The Social Origin of Career Diplomats in Brazil's Ministry of Foreign Affairs: Still an Upper-Class Elite?

Abstract

One of the first bureaucratic institutions created in the newly independent Brazilian state in 1822 was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then under the designation Ministry of Foreign Matters and now known as the Itamaraty. Little is known about the institutional environment of the Brazilian MFA beyond what the diplomats'. themselves have written. Because of the development of research in social sciences in Brazil and difficulties in accessing information, particularly about the authoritarian periods, the institution was rarely researched from the outside. Most of the material comes from what the diplomats wrote about themselves and their institutional lives. In this chapter, we analyse the geographic, educational and social background of Brazilian diplomats, using our database with the universe of diplomats active from 1971 up until 2019. To this end, our sources use a survey of over 200 diplomats conducted in 2015, as well interviews, memoirs and biographies.