CIAO DATE: 04/2014
Volume: 2, Issue: 4
March 2013
EDITOR'S NOTE: BRAZIL, THE WEAKEST LINK OF BRICS? (PDF)
Paulo Visentini
Many readers and contributors of AUSTRAL, from the most diverse countries, have been asking us: “what is happening in Brazil?” In fact, there is no economic crisis or conjunctural problems that could serve as an explanation for the recent demonstrations. After about a decade of intense international projection, economic growth and successful social policies, Brazil under Dilma’s presidency was hit in June 2013 by a wave of strange protests, characterized by contradictory motivations. The achievement accomplished by President Lula of making Brazil the host-country of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and Rio de Janeiro the host-city of 2016 Olympic Games seem subtly in risk. Brazil, as most countries, endures the chaos of megacities and urgently needs infrastructure updates, which would be propitiated by the World Cup and the Olympics.
BRAZILIAN PERSPECTIVES ON THE CONVERGENCE OF SISBIN AND ZOPACAS (PDF)
Sérgio Gonçalves de Amorim
This communication aims to address Brazilian perspectives on the convergence between Brazilian Intelligence System (SISBIN, in Portuguese), a Brazilian State institutional arrangement in the national defense sector established in 1999, and the South Atlantic Peace and Cooperation Zone (ZOPACAS, in Portuguese), a multilateral negotiation mechanism approved by the United Nations (UN), in 1986, following the initiative of Brazilian diplomacy. This paper, therefore, aims at analyzing the convergence of a country‟s internal and external security and defense policies in a given regional context. The ZOPACAS was created by a Brazilian initiative at the UN, which approved it in the context of the Cold War, the paradigm in force concerning decisions in International Politics at that time. Brazil was then initiating a democratization process, and the Zone of Peace and Cooperation was one of its new diplomatic initiatives.
SOUTH ATLANTIC, SOUTHERN AFRICA AND SOUTH AMERICA: COOPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT (PDF)
Analúcia Danilevicz Pereira
The South Atlantic is responsible for linking South America to Africa, but it is, first, also a strategic space for political, technical and commercial exchanges between both continents. Historically considered a commercial region involving Europe, Latin America and Africa, the Atlantic Ocean resumes its geo-economic and geopolitical importance due to its great natural resources, as well as to the turnaround of geopolitics towards South. Though it has huge importance since the colonial era, it is since the 1970s’ Oil Crisis that this ocean had its prominence re-dimensioned, boosting the debate on limited maritime borders, but mainly on the exploration of its natural resources. Moreover, the incapacity of the two current interoceanic waterways – Suez and Panama – in responding demands and receiving more important ships increased the pressures on the area. Besides the oil reserves and the ecosystems located in the Atlantic, there is a diversity of other resources that might benefit the economic development of the countries lying on both margins.
SOUTH ATLANTIC: THE RELATIONS BETWEEN BRAZIL AND AFRICA IN THE FIELD OF SECURITY AND DEFENSE (PDF)
Sergio Luiz Cruz Aguilar
While the South Atlantic conditioned the preparation and employment of naval forces in the context of defense of the Americas during the Cold War, today this area is presented to the country's foreign policy as a strategic priority and as a hub for Brazil´s international insertion. Consequently, within the framework of the so-called South-South cooperation, which conformed in the 1970s and gained momentum in the post-Cold War, Brazil has been signing a series of agreements with African countries, especially those located on the western coast of the continent. In addition to the economic, political and technological areas, cooperation is also taking place in the field of security and defense.
THE CENTRAL BANK OF BRAZIL AS AN AGENT OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS (PDF)
Mauro Salvo
The main reason for writing this article was a passage of Amado Cervo’s book called “The International Challenge”, which says that Central Bank’s (CB) and Finance Ministry’s technicians have taken the place of Itamaraty in international economic negotiations, referring to the dichotomy between political and technical treatment given to the issue of Brazilian external debt. “The Nation and with it nationalism were removed of debt negotiations, once the Congress and the Chancellery had nothing to say. The political treatment that was reclaimed internally and hyped by the diplomacy in Latin American forums was fake. The conduction of negotiations were trusted to CB and Finance Ministry economists and was always in their hands, even because one could not give to such an important issue two different treatments.” (Cervo 1994, 49) Having the above assertion as the starting point I decided to test the hypothesis that the CB is an agent of international relations. To achieve this aim, the article interweaves historical facts and theoretical inferences. Initially it approaches how economic themes had their space enlarged in international relations after World War II and even more after the end of the Cold War, in detriment of national security themes. Besides that, many relevant economic themes in contemporary world scenario are attributions of the national central banks.
ZERO HUNGER FOR THE WORLD: BRAZIL'S GLOBAL DIFFUSION OF ITS ZERO HUNGER STRATEGY (PDF)
Markus Fraundorfer
Brazil‟s ex-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010) received a number of prestigious international awards2 for his activities in the global fight against hunger and poverty, not least because of the impressive results of the Zero Hunger Strategy, launched by Lula da Silva in 2003, which achieved to considerably reduce the numbers of people living in poverty in Brazil. A myriad of relevant actors in the global governance of food security, among them civil society organisations (CSOs) and international organisations, praised Brazil‟s approach to fighting hunger and poverty. In 2009, ActionAid, one of the most influential CSOs worldwide in the fight against hunger and poverty, started its global HungerFREE campaign which included the introduction of a scorecard3 with the aim to monitor the performance of developing countries in the fight against hunger. Through these monitoring practices ActionAid confirmed that Brazil‟s approach to fighting hunger, in the form of Lula da Silva‟s Zero Hunger Strategy, was the most successful one in the developing world. Brazil was ranked first by ActionAid in both 2009 and
TRIANGULAR TECHNICAL COOPERATION AND THE ROLE OF INMETRO (PDF)
Leonardo Pace Alves
Nowadays, the Triangular Technical Cooperation appears as a promising subfield of the Cooperation for Development area, uniting efforts of a developing country and developed country (or of a multilateral organization) in favor of a third nation destitute of resources. The Triangular Technical Cooperation meets the eighth goal of the United Nations 2000 Millennium Declaration, establishing partnerships for development in order to reduce global inequities. After remaining for two decades a recipient of technical knowledge from more industrialized nations, Brazil gradually assumed the dual identity of recipient and provider thereof, accumulating forty years of experience in international technical cooperation with countries of less relative development. This cooperation was built in both bilateral and trilateral scope.
NSIDE THE BRIC: ANALYSIS OF THE SEMIPERIPHERAL NATURE OF BRAZIL, RUSSIA, INDIA AND CHINA (PDF)
Daniel Efrén Morales Ruvalcaba
Every approach and development of the World-Systems Theory is carried out in a structured time-space continuum. Concerning the spatiality, this theory understands the world in a stratified and hierarchical way on three areas: core, semiperiphery and periphery2 . Such division “is not merely functional – that is to say, occupational – but also geographical.” (Wallerstein 2003a, 492) That understood, the world-systems‟ observed areas are not only a theoretical construct in order to understand the international division of labor but also real, authentic, historically built and spatially established geographical areas, whose differences – sudden or not – do exist, “as point the price criteria, the wages, the life levels, the gross domestic product, the per capita gross and the commercial balances” (Braudel 1984, 22). As David Harvey explains, these areas “are perpetually reproduced, sustained, undermined and reconfigured by the socioecological and political-economic processes that lie on the present” (Harvey 2000, 98). It indicates that the spaces do not belong to a single area anymore, but that the processes are “what structure the space” (Taylor and Flint 2002, 21) in an unstoppable and perpetual way
LATIN AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY AND THE COMMUNITY OF LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN STATES (PDF)
Elsa Llenderrozas
The creation of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in February 2010 reconfigures a new step in the process of the regional political concert. Resulting from the convergence of many regional instances, especially the Rio Group and the Latin America and Caribbean Summit on Integration and Development (CALC, initials in Spanish), besides increasing aspirations to cooperate, a new mechanism that aims to overcome the subregional level is created to activate multilevel forums and strengthen the tendency to build multidimensional agendas.
MIDDLE POWERS IN THE FRAME OF GLOBAL CLIMATE ARCHITECTURE: THE HYBRIDIZATION OF THE SOUTH DIVISION (PDF)
Maria del Pilar Bueno
The distribution of power among nations has been one of the most characteristic debates of International Relations. Unipolarity, multipolarity, bipolarity and non-polarity are just some of the concepts that promote an analysis of the International System and the links between state actors, in particular the nation states. Since the end of the 20th Century, after the last breath of the Cold War and, therefore, the end of bipolarity, the endless academic disagreements related to the existence of one or many centers of power in the global scene became apparent. Nonetheless, the relative power crisis in which the hegemonic power – United States – is the protagonist, followed by the difficulties Europe is passing through, has put the middle powers in a privileged sphere.
GEOGRAPHY AND MARITIME POTENTIAL OF CHINA AND IRAN (PDF)
Soren Schlovin, Alexandr Burilkov
In recent years, developments in Chinese and Iranian foreign policy have been a constant in discussions in the West, particularly in the United States. It is a haphazard process but the Chinese continue to modernize and expand their forces and strategic reach. In the meantime, Iranian political and military leaders are fond of reminding the world of their thousands of missiles that are supposedly but a push of a button away. Outlandish projects aside, when it comes to strictly maritime matters it becomes possible to see that each state has a certain maritime potential, meaning the ability to leverage the near and far seas so as to achieve its objectives at some point in the near future. We seek to show how this potential is influenced by geography.