After three decades of democratic reforms, the literature on Latin American civil-military relations has shifted its focus from the military towards civilian elites. Following this trend, this article offers a contribution to the study of the ‘civilian variable’ by examining two controversial decisions taken by Argentina since 2011: the empowerment of an army official who gained influence over key areas of national defense; and the involvement of the armed forces in anti-drug operations. While the literature often relates setbacks in […]

(Allison, Graham. Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017) What is ‘Destined for War’s’ main argument? In sum, the impact of a rising China on the United States and the global order under American hegemony are leading these two nations toward an avoidable violent clash, which neither one wants, because they risk falling into what the author calls ‘Thucydides’s Trap’. […]

This article aims to determine whether and in what ways women’s movements vary their strategies in order to influence the political agenda according to different political scenarios. It uses a qualitative small-N comparison in four South American countries. The findings suggest that women’s movements collaborate with the state. However, this collaboration presents variations that depend on the political scenario at the time: critically, the status of the women’s policy agency, the leaders’ views and background, and the composition of the […]

The article examines the construction of the concept of autonomy in Latin America and discusses to what extent it can be applied to contemporary Brazilian foreign policy. The article first examines classical definitions of the concept, and then looks at the ways in which it has been used to analyze Brazilian foreign policy for over half a century. We then reaffirm the importance of agency and how power relations vary from one thematic area to another. In doing so, the […]

As a result of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) from the European Union (EU), the environmental governance structure in Brazil has been challenged, bringing to light a legal ambiguity in the ecological obligations between the EU and Brazil. The article hypothesizes that this legal ambiguity is caused by the complex political and legal system that characterizes the Brazilian governance structure. How does the Brazilian federal government, in its role as policymaker, balance its EU trade agenda? Can it be affirmed that […]

What went wrong? The main cause of this failure — or worse: this retrogression, in Lavinas’ view (2017) — is the creeping financialization of social policy, as reflected in the book’s title. By financialization she means “an array of empirical features and processes… of a new accumulation regime in which macroeconomics and economic policies are increasingly dominated by the rationale of financial capital” (LAVINAS, 2017, p. 07). The influence of financialization, she stresses, is not only felt in the market […]

“Cooperation and Protracted Conflict in International Affairs” is a persuasive analysis of the application of the concept of reciprocity to the study of international relations. The interdisciplinarity of this book represents an added value to the literature on conflict resolution. The author, Anat Niv-Solomon, is an Associate Professor in political science at the College of Staten Island, New York, USA. She obtained her PhD degree from the University of Connecticut, completing a dissertation that she reworked to write this book. […]

In this article, we present new data on electoral alliances (coligações) that were formed to contest Brazilian general elections between 1986 and 2014. We present evidence to show that alliances formed for gubernatorial and lower house elections are connected to one another. These joint alliances are part of complex coordination strategies for managing the entry and withdrawal of candidates for concomitant elections regulated by different rules. As we shall show, these joint strategies result in: 01. interlinked processes of party […]

By analyzing the content of 6,523 pronouncements by Brazilian decision-makers, this paper aims to present some quantitative evidence to answer the following questions: 01. How did Brazilian Foreign Policy decision-makers employ the concepts of Latin America and South America from 1995 to 2014? 02. Were South American terms prioritized over Latin American terms? 03. Did the diplomacy of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (Lula) invoke the idea of South America more than that of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (FHC) and Dilma […]