Repositório RCAAP

Abstract This article reviews three classic texts of the French, American-Realist and English schools in International Relations, namely Tout Empire Périra (Duroselle 1992), Politics Among Nations (Morgenthau 1948), and Power Politics (Wight 1978). I argue that Wight’s approach can be regarded as a middle course between those of Duroselle and Morgenthau, and that Wight adopted this position in order to associate himself with important assumptions by both Duroselle and Morgenthau. In particular, there are similarities between Wight’s concept of ‘international revolution’ and Duroselle’s notion of the ‘unbearable.’ Both are critical of behavioural methods, and both search for recurrences in international relations. As regards Morgenthau, Wight shares with him a Realist view of international anarchy, a classical understanding of ‘national interest,’ and an understanding of ideologies as the legitimation of government actions.

Abstract Lebanon is frequently referred to as a model of a plural and stable democracy in the Middle East: a multi-ethnic and pluri-religious society that guarantees political representation through a power-sharing confessional framework. Numerous authors also see the consociational model as the best democratic alternative given such a high degree of domestic heterogeneity. However, by emphasising Lebanese stability vis-à-vis a troubled regional scenario, these positive perceptions have neglected some elements of how democracy actually works in Lebanon. In this article, I analyse two domestic dimensions that hinder the success of the Lebanese democratic experience (the pre-attribution of seats and distortions of representation) and point to the limits, effects and consequences of consociationalism in this specific confessional reality. The results of this case study indicate that highly institutionalised consociational arrangements can lead to sectarianism, institutional instability, clientelism, and state frailty. I also lay out some lessons and implications that can be derived from such a framework in terms of harmful sectarian narratives at both the local and regional levels.

Abstract Middle Eastern geopolitics are dynamic and complex. Ideological and religious matters interplay with domestic and international structures, generating several types of relations. This article aims to analyse the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, two powerhouses that compete for leadership in the Gulf. The objective is to understand this competition through the lens of Role Theory, focusing on the national role conceptions that both countries project outwards. This theoretical framework presupposes that Iran and Saudi Arabia project self-made images that represent cognitive constructions of what policymakers believe their respective nations stand for. As an example, Iran projects a role of bastion of revolutions, which is firmly set against Saudi Arabia’s anti-instability role. Regional instability periods, such as civil unrests, provide useful study cases for investigating the phenomenon of rivalry. Therefore, this article focuses on the Iranian and Saudi reactions to the events related to the so-called Arab Spring in Bahrain and Yemen, detecting when the rivalry is (somehow) present in their international behaviours. In conclusion, the article adds to a better understanding of Tehran’s and Riyadh’s ideological projection, and of how much of the region’s politics are constrained by the rivalry status.

Abstract This article proposes a theoretical framework for understanding Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte’s celebrated ‘pivot to China.’ It begins by discussing the model of asymmetric relations as a suitable framework for understanding relations between highly unequal states, and the concept of dual structural asymmetry as a means of theorising the triangular relations among the Philippines, the USA and China since the end of the Cold War. Next, it presents various economic and political indicators of the shift in Filipino foreign policy under Duterte. It goes on to propose a theoretical model for identifying the linkages between elements of political economy and international security from the perspective of Brantly Womack’s theory of asymmetry. Lastly, it presents three scenarios for resolving the territorial dispute in the South China Sea (SCS) between the Philippines and China: two with maximum gains for one country only, and a third with an acceptable result for both countries as a product of mutual concessions.

Abstract In this article, I examine Latin American regionalism from the collapse of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) to the emergence and development of the Pacific Alliance (PA) in the period 2005 to 2015. For most of the research, I use the main economic blocs in the region, Mercosur as well as the PA, as the units of analysis. The main findings are that since the FTAA’s collapse, integration processes have become more heterogeneous; that Mercosur and the PA contrast with one another in political-economic terms; that the Brazilian project of establishing a post-liberal/post-hegemonic regionalism in South America has not succeeded; and that regional demand for Brazilian products is at risk of shifting to other markets in the medium to long term, thus further undermining its aspirations towards regional leadership. All of this is evidence of a decentred economic regionalism – that is, a form of regionalism in which no single state is in central command, or has enough followers to assume leadership and establish a dominant conception of integration and regional cooperation. Other factors contributing to this decentralisation are the poor economic performance of Brazil and Mexico, and the US government’s changed attitude towards trade relations with Latin America. Despite this, I argue that Latin American countries do need to strengthen cooperation within and among these regional blocs, aimed at promoting their joint global competitiveness. This will require cooperation rather than coercion, and networks and connectivity rather than hierarchies.

Abstract The objective of this article is to analyse the announced and ongoing foreign direct investment of companies from China in the Amazon region, mainly in Brazil, which covers most of the region, and Peru. We will also to a certain extent include the Amazon region that crosses Colombia and Ecuador. These countries constitute one of the centres of South American integration due to their infrastructure, and the construction of a highway linking Peru and Brazil to the Pacific has been planned. Segments such as mining, petroleum and grains have been the target for the productive internationalisation of Chinese companies. In the analysed countries, the volume of announced and ongoing direct investment of Chinese companies is indeed significant, targeting the above-mentioned natural resource industries. The large infrastructure project announced will be a logistical support for the companies that announced investments in the Amazon, especially between Brazil and Peru. Even though these countries and the other five that share the Amazon rainforest have presented some proposals of co-operation, they have not developed a common approach for the reception of investments from Chinese companies.

Abstract Since the emergence of the environmental agenda in the global arena, Brazil has maintained an active position in the debates around this topic. Although Brazil has always been a protagonist, its foreign policy has shown some changes in relation to addressing climate change in recent years. Likewise, the modalities under which this issue has been framed as a problem since 1992 are fundamentally important to interpreting the Brazilian position in international negotiations and the changes in them over the years. The objective of the following article is to understand the discursive framework on which the foreign policy of climate change in Brazil was structured from a constructivist standpoint on International Relations. Using this approach, this article studies both the international influences and the internal conditions of Brazilian climate policy in the negotiations of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The main sources of this research are semi-structured interviews with state and non-state actors in Brazil, complemented with a review of secondary sources such as official documents and academic papers.

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Abstract This article focuses on media representations of ‘the South in the North’ crosscutting the European mediascape in 2015 and the beginning of 2016. Assuming that both identities and perceptions of in/security are socially constructed, particularly by means of discourse, that security is gendered and gender constructions are in turn built on dynamics of in/security, and that gendered power relations and representations are always entangled with other structures of inequality and domination such as racism, this article argues that gendered categories of othering in the media’s representations have been critical to produce and justify 1) hegemonic narratives of securitisation that aim to protect an imagined European identity and 2) counter-narratives denouncing the racial and cultural discrimination tied to the ‘North’s’ hegemonic representations of refugees. Theoretically, the article proposes a dialogue among critical, feminist, and postcolonial peace and security studies. Methodologically, it analyses through discourse analysis three highly mediatised cases by examining the social representations of the refugees, namely their gendered components put forward by representative European media outlets based in the UK. It explores their implications in terms of the consolidation of stereotypes and hierarchies of suffering according to criteria of credibility/suspicion and vulnerability/threat, and identifies some examples of media counter-narratives on refugee flows through specific gendered and racialised representations.

Abstract The paper addresses the women’s movement in the Northern Syrian region known by Kurds as Rojava, a movement whose central role in building an autonomous political project has its roots in the Kurdish nationalist struggle, specifically that organised by the Kurdish Worker’s Party, also known as the PKK, in Turkey. This study brings to the fore reflections on the power relations that cross the struggle carried out by these women, who, for their part, are crossed by the intersection of gender, ethnicity and class, which feeds and composes the critical praxis of this organised struggle. The Kurdish women’s political path is approached through the contradictions and ambiguities they encounter when they face the challenge of becoming aware of their own place in a political project, which at first had a nationalist character and is now beginning to gain new contours. The presence of the female figure in a political context of armed conflict endows these women with the role of challenging the boundaries on which the foundational elements of international politics rely, namely, the boundary between public and private spheres and gender roles played socially and politically. The Kurdish women’s movement in Rojava disturbs the foundational boundaries of the modern nation-state alongside the hegemonic constructions of masculinity and femininity, and the militarised character of politics, which are constitutive of the modern imaginary of political community.

Abstract The trajectories of migration and prostitution are embedded in representations of body, gender, sex and sexuality. This article seeks to understand the articulation between migration and sex work through the lens of gender. To this end, this article relies on a typological approach that aims to clear some ground in the ongoing debate on the issues of prostitution, sex trafficking and migration of sex workers. It explores the theoretical cross-contribution as well as the conceptual limitations of radical, liberal, post-colonial, critical and postmodern feminist perspectives on the issues of prostitution, sex workers’ mobility and sex trafficking. It gives special focus to the contributions of the postmodern feminist reading, especially by highlighting how it has challenged conventional feminist theories, hitherto grounded in dualistic structures. In fact, the postmodern feminist approach makes a stand against the simplistic dichotomies such as First/Third World, passivity/agency, vulnerability/empowerment, innocence/conscience, sexual trafficking/voluntary prostitution or ‘trafficked victim’/‘autonomous sex worker.’ As such, postmodern feminism disrupts all fixed demarcations and homogeneous forms of categorisation on which the dominant feminist theories were based, allowing thus for the emergence of new practices of subjectivity as well as new forms of flexible identities.

Abstract The aim of this article is to contrast prominent discourses on prostitution and human trafficking to the context of prostitution in Brazil and local feminist discourses on this matter, understanding their contradictions and limitations. I look at Brazilian transgender prostitutes’ experiences to address an agency-related question that underlies feminist theorizations of prostitution: can prostitution be freely chosen? Is it necessarily exploitative? My argument is that discourses on sex work, departing from sex trafficking debates, are heavily engaged in a heteronormative logic that might be unable to approach the complexity and ambiguity of experiences of transgender prostitutes and, therefore, cannot theorize their possibilities of agency. To do so, I will conduct a critique of the naturalization of gender norms that hinders an understanding of experiences that exceed the binary ‘prostitute versus victim.’ I argue how both an abolitionist as well as a legalising solution to the issues involved in the sex market, when relying on the state as the guarantor of rights to sex workers, cannot account for the complexities of a context such as the Brazilian one, in which specific conceptions of citizenship permit violence against sexually and racially marked groups to occur on such a large scale.

Abstract Brazil’s sex workers’ movement has long challenged hegemonic narratives about the sale of sex. In recent years, anti-prostitution sentiment has grown in Brazil, threatening sex workers’ rights. Simultaneously, the death of activist Gabriela Leite has lead to a renewal of leadership and a reformulation of theoretical approaches in the movement. In this context, putafeminismo is becoming established as an intersectional approach to race, class, and gender rooted in local historical contexts. The present article, based on 12 years of ethnography in sex workers’ movements, presents putafeminista understandings of sex, gender, race/color, and work. Inspired by Leite’s recovery of whore/puta as a self-identifier for sex workers, and rooted in feminist anthropology and historiography, putafeministas seek to resituate the term as a broader/deeper category. Putafeministas recover puta as a term applied to women working outside the family, unprotected from sexual violence. Looking at Brazilian history, they situate the sale of sex as a practical inevitability for a racially-identified female working population, whose horizons of possibility were bounded by cheap labor, marriage and prostitution. Finally, putafeministas use puta as a bridge to working class experiences more generally, questioning pornophobic understandings of ‘sexual slavery’ in a historical context in which women were often actual chattel.

Abstract After a decade dominated by post-liberal or post-hegemonic initiatives, the advent of conservative governments in Argentina and Brazil and the crisis in Venezuela have led to a resurgence of open regionalism. This could have important consequences in a region divided by different models of economic integration and political cooperation. The study evaluates the complex and changing scenario of Latin American regionalism. First, I trace the trajectory of regionalism in Latin America in recent years. Second, I examine models of economic integration and political cooperation. Third, I analyse the operation of those models in the post-hegemonic era. Lastly, I assess the emergence of a new regional cycle, and its implications for regional integration and cooperation.

Abstract This article examines oversight over foreign policy-making by the Brazilian National Congress, specifically whether the use of oversight tools at their disposal by Senators and Deputies conform to the ‘fire alarm’ or ‘police patrol’ models. This is done by recording and analysing requests for information and summonses to ministers filed in the Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate between 1991 and 2014, especially those directed at the Ministry of Foreign Relations. We also compare the use of these instruments in respect of foreign policy to their use in respect of other portfolios. Lastly, analysing the content of these requests and summonses leads to interesting conclusions about how these instruments are used politically, notably in terms of the government-opposition ideological divide.

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Abstract This paper aims to offer a feminist, Latin-American reading on the gender representations that constitute the discourse on the US war on drugs in Latin America. Drawing upon the feminist literature on international security, this article explores some of the nuances of the US war-on-drugs discourse when it comes to gender. It argues that, although a gendered discourse has been constantly present in US official discourse, it has visibly changed in character as the USA’s antidrug policies became increasingly internationalized, militarized, and oriented by a ‘supply-side approach.’ Once deployed through the feminization of drug consumption as a moral degradation of the nation’s social body, US war-on-drugs discourse perceptibly changed to encompass a process of hyper-masculinization of the figure of the US drug warrior, supported by subordinate masculinities and femininities represented by the subaltern, feminized Latin American drug warriors, and the ruthless, hyper-aggressive drug lords. Ultimately, the gender(ed) cartographies of the USA’s war-on-drugs discourse work as conditions of possibility for framing the war on drugs as the only ‘solution’ to the ‘drug problem’ and reaffirm the incessant search for sovereignty that has as its ultimate goal the total control, domination and vigilance of human interaction with psychoactive substances: attributes of a hegemonic state masculinity par excellence. Through gendered (in)security performances, the state defends not only its ‘physical’ borders from external threats, but also its own frontiers of possibility.

Abstract This study explores the labour rights discourse produced by Brazilian domestic workers. It shows that the 2015 Brazilian legislation which extended labour rights to domestic workers was not simply a ‘boomerang effect’ of ILO Convention 189 on decent work for domestic workers, or a case of the ‘vernacularisation’ of global rights. Indeed, domestic workers have agitated for equal labour rights since 1936, and articulated the specific rights contained in the new legislation decades before their institutional recognition. Therefore, rather than being an instance of the translation of pre-existing global frameworks at the local level, the case of domestic workers demonstrates the ability of subaltern groups to transnationalise their demands, suggesting that the global South should not be conceived only as a place of rights reception, but also as a place of rights production. In this context, I trace the genealogy of the labour rights discourse as imagined and mobilised by domestic workers in Brazil, and examine the ways in which they have travelled between their subaltern location, the Brazilian state and the international agenda about ‘decent work.’

Abstract This article analyses Cuban medical internationalism through a feminist International Relations lens. Our results are based on numerous in-depth semi-structured interviews and fieldwork conducted with both female and male participants in these programmes. The doctors we interviewed have concluded medical missions in countries such as Brazil, Venezuela, Angola and Ghana. We argue that examining Cuban medical internationalism from a feminist IR perspective gives us insights into the nuanced status of feminism within Cuban civil society, how international employment impacts family relations both positively and negatively, and how time spent abroad provides transformative experiences. This paper seeks to contribute to greater conversations on power, agency and gender in the global South.