A Leader Without Followers? The Growing Divergence Between the Regional and Global Performance of Brazilian Foreign Policy

Brazilian diplomats and academics alike have long regarded regional leadership as a springboard to global recognition. Yet Brazil's foreign policy has not translated the country's structural and instrumental resources into effective regional leadership. Brazil's potential followers have not aligned with its main goals, such as a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and Directorship‐General of the World Trade Organization; some have even challenged its regional influence. Nevertheless, Brazil has been recognized as an emergent global power. This article analyzes the growing mismatch between the regional and global performance of Brazilian foreign policy and shows how both theoretical expectations and policy planning were “luckily foiled” by unforeseen developments. It argues that because of regional power rivalries and a relative paucity of resources, Brazil is likely to consolidate itself as a middle global power before gaining acceptance as a leader in its region.     

Indigenismo and the Avant‐garde: Jorge Sanjinés' Early Films and the National Project

Jorge Sanjinés' 1960s films Revolución and Ukamau challenge the class and ethnic hierarchies of Bolivian society by casting the proletarian and indigenous masses as revolutionary liberators. The new national imaginary they evoke is tightly bound to the experimental cinematic techniques they employ, since their rejection of rationalist, realist aesthetics signals a partial undermining of the linear time of the modern nation. Ukamau both recalls and resists previous Bolivian indigenismo, which sought to co‐opt the Indian into a national mestizo consciousness. Its exoticist portrayal of the Indian ultimately limits its political effectiveness, but textual and contextual analyses show subversive Indian agency leaking through.     

US Travel Writer E. G. Squier and the Construction of Racialised Geographies in Nineteenth Century Honduras

This article examines the ideological foundations of American diplomat Ephraim George Squier's Notes on Central America (1855), and its effect on the formation of Honduran identity. I detail the type of racial constructions and judgments Squier made of the distinct ethnic populations, and contextualise them within the nineteenth‐century transnational debate on the origins of mankind and the surge of imperialism. I also argue that Squier's writings played a role in the employment of a series of state‐initiated civilising projects and legislative actions that clearly demonstrate how Honduras was defined both racially and spatially.     

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: Castro, Max. J., ed. Free Markets, Open Societies, Closed Borders? Trends in International Migration and Immigration Policy in the Americas. Craske, Nikki. Women and Politics in Latin America. Jaquette, Jane S., and Sharon L. Wolchik, eds. Women and Democracy: Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe. Hira, Anil. Ideas and Economic Policy in Latin America: Regional, National, and Organizational Case Studies. Mace, Gordon, and Louis Bélanger, eds. The Americas in Transition: The Contours of Regionalism. Rodríguez Mendoza, Miguel, Patrick Low, and Barbara Kotschwar, eds. Trade Rules in the Making: Challenges in Regional and Multilateral Negotiations. Welch, Cliff. The Seed Was Planted: The São Paulo Roots of Brazil's Rural Labor Movement, 1924–1964. Hanchard, Michael, ed. Racial Politics in Contemporary Brazil. Lesser, Jeffrey. Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil. McCaughan, Edward J. Reinventing Revolution: The Renovation of Left Discourse in Cuba and Mexico. Snyder, Richard, ed. Institutional Adaptation and Innovation in Rural Mexico. Dietz, Henry. Urban Poverty, Political Participation, and the State: Lima, 1970–1990.     

Understanding Brazil's new drive for Africa

Following a period of some distancing through the 1980s and 1990s, Brazil has made a concerted effort to engage with Africa. Today, under the leadership of President Lula, Africa is clearly a priority, especially as Brazil emerges as a global economic power and leader of the developing South. Yet, relatively little is written of Brazil's engagement with Africa and the rationale behind the political and economic drive toward the continent. What is clear is that Brazil's engagement with Africa, viewed in the historical context, maintains its underlying foreign policy principles of economic development on the one hand and the preservation of autonomy in an asymmetric world on the other. Brazil's engagement with Africa has taken on a three-pronged approach of political diplomacy, commercial engagement and development co-operation. This is indicative of a new era of Brazilian foreign policy and Brazil's process of internationalisation in general. This is a complex and inter-related process that Brazil seems to have managed well through a high degree of diplomatic sophistication and open cooperation between the political, commercial and various development entities. Africa displays one of the best contextual examples of Brazil's delicate balancing act between commercial and strategic interests and external development assistance. The way Brazil manages this and builds on its positive image in Africa is indicative of its role and approach as a new and emerging power on the international stage.     

Why Party Organization Still Matters: The Workers' Party in Northeastern Brazil

Does party organization still matter? Much of the party literature suggests that politicians, who can use substitutes like mass media to win votes, lack incentives to invest in party organization. Yet it remains an electoral asset, especially at lower levels of government. Evidence from Brazil's Workers' Party (PT) indicates that party elites invest in organization when they prioritize lower‐level elections and that this investment delivers electoral returns. In the mid‐2000s, the PT strengthened its support across levels of government in the conservative, clientelistic Northeast. Drawing from underutilized data on party offices, this article shows that organizational expansion contributed substantially to the PT's electoral advances in the Northeast. While President Lula da Silva's (PT) 2006 electoral spike in the Northeast resulted from expanded conditional cash transfers, the PT's improvement at lower levels followed from top‐down organization building. The PT national leadership deliberately expanded the party's local infrastructure to deliver electoral gains.     

The Recent Appearance of Favelas in São Paulo City: an Old Problem in a New Setting

Abstract— While favelas have been an important feature of many Brazilian cities over the past 50 years, they were relatively insignificant in São Paulo until the mid- 1970s. Since then, São Paulo's favelas have experienced a dramatic expansion and some estimates now put their total population in the region of two million. This article examines potential explanations for this sudden change, including migration, changes in the housing market, relative prices and state intervention.     

Brazil and South Africa: the ‘odd couple’ of the South Atlantic?

Exploring the complexity of South Africa's and Brazil's ‘like-mindedness’ at the regional, multilateral, and bilateral levels, this article argues that shared middle power roles traceable to the pre-Cold War era and beyond set the scene for a great deal of political complementarity and cooperation at the multilateral level where Brazil and South Africa's shared identities drive an interest in reforming global governance processes. This complementarity does not, however, always spill over to the bilateral level, where trans-societal linkages are still relatively limited compared with state-to-state interactions.     

Culturing identities,the state,and national consciousness in late nineteenth‐century western Guatemala1⋆

This paper examines the procedural culture that shaped ethnic and national identities in late nineteenth‐century western Guatemala. Rooted in face‐to‐face encounters between departmental jefes políticos (departmental governors) and local Maya communities, this procedural culture emerged from routines of governance such as annual municipal inspections, ethnic struggles for municipal control, and local efforts to title community lands that led Maya and state officials to develop contrasting understandings of each other and their relations. Far from precipitating a national identity of mutual belonging, state formation here intensified the racism and political violence that would rend Guatemala during the century to come.     

The Shi'a of Saudi Arabia: a minority in search of cultural authenticity

This article focuses on the transformation of Saudi Shi'a resistance from one which centred on military confrontation in the 1980s to one which invokes searching for cultural authenticity (al‐asala al‐shi'iyya) in the 1990s. Today the struggle of the Shi'a for equal status among the Sunni majority draws attention to the attempts of Shi'a intellectuals to write their own regional history. Shi'a intellectuals and opposition leaders deconstruct official representations of themselves and provide alternative historical narratives which anchor their community in Saudi history and society, thus dismissing suggestions that they are a non‐indigenous community. This article examines Shi'a historical narratives in an attempt to understand the transformation in their struggle against discrimination in Saudi Arabia.     

Maori Self‐Determination: Towards Differentiated Liberal Citizenship

During the 1980s and 1990s biculturalism was the ascendant political philosophy for managing the relationship between the New Zealand Crown and the indigenous Maori population. Biculturalism understood Maori politics as a partnership between Maori and the state, grounded in the Treaty of Waitangi, the agreement signed in 1840 from which British government was established. Biculturalism was presented as morally superior to multiculturalism which was understood as setting aside Maori Treaty rights and rights of prior occupancy in favour of less substantive rights available to Maori as one of many ethnic minorities. However, a deeper reading of multicultural political theory provides an instructive critique of biculturalism's inherent limits from the perspective of the Maori right to self‐determination. It shows why biculturalism's influence waned. It also shows why Matike Mai o Aotearoa, a blueprint for constitutional transformation commissioned by tribal leaders is unlikely to succeed as a contemporary attempt to reassert biculturalism's influence. Multicultural theory is not a panacea for the right to self‐determination, but it does not restrict the development of a broader Maori‐centred differentiated liberal citizenship in the ways that biculturalism precludes.     

Press and ethnic polarization in post-2001 Afghanistan: the 2014 presidential election experience

This article analyses the contents of three newspapers affiliated with the Tajik-dominated Jamiat and Shura-e-Nezar factions that were deployed during the 2014 presidential election to publicize ethno-political polarization for instrumental ends. The practice of nurturing ethnic identities serves as a microcosm of the broader context in which identity politics, besides coalition-building, rent-seeking, and patrimonial interdependencies, has become a key feature of post-2001 politics. This article focuses on how these factions used these newspapers to polarize ethnic cleavages to win legitimacy for themselves and defamation for their Pashtun-dominated rival factions – Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin and the Taliban. It will be years before the ethnic mujahedeen and muhajereen and the new generation reach a mutually binding and working condition that facilitates the country's long-term stability. Reaching this condition is critical because the future of Afghanistan lies in the commitment of its people to form a united community that resolves disputes in the manner of a democratic nation.     

The Gender Ethics and Politics of Affection: The ‘Feminine’Melodramatic Mode in Walter Salles' Central do Brasil (1998)

This article reads Walter Salles's Central do Brasil (1998) through a reappraisal of the film's relationship to melodrama in order to emphasise the significance of the association of affect with ethical judgment in thinking about the complex and contradictory gender politics of the film, thereby challenging the conventional tension between pathos and logos. Using a number of filmic and psychoanalytic theories, this article argues that Central do Brasil's melodramatic search for a ‘space of innocence’ in the Sertão could offer less a nostalgic return to anachronistic forms of living than a survival strategy for living in late modernity. Finally, this article argues that Central do Brasil, while lamenting the state's withdrawal from the public sphere, calls for an ethical imperative that is associated with a ‘feminine’ responsible and generous capacity to embrace the other as a necessary form of social and political action for the redefining of citizenship in Brazilian neoliberal society.     

Soft or Hard Power? Discourse Patterns in Brazil's Foreign Policy Toward South America

This article analyzes the discourse of Brazil's foreign policy toward South America from 1995 to 2010 by means of quantifying, codifying, and weighting all speeches registered in the homogeneous and periodic official documentation of Brazil's Ministry of Foreign Affairs using a discourse analysis approach. The aim is to investigate discourse patterns in order to qualify Brazil's foreign policy as either hard power or soft power and to identify the orientation and differences in its discourse of foreign policy regarding each country of South America during the presidential terms of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2002) and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (2003–2010).     

Reducing Poverty Intensity: What Alternative Poverty Measures Reveal About the Impact of Brazil's Bolsa Família

Brazil's conditional cash transfer program Bolsa Família (Family Allowance) has gained a worldwide reputation as an effective antipoverty program. However, studies applying the dominant headcount poverty measure, which counts the percentage of households falling below a given poverty line, only credit the program with a first‐order reduction in poverty (and extreme poverty) of 0.15 to 1.88 percentage points. This raises the puzzle of how such a modest impact could lead to Bolsa Família's political popularity. This article argues that Bolsa Família does dramatically reduce poverty, but measuring this impact requires thinking of poverty as how far a household is from meeting its basic human needs; choosing a continuous variable; and using income gap, intensity, and ordinal measures that reflect this conceptualization. The more substantial reduction of poverty intensity helps explain the program's reputation.     

Double-layered ethnic politics in Malaysia: national integration,ethnic unity and social stability

Each ethnic community has an ethnic-based political party both within the government coalition (Barisan Nasional: BN) and within the opposition coalition (Pakatan Rakyat and Pakatan Harapan). Therefore, Malaysia’s political structure can be described as double-layered ethnic politics. In this political structure, the BN government has been forced to adopt a fluctuating policy framework for nation building. As a result, double-layered ethnic politics impedes the development of national integration. Paradoxically, this phenomenon contributes to the maintenance of social stability as this political structure effectively prevents the establishment of a robust ethnic unity that may lead to ethnic conflicts.     

Rethinking Price Reform in the USSR

A distinguished and outspoken Soviet proponent of perestroyka, who is one of its key architects, outlines the major components of an “ideal” price reform package before examining its possible consequences and obstacles to its full realization. He then presents what he believes is a workable alternative to the official Soviet policy on price reform, as well as a crude timetable for its implementation (sequence of reforms in retail and wholesale prices). The paper marks a significant shift in the author's view on the subject, journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: 027, 052, 124, 227.     

“A Good‐Will Ship”: The Light Cruiser Köln Visits Rabaul (1933)

The concept of loyalty still holds a central space in many histories about New Guinean‐Australian relations, especially during the Second World War, and translates into demands by Australians that New Guineans recognize Australia's political system as “the best”. In this article about the visit of the first German navy cruiser to New Guinea after the First World War, I tell a story not about loyalties, but about contesting colonial claims, namely Australia's insistence on “loyalty”, and Germany's demand for a “return” of her colony. The visit of Köln in 1933 raises questions such as: How did Germans and Australians negotiate living together in the Mandated Territory of New Guinea? How were divisions, grief, tensions, and hostilities after the First World War dealt with? What separated them, what united them, and what role did New Guineans play in this complex relationship?     

Towards a More Enabling Representation: Framing an Emergent Conceptual Approach to Measure Social Conditions Following Mega‐Event Transformation in Manaus,Brazil

This paper presents a conceptual and methodological approach for researching social conditions to understand how urban change and development affects a community and its residents. Manaus, in Brazil's Amazonia region, received much criticism after US$300 million that was spent on a 40,000+ seat (upgraded) stadium in a city with no regular sporting tournaments. This paper positions the need to look beyond tangible features and assess social impacts based on community perceptions using ethnography to locate local meanings of social transformation. Attention is needed in communities adjacent to new stadium developments in Manaus to understand inclusion, exclusion and social leveraging.     

Inventing Tradition at Gunpoint: Culture,Caciquismo and State Formation in the Región Mixe,Oaxaca (1930–1959)

This article examines the links between the creation of a post‐revolutionary Mexican culture and the maintenance of traditional forms of cacical control. Taking as a case study Luis Rodríguez, a cacique from the state of Oaxaca, it is argued that he utilised state notions of indigenismo and indigenous cultural production to assert and maintain his position as the strongman of the Mixe ethnic group. However, despite the employment of state discourses, Rodríguez’s fiefdom was never subsumed into the corporate revolutionary state. Rather, these claims of ethnic unity were used as a smokescreen to deter state intervention. As a result, Rodríguez was forced to use intimidation and violence to control pueblos outside his immediate sphere of influence during the 1940s and 1950s.