Multilateral Cooperation Although the essays constitute, in the author’s own words, a defence of multilateralism (p. 16), international multilateral cooperation is neither seen as a panacea, nor as easy to achieve. Hence the need to understand the limits and potentialities of multilateral institutions, especially of the UN System (p. 17), as well as how multilateral political will is formed (p. 49). On the question of multilateral political will, the author states that the greatest difficulty in consensus-building originates in the […]

Since the 1990s, the English School of International Relations has re-emerged as a research program. The work of its classical authors has been taken up again and new theoretical investments have projected it onto the centre of the debates on transformations in the international order after the Cold War. The English School has thus gained a renewed momentum. In spite of the remark by as to the alleged development of two streams within this tradition — classical theorists of international […]

In a context where the amount of cases being processed in the justice system reaches the extraordinary figure of 67.7 million – which is equivalent to one case for every two people over the age of 20 – and where higher court decisions, such as those by Superior Electoral Court (TSE) and the Supreme Federal Court (STF) have directly affected the relationships among the branches of power and redesigned Brazilian polity, the publication of Matthew Taylor’s Judging policy could not […]

A sombre title for sombre prognostics. A book that begins by refuting dogmas and carries on, announcing at the end of each chapter a new dogma to be refuted in search of an understanding of two permanent questions in the analyses of Brazilian social scientists: the absence of rebellions against a status quo of cumulative inequalities and the non-fulfilment of the expectations aroused by the exercise of democratic practices in Brazil. Firstly, it shows that representative democracy is far from […]

If life was hard for late-industrializers at the end of the nineteenth century, it be came even more so for late-late-industrializers in the twentieth century. This seems to be the overall message that Kohli highlights in his impressive survey and comparison of industrialization in four large developing countries. There are many profound challenges involved in this process. First, it is impossible to promote economic development in a vacuum, since every country is somehow connected with the international system, especially countries […]

The relationship with the United States has been a central element of Brazil’s foreign policy since the early 20th century. What shaped the two paradigms that guided Brazil’s international insertion until the late 1980s — the americanist paradigm and the globalist paradigm — were relations with the USA (; ; ). For the americanist paradigm, the approximation, cooperation and understanding were justified not only for pragmatic reasons, given the emergence of the USA as a power hub in the Americas […]

The collection titled Governo, Políticas Públicas e Elites Políticas nos Estados Brasileiros (Government, Public Policies and Political Elites in the Brazilian States), organized by Celina Souza and Paulo Fábio Dantas Neto, of the Federal University of Bahia, is a landmark in the welcome, but still incipient, process of decentring of Brazilian political science. I say this because the nine studies compiled promote significant displacements in relation to three of the guiding axes of Brazilian politicology, those being the thematic, the […]