Posted inForeign Policy
Brazil’s Kremlin Convolutions
Bolsonaro’s engagement with Putin in the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine was bizarre, to say the least.
Posted inPolitics
Splintering Parties and the Governance Challenge
The hyperfragmentation of the Brazilian party system is unparalleled. The party system has splintered repeatedly over the years, with 24 parties currently represented in the lower house of Congress and 33 parties registered at the electoral court at last count. The effective number of parliamentary parties – a standard measure of parties to seats – has...
Posted inInstitutional Politics
Brazil’s Independence Day Showdown?
A visit to São Paulo this past month was unusually troubling. Poverty has never been more visible, and city streets are littered with tents and families living in parks and under bridges. Anecdotal evidence suggests brain drain is picking up: both rich and poor acquaintances are moving to Europe and...
Criminal Governance and Bolsonaro
The Bolsonaro administration poses many pressing questions for social scientists, most notably about the boundaries between antidemocratic rhetoric and authoritarian practice. Associated with this large theme are questions about the meaning of the rule of law in a country governed by a man who is an apologist for brutal police...
Labor regulations and globalization
How do market-oriented reforms matter to workers outside the formal economy? This is an important question for developing economies, where formal labor markets often coexist with large pools of informal labor, in which workers are offered fewer protections, little training, and few if any benefits. But it is also a...
Reflections on Bolsonaro’s Brazil
In case you missed it, American University's AULA Blog has posted two good reflections on Bolsonaro's Brazil in recent days: Ingrid Fontes, a senior at American University, writes about the Bolsonaro administration’s devastatingly incompetent response to the pandemic, showing Brazil’s comparatively high death rate and low vaccination rate, as well...
Posted inEnvironment Politics Social
Reshaping the meaning of politics
Brazil’s political turbulence remains difficult to fully comprehend, in part because of the enormous concussive shock with which the seemingly golden years of pre-salt oil and commodity-driven prosperity suddenly met a grim sequence of protest, impeachment, and scandal. Scholarship has been challenged by the historical contingency of the unprecedented, fluid...
Posted inEnvironment Foreign Policy Judiciary
Don’t Count on the Amazon
Can the international community rely on carbon sequestration in the Amazon as a strategy for halting global warming? Don’t count on it, even after Jair Bolsonaro’s grudging green conversion this past week. Convincing Bolsonaro to change his tune must have been no small task, judging by the ratcheting up of...
Posted inForeign Policy
Confronting Latin America’s Diplomatic Decline
In a pair of stimulating recent articles in Foreign Policy and Nueva Sociedad, Andrés Malamud and Luis Schenoni discuss the declining relevance of the Latin American region to geopolitics. Given their focus on regional trends, the articles are understandably low on specifics about particular countries and specific foreign policy choices. But the Nueva Sociedad article...
“The Organization”: Corruption and Business
This weekend I finished Malu Gaspar’s definitive history of the Odebrecht case (A Organização: A Odebrecht e o esquema de corrupção que chocou o mundo; Companhia das Letras 2020). While not an academic book, it offers an insightful and page-turning perspective on the evolution of business-state relations in Brazil over...