Abstract
Given Brazil’s regional prevalence, its low, late and soft investment in regional security governance appears puzzling. We approach the puzzle through an analysis of contextual features, institutional overlap and policy networks, especially regarding nuclear energy and the environment. Our findings show that Brazil’s behavior is explained by a combination of low regional risks, scarce domestic resources, a legalistic regional culture of dispute settlement, and transgovernmental networks that substitute for formal interstate cooperation and deep regional institutions.
Brazilian foreign policy; Latin American regionalism; Regional Security Governance; Regional Powers; Policy Networks
Source: own elaboration from data of SIPRI 2013.
Source: own elaboration from data of SIPRI 2013.
Source: www.tradingeconomics.com – Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE)
Note: Network plot using multidimensional scaling with probabilities drawn from the affiliation matrix. The figure was plotted using the SNA package in R 2.6, with a matrix of probabilities and distances estimated via multidimensional scaling (MDS). The MDS option takes as input a matrix of similarities and finds a “set of points in k-dimensional space such that the Euclidean distances among these points corresponds as closely as possible to the input proximities” (Borgatti, Everett and Freeman 2002).