Avaliação: Alternative Visions on Global Order: New Perspectives and dialogues for facing the contemporary pandemic crisis – Region in the time of cholera: Brazil’s troubled activism in South America in the Bolsonaro years (2019-2022)

The paper seeks to contribute to the discussion on regionalism and Brazil’s role in regional cooperation in South America with a particular focus on the Bolsonaro years (2019-2022). This period mostly coincided with the Covid-19 pandemic which had a grim toll both in Brazil and in other countries of the region. The main claim is that due to the adoption of a populist foreign policy that redefined the meaning of the neighborhood, Brazil significantly reduced its international activities in the region, weakened the region’s institutional framework by withdrawing or suspending its membership in organizations such as UNASUL and CELAC, and refrained from proposals aimed at cooperating in the fight against the pandemic. These issues need to be addressed by other regional players and the new Brazilian decision-makers in the post-Covid reality.
To conceptualize Brazil’s activism and its consequences for the region, the paper draws from recent literature on populist foreign policy (Chryssogelos 2017; Stengel et al. 2019; Destradi et al. 2021; Wehner and Thies 2021) and proposes a novel theoretical framework to study such policy, building on Social Identity Theory (SIT) (Tajfel and Turner 1986; Larson and Shevchenko 2019). Brazil’s activism is conceptualized as a strategy of social vandalism that undermines the existing regional order without proposing alternatives and leaving a leadership lacuna. The theoretical proposal is illustrated by empirical evidence obtained from qualitative analysis of speeches and articles of President Jair Bolsonaro and his foreign affairs minister Ernesto Araújo, statements published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, press releases on regional activities, and interviews with Brazilian and Latin American diplomats

• South America
• Brazil
• region
• Jair Bolsonaro