This article presents an analytical framework of the influence of ideas over Brazilian contemporary foreign policy formulation, focusing on Brazilian performance at the League of Nations and the United Nations. In both organizations, Brazil has aspired to perform an international leading role, which, as we argue, constitutes an indicator of the recurrence, in the diplomatic discourse, of certain beliefs about what should be Brazilian status, role and belonging in the international arena. Simultaneously, the article argues that such analysis should not only reconstruct the diplomatic discourse but also try to unfold the causal mechanisms that explain the impact of those beliefs in the policymaking process. In this sense, the international academic literature has already developed a series of approaches that might prove useful to the study of Brazilian diplomacy.
Brazilian Foreign Policy; League of Nations; UN; UN Security Council; Foreign Policy Analysis; Cognitive Analysis