Public policies are produced by connections between several actors, within institutional environments and crossing organizational boundaries, but detailed analyses of the environments in which politics occur are relatively rare in Brazil. I believe the concept of governance could help to bridge this gap. However, this concept has different meanings and has been circulated in Latin America with quite confusing and cacophonic meanings. In this analytical essay, I build a definition of governance based both on local debates and the recent […]

In this article I shall analyze the content of Wanderley Guilherme dos Santos’ research, carried out between the decades of 1960 and 1970, and in the end perform an assessment of his contribution to the studies of Brazilian political thought. In summary, from his research there emerged a thesis for the existence of a national political culture; that Brazilian political thought was its intellectual product par excellence and that it would not be possible to comprehend the rugged Brazilian political […]

This study is about mapping and explaining the use of the Left-Right divide across 14 countries from 5 Continents and relies on the richness of the post electoral mass surveys from the Comparative National Election Project: 14 countries and 18 elections spread over 5 continents. The paper shows not only how extensively the LR divide is used in these 14 countries, but also explains variation across both individuals and countries in terms of the factors determining LR recognition and use. […]

This article analyses the security practices of the anti-nuclear movement in the post-Cold War period through the prism of securitisation theory. By exploring Buzan and Wæver’s conceptual developments on macrosecuritisations, the practices involved in the struggle against the Bomb are interpreted as securitising moves, in which the anti-nuclear movement is the leading securitiser. In the capacity of securitising actors, nuclear abolition activists argue that nuclear disarmament, under a Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC), would be the only way to protect humankind […]

In this article, I intended to develop an analytical schema to analyze moments of redirection in Brazilian Foreign Policy. The schema encompasses the following logic: sources from national and international contexts may influence the domestic political arena, leading to the opening of a policy window and the rupture of stabilizers, which together may form a scenario prone to reform in terms of foreign guidelines. In this context, the decision makers may opt to promote a foreign policy change (FPC). To […]

This research note provides a critical review of the recent literature on the consequences of development and democratization for the protection of human rights. It identifies common lessons and grounds for further research in the field. This literature takes a series of paradoxes that challenge conventional wisdom regarding the relationship between development and democratization as its starting point, on one hand, and the protection of human rights, on the other. To that effect, several unintended adverse consequences of economic development […]

The book Diffusion of Good Government: Social Sector Reforms in Brazil by Natasha Sugiyama is one of the most important recent contributions to a literature dedicated to confronting the policy choices made by States who face the persistence of poverty and social inequality in Latin America. With a theoretical and methodological support that mixes traditional and sophisticated approaches to the study of the formation of new agendas, the author presents an original analytical vision of the factors which orient the […]