Kai Michael Kenkel

South America's Emerging Power: Brazil as Peacekeeper

This article assesses the utility of the notion of emerging powers in analysing key characteristics of Brazils past and present policy towards peace operations. After decoupling emerging powers analytically from traditional middle powers, it addresses a series of political and behavioural factors specific to South America. Finally, the analysis identifies those elements derived from Brazils emerging power status and South American identity that are of relevance in shaping the countrys attitudes towards peace operations generally, and more specifically its participation in the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). It reaches the conclusion that Brazil has acted as a model emerging power – in typically South American Fashion.

Brazil and R2P: Does Taking Responsibility Mean Using Force?

This article traces the reaction of the Brazilian government to the emergence of the R2P norm. After an initial period of rejection, followed by a period of absence from UN debates, Brazil has recently engaged cautiously with R2P. The article gives a detailed analysis of the origins of the Latin American system of legal protections that resulted in an interpretation in the region that reduces sovereignty almost exclusively to the inviolability of borders. This interpretation is at the heart of Brazil’s rejection of R2P’s tenets regarding the use of force. It does not stand in the way, however, of its contributing decisively to the other two pillars identified in the Secretary General’s Implementation Report. The paper identifies two main factors that motivated the gradual opening of the Brazilian foreign policy establishment to R2P, one external and one internal. Externally, the strong endorsement of R2P in the World Summit Outcome Document did much to facilitate Brazil’s rapprochement with the concept. Concomitantly, Brazil’s rise as an emerging power has increasingly created tensions between regional traditions and still-dominant Northern views of the responsibilities that accompany Brazil’s global aspirations. Brazil is in the process of developing an approach to peace operations and intervention that defines responsibility separately from the use of force, obviating the effects of this perceived tension. As a result, Brazil has become an important peacekeeping troop contributor and is no longer a vocal detractor of R2P. It has begun adapting the non-military elements of the principle to its policy goals and looks set to be an active and important participant in the concept’s further implementation.

Brazil’s Peacekeeping and Peacebuilding Policies in Africa

This article analyses the peacekeeping efforts of Brazil, an emerging power for which peacebuilding is a key element of its international presence, and which has been strongly critical of the dominant liberal paradigm. Peacebuilding is key to Brazil’s approach, as the country by tradition participates (with the contested exception of MINUSTAH) only in Chapter VI peace operations, abjuring the robust use of force. An activity such as peacebuilding which marries development and security concerns is an ideal setting for Brazil’s foreign policy aims; in order to gain a seat in global decisionmaking bodies, in the absence of hard power and the will to use it Brazil turns to peacebuilding to transform its domestic development successes into action in the security arena. The South American giant has also placed significant emphasis on Africa in part as a means to the end of underscoring – as a voice for the global South – its claim to greater international influence. This article will examine the motivations that underpin Brazil’s commitment to peacebuilding operations, as well as its commitment to that practice in Africa, which has taken place largely on a bilateral basis.

Peace and the Emerging Countries: India, Brazil, South Africa

Over the course of the last decade, countries commonly designated as ‘emerging powers’ have taken on an increasing role, not only in contributing materially to international efforts at keeping, building and enforcing peace, but — more primordially — in giving conceptual contours to what vision of peace underpins these efforts. The IBSA countries — India, Brazil and South Africa — combine political and material factors (such as democracy, participation in peace operations and an openly revisionist diplomatic agenda) to provide the most cogent example of rising powers’ behaviour in this area. As each state is grounded in its own national and regional traditions, the present analysis focuses on those common factors in their approach to peace that derive from their condition as emerging powers. When placed in this context, therefore, their interaction with the concept of peace will here be primarily viewed through the lens of their relative position in the international system.

Rising powers and intervention: contested norms and shifts in global order

The papers in this special section are the results of two workshops that were held in 2014, both organized by the editors of this special section. The first workshop was financed by a Venture Research Grant from the International Studies Association and held at that organization’s Annual Convention in Toronto in March 2014. The second was held in Rio de Janeiro in September of that year, under the auspices of the Institute of International Relations of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (IRI/PUC-Rio). Both workshops were concerned with mapping out in both conceptual and empirical terms how a new generation of emerging powers were attempting to reshape the international order. Much has changed over the last two years since those workshops took place. While there were storm clouds on the horizon even back then, at the time of writing virtually all the emerging powers find themselves mired in significant difficulties that will weigh down and perhaps in some cases even snap their upwards ascent. Only a few years back the emerging powers whose core were the so-called BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) were still assertive and self-confident, openly seeking greater prestige and international status as they sought to boost themselves from the regional cockpit of power politics into the global arena. In 2009, one year into the global financial crisis, Brazilian president Luiz Ignacio ‘Lula’ da Silva boasted that Brazil would only feel the crash as an uma marolinha—a ripple, and Brazilian fiscal policy would be able to stave off economic damage (Rathbone 2013). Today the situation is grim. Brazil’s entire political elite is imploding, as a result of a metastasizing corruption scandal. Lula’s successor as president, Dilma Rousseff, is in a desperate struggle for political survival, while the Brazilian economy has seen among the sharpest falls in the world over the last two years (Anderson 2016). Russia remains locked in an authoritarian freeze that grows colder and harder. The Russian economy is staggering under the impact of a collapsing oil price and Western sanctions imposed as punishment for Russia’s intervention in Ukraine’s civil war since 2014. India’s current government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi is rapidly losing political momentum after losing a major election in Bihar, one of India’s most populous states, in November

Dedication to Dr Pablo Gabriel Dreyfus and Ana Carolina Rodrigues

The guest editor of this issue wishes to dedicate it to the memory of Dr Pablo Gabriel Dreyfus and his wife, Ana Carolina Rodrigues, who perished in the crash of Air France flight 447 on 1 June 2009. Dreyfus, a native of Argentina, held degrees from the University of Buenos Aires and the Graduate Institute of International Studies at the University of Geneva. He completed his doctorate at the latter with the prize-winning dissertation ‘Border Spillover: Drug Trafficking and National Security in South America’, which remains a key reference on the subject. After a time as an adviser on security matters to the Presidency of the Republic in Argentina, he established himself as the premier Latin American authority on small arms trafficking at the Rio de Janeiro NGO Viva Rio. Dreyfus possessed a distinctive talent for bringing his uncommon analytical acuity to bear in the practical world of public policy. He assisted government policymakers in programmes dealing with small arms and urban violence in Angola, Mozambique, Haiti and seven South American countries. Additionally, he contributed decisively to small arms control initiatives under the auspices of the UN and the Organization of American States, as well as the International Action Network on Small Arms. Dreyfus was affiliated with numerous research institutes in Europe and Latin America, including the influential Geneva-based Small Arms Survey. His colleagues estimate that his crucial contributions to several small arms-related policy initiatives in Brazil have saved the lives of at least 6,000 people. Ana Carolina Rodrigues, from Rio de Janeiro, was a promising researcher in her own right, having begun a doctorate at Rio’s prestigious Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro. She was extensively involved in groundbreaking policy-oriented research directed at the reduction of violence against youth in the city’s favelas, and shared her husband’s unfettered dedication to using research to better the lives of the communities of which they were a part. Pablo’s rare and sonorous renditions of tangos from his beloved Buenos Aires in the midst of Rio de Janeiro’s nightlife, as well as his and Ana Carolina’s life together, were an eloquent manifestation of the cooperation among South Americans that is one of the themes of this volume.