This chapter examines Brazil’s emergence as a global power, with a particular focus on how the country has striven to play a bigger role on the international scene. It first provides a brief historical background on Brazil before discussing contemporary Brazilian foreign policy — especially its leaders’ vision of the country as a consequential global player in an increasingly multipolar world. This is seen through the active campaigning for continental integration in which Brazil has played an important role by means of several initiatives. The chapter explores Brazilian foreign policy initiatives in four global issue arenas: trade, climate, financial governance, and nuclear proliferation. It concludes with the suggestion that in terms of material power resources and influence, Brazil was not a global power in the twentieth century, even as it notes the country’s aspiration to become a major international player in the early twenty-first century.
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28. Brazil as a Global Player?
Leslie Elliott Armijo
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16. The Political Economy of the Environment
Kate Ervine
The global community is confronted with an unprecedented array of overlapping environmental crises, threatening humanity and non-human species, though the impacts remain highly uneven, with nations and communities least responsible for contemporary ecological problems paying the highest cost. With widespread climate disruption projected to intensify in the coming years and decades, this work illustrates the critical need for effective and democratic governance. It unpacks the prevailing relations of power connected to the global political economy of advanced capitalism, dominant debates and disagreement about how environmental crises are understood, and how governments and various actors respond to climate crises based on these understandings and power structures. It pays particular attention to how uneven development and colonialism have shaped inequality and ecological decline, showing that effective and meaningful responses to planetary crises will also need to respond to the deep injustices and inequalities that mark the contemporary GPE.
