools in Latin America (mainly Argentina and Mexico). Whether or not this quantitative and qualitative momentary gap will persist will only be revealed in the coming years.
The historical background presented in this article sheds light on the need for a more complex story of the different births of IR as it can be told from the perspectives of the South. Framing the ‘international’ from the South based on different genealogies of IR not only alows us to revisit its history and practices, it also unveils how disciplinary narratives articulate the agency of the developing world. The Brazilian birth of IR allows us to understand how regional and national contexts matter in the construction of a truly global IR. As Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan have said, since the 2008 financial crisis, wealth, power, and cultural authority have all been diffusing away from the Western core and Japan. Together with the 2008 crisis, China's rise, Trump's electoral victory and administration, Brexit, environmental crises, and the climate emergency, as well as the re-emergence of far-right governments, ideologies and movements in the North and South have all challenged the liberal teleology and Western dominated narratives of IR on development, peace, and security.Footnote 44 Becoming acquainted with other national and regional versions of IR is essential not only to generating informed debates about the ethnocentrism and parochialism of IR theory, but also to making the field more inclusive and truly critical. Whether or not the Western-based international system will be replaced by a ‘multiplex world’ (Acharya), a ‘polymorphic globalism’ (Katzenstein), or a ‘multi-order world’ (Flockhart) remains to be answered, since historical processes are neither uniform nor multilinear, but necessarily dialectical. Enriching mainstream IR with theory, history and empirical evidence from the South should unquestionably be part of this global intellectual endeavour.Footnote 45
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the peer reviewers and invited editors for their comments on a previous version of this article.
