Ibeg your pardon: Octavio wrote a book on what?! For those familiar with previous publications and the career path of Amorim Neto – and there are many in Brazil as well as abroad – nothing could be more surprising than him writing a book on foreign policy. “Domestic” institutions such as presidents, cabinets and parliaments had always been at the core of his research, and articles in World Politics, Comparative Political Studies, the American Journal of Political Science, and Party […]

“A África na Política Internacional – O sistema interafricano e sua inserção mun-dial”, written by Paulo Fagundes Visentini, full professor of International Relations at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, is an important contribution to both African studies in Brazil and to general knowledge in the field of international relations for the country as a whole. The author, a renowned Brazilian historian and an international relations expert, detains vast academic publications and has been for some time now […]

A book that, with remarkable erudition, addresses politics and State in the immense theoretical work of Marx does not need many justifications nowadays. If in the 1980s and 1990s Marxism was to philosophy, ideology and the official social science a definitely lost continent, the extraordinary volume of scholarly meetings, specialized publications, critiques and renewed translations of Marx’s works over the last ten years only confirm the rising interest in this theory, at least in Brazil (). Thamy Pogrebinschi’s book is […]

Firstly, this book makes for a great read, with rigorous research typical of a specialist who wants to appeal to those who are not. The book is about the creation of the Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (CSN, National Steel Corporation) founded in 1941, during the Vargas dictatorship and, at the same time, about the emergence of the city which would be its home, in the Paraiba Valley, in the state of Rio de Janeiro. In particular, it deals with how the […]

Time for democracy for all Maria Celina D’Araujo’s book is an original and coherent contribution on democracy and the achievements and difficulties of the South American, especially Brazilian, Armed Forces in accepting that differential treatment which has granted them corporative privileges is not appropriate under democracy, and that the past, present and future actions of the Armed Forces should be monitored through public rules and institutions as they are set up. The book has non-linear structure which identifies the profound […]

Edgar Dosman’s The life and times of Raúl Prebisch (1901-1986)’ is the kind of book that might catch the attention of scholars working within different agendas, research interests and disciplines. Those interested in Latin American history and politics will probably note how Dosman underlines Raúl Prebisch’s contributions – both as an intellectual and as a policymaker – to regional and international debates on development and modernization in the Global South. The impact of Dosman’s work on the current debates on […]

The book Emoções ocultas e estratégias eleitorais by Antonio Lavareda is innovative with respect to explaining the determinants of the vote. The author does not set out to explain the motives for voter decision based solely on what has already been proposed by the Brazilian literature. Grounded in his empirical experience and academic qualification, Lavareda provokes researchers who take an interest in electoral behaviour by proposing arguments that complement existing explanations of the determinants of the vote, as well as […]

The “third wave” of democratization in Latin America, starting with the Dominican Republic’s transition in 1978, was accompanied by a vigorous academic debate on the working of presidential systems. This debate started with an initial generation of studies framed by pessimistic argument on the perils of presidentialism, and was soon followed by a second generation of studies emphasising the diversity of institutional formats and party systems in presidentialist countries and, more importantly, how this diversity had a relevant impact on […]

Political Science and Political Power The various sorts of bureaucratic rules, constitutional texts, government systems and other institutional frameworks that “gave shape” to the Western State emerged as a consequence of long-running processes of legitimization of certain social groups’ political power. According to Max Weber’s sociology of domination, it is critical to regard the social structures that allowed for the legitimacy of certain practices in the exercise of power as a specialized social sphere. The differentiation of politics in western […]

Coalition presidentialism has revealed itself to be one of the most instigating ways of forming a government. Its recurrence has introduced new challenges in the study of relations between the Executive and Legislative branches, gradually displacing the focus to the decision-making process and the micro-institutions that regulate it. This analytical trend has given rise to a considerable number of studies on the dynamics of the aforesaid relations, which have gradually provided readers with a more thorough picture of the political […]

Norberto Bobbio (2005) taught us that the “great dichotomy” between public and private constitutes one of the most important definitions in political and social thought. It is as relevant as peace and war, democracy and autocracy, society and community, state of nature and civil state. By itself, this assertion would justify the major interest elicited by the work of Telma Maria Gonçalves Menicucci among public policy scholars and activists from the health field. Público e privado na política de assistência […]

The book Reforma da previdência em perspectiva comparada: Executivo, Legislativo e sindicatos na Argentina e no Brasil, originally a Ph.D. thesis, presents an analysis of trade unionism-government interaction in the pension system reform processes during the administrations of presidents Carlos Menem (1989-1999) of Argentina and Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002) of Brazil. The author starts off from the following questions. To what extent can the trade union (TU) movement influence the course of pension system reform? Under what politico-institutional conditions is […]