Suchergebnisse

The election of President Trump, Brexit, and the amplifying of isolationist voices have signaled the possible emergence of a new era–one of retreat in the Liberal International Order. While this is one way of defining the present moment, it does not capture the full picture, as uncertainty has opened and/or widened new partnerships. In this scenario, MERCOSUL (Southern Common Market) has both sought and been sought by a growing number of countries and international organizations, recently (re)launching free trade negotiations with many partners, including Canada. This paper explores the empirical aspects of MERCOSUL's apparently sudden growth in attractiveness, reflecting external and internal factors, with particular attention to Brazil recent negotiations. The case allows an opportunity to reflect if the world is witnessing indeed an "unravelling" of the multilateralist world order or rather a re-adjustment, whereby increasing diversification is pursued through untraditional and overlooked partnerships. The idea is not to minimize the significant worldwide impacts of the US' inward-looking trade policies and discourse or deny the growth in appeal to isolationism, but to question whether such positions are still exceptions, or if reports on the open trade system's death have only been greatly exaggerated.

This paper engages with debates over the Liberal International Order (LIO) and Latin America by focusing on Brazil. More specifically, it addresses President Jair Bolsonaro's foreign policy. His radical-right populist and religious-infused approach has been characterized by an explicit rejection of practically all elements of the LIO, including multilateralism, multiculturism, and regionalism—historically core features of Brazilian foreign policy. We seek to answer two interrelated questions: (1) what were the political conditions—domestic and international—that allowed for such dramatic foreign policy change? (2) what impact is Brazil's new foreign policy orientation having on the LIO? To address them, we resort to the aspirational constructivist theory, which has allowed us to theorize Brazil's new identity formation. We argue that Bolsonaro has reshaped Brazil's foreign policy as part of his endeavour to create a national self-image based on three pillars: anti-globalism, anti-Communism, and religious nationalism. By doing so, the Bolsonaro administration has transformed Brazil, otherwise an avid supporter of the LIO, into one of the order's most vocal critics. While anti-globalism (and, subsidiarily, anti-Communism) undermines the normative and institutional foundations of the LIO, religious nationalism offers a replacement to the order, based on independent ethno-nationalist communities. If Brazil's radical right populist model spreads across Latin America, it has the potential to hollow out the region's support to the LIO.

In this article, we explore cruelty under populism, focusing on radical right populism. We develop our argument by introducing a two-dimensional model of cruel behavior in politics, in which cruelty is conceptualized as a dependent variable defined in terms of empathy (how the leader addresses those who suffer) and action (how the leader acts to alleviate suffering). This framework provides a nuanced understanding of how cruelty and populism connect, providing an original and cutting-edge contribution to both bodies of work. We use our two-dimensional model of cruel behavior to shed light on the different ways radical right populists (RRP) embrace cruelty as part of their political strategies. We have come to three "ideal" types of RRP cruel behavior: downplaying, blaming, and conspiring. In order to advance our ideas, we rely on the qualitative analysis of Brazil's far-right populist President Jair Bolsonaro and his (in)actions regarding COVID-19, who once asked about the soaring number of dead from COVID-19 simply answered: "So what? What do you want me to do?." Using this case study, we empirically illustrate different ways in which how cruelty can manifest itself in practice and what real-life consequences it can have.