By Dr. Ana Margheritis, Reader in International Relations at University of Southampton (Twitter, Academia.edu). You can find more posts by Ana here.

This semester, the Faculty of Social, Human and Mathematical Sciences awarded Dr. Ana Margheritis a Strategic Research Development Fund Award to support her project on Brazil’s Foreign Policy. As a result, this week she is organizing and chairing a workshop at King’s College London. The event gathers distinguished specialists from the UK, Portugal, Germany, and Brazil, and aims at consolidating the academic collaboration of the group through publications and further research.

Members of the group have been collaborating informally for over a year. They last met at the international conference of the Latin American Studies Association, where Dr. Margheritis organised and chaired a very successful panel on the subject. Their combined expertise will now be directed towards the following issues which have become even more relevant lately in the light of the ongoing economic downturn and politico-institutional crisis in Brazil:

1. What are the main issues, actors, and dynamics of Brazil’s foreign policy agenda today?
2. What factors explain the setbacks in Brazil’s determination to play a prominent global role?
3. What policy and theoretical implications do recent changes pose to the country’s strategies and our analytical frameworks?

As Brazil has attempted to rise in global affairs, its foreign policy agenda and policymaking process has become more diversified and complex, thus questioning traditional analytical assumptions. Moreover, contradicting high expectations at home and abroad, modest economic growth, political crises, and social unrest have recently cast doubts on such international projection and, more broadly, on Brazil’s presumed leadership capacity. The current presidential impeachment process further exacerbates political uncertainty and questions these ambitions.

The research team’s main goal is to understand to what extent, and how, these issues and performance record require an adaptation of policymaking mechanisms and strategies and, consequently, of traditional analytical frameworks.