Climbing the ladder: Brazil and the international security field

Abstract

During the past two decades the Brazilian Foreign Policy Community (BFPC) experienced a great deal of change. Brazil’s international stance has for a very long time been recognized for its attachment to the principles of sovereignty, non-intervention and non-interference, as well as for its quest for autonomy and status recognition. Nevertheless, since the beginning of the 2000s, Brazil led the peacekeeping operation in Haiti (under Chap. VII of the UN charter), got involved in the military coup in Honduras and engaged itself in contentious development projects in Africa. What has changed? How has the Brazilian foreign policy community bared new understandings about these long-standing principles. This chapter discusses Brazil’s international stance in the field of international security, focusing on the intersection between security and development and the regional-global nexus. We contend that in order to understand the process of change and continuity it is necessary to look into the relations between the positioning of the country, the understandings about the dynamics of the international system and forms of resistance and adaptation considered by those who are making decisions and building discourses (the foreign policy community).