Event Date: March 7, 2018 - 12:00 to 13:30
Location: FSS 5028, 120 University Private
Presented by CIPS and IPEN
One of the preoccupations of Anglo-Saxon scholars over the last decade has been: what does the rise of the BRICS mean for the existing structure of the international system. Are these emerging actors going to tear down the post-World War Two order and try to take over? How will the global governance system change as new powerful voices speak up? Much of the response to these questions has leaned towards the apocryphal, with much talk of hegemonic transition and great power conflict. Looking at the case of Brazil this paper will argue that such assumptions are wrong and that what is actually taking place is a broadening of the existing international system that actually reaffirms and more deeply entrenches its core ideological requisites, not an attack upon it. Working with Robert Cox’s neo-Gramscian approach to hegemony and Susan Strange’s model of structural power this paper will argue that Brazil is not contesting the nature of the international political economy system, but rather is examining how key concepts and terms used to order it are defined. The goal is not to achieve a surfeit of relative power to forcibly take what Brazil wants, but rather to shift the terms of debate so that the developmental priorities of countries like Brazil become central to the discussion of international order, not a hobbyist side-issue. Ultimately, the paper will argue that this reinforces the existing system and will help retrench it for decades to come.
Sean W Burges is Senior Lecturer in International Relations, at the Australian National University, Visiting Scholar at Carleton University, and a Senior Research Fellow with the Washington, DC-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs. He is the author of Brazil in the World: The International Relations of a South American Giant (Manchester, 2017 — winner of LASA’s 2018 Luciano Tomassini Book Award), Brazilian Foreign Policy After the Cold War (Florida, 2009), and over thirty peer-reviewed scholarly papers and dozens of OpEds and analytical pieces.