Trajetórias que se encontram: análise comparativa da inserção do Brasil e da África do Sul em seus entornos regionais (1998-2018)

• Autor(a) principal: Costa, Murilo Gomes da
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: [e-mail]
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UERJ
• Texto Completo: http://www.bdtd.uerj.br/handle/1/18248
• topic: Brazil; South Africa; Regional surrounding; Grand strategy; Regional powers; Brasil; África do Sul; Entorno regional; Grande estratégia; Potências regionais; CIENCIAS HUMANAS::CIENCIA POLITICA

The general objective of this is to analyse the insertion trajectories of two non-nuclear regional powers from the South - Brazil and South Africa - in their respective regional surroundings, based on an interlocution between the literature on regional powers and the idea of region-building. For this purpose, a model of comparative analysis was employed which involves the concepts of regional surrounding - in three dimensions, the symbolic, the political and the geographic location - and that of grand strategy, associating these concepts with the debate on regional powers. The hypothesis that guides this research is that the formulation and implementation of a Grand Strategy - understood as a proxy towards the idea of graduation ambition in the international system - influences and generates consequences for the relational dimension of the Southern Regional Powers with their regional surroundings. In other words, the development and the implementation of a Grand Strategy is understood as evidence of a graduation process. However, the formulation of a Grand Strategy involves bringing together conditions - the articulation of foreign policy and defence policy, material capabilities, political will, and the capacity of mobilization and cohesion of strategic elites - which will vary and be influenced by critical domestic and external conjunctures experienced by each country studied throughout its trajectory. The empirical operationalization of this model, in turn, is based on the process tracing method, since we understand that in order to understand the development of a grand strategy within the time frame of the thesis, it is necessary to bear in mind the existence of a dependence of the trajectory on previous moments. It is through the historical analysis of their trajectories - divided into moments - that we can understand and demonstrate how the conditions for the development of a grand strategy were updated and how the grand strategy can be defined in each of the cases. Given that the cases selected for the comparative analysis of the thesis were Brazil and South Africa, we adopted a temporal cut-off that emphasized the Lula (2003-2010) and Dilma (2011-2016) governments in Brazil, and Mbeki (1999-2008) and Zuma (2009-2017) in South Africa. Therefore, in the thesis a combination of the "within-case" analysis method was carried out, that is, a detailed study of both the Brazilian trajectory and the South African trajectory, as well as in the comparison between these two cases (cross-cases analysis), highlighting the similarities and differences, as well as the advances and setbacks in the formulation and the implementation of the Brazilian and the South African Grand Strategy, seeking to derive arguments from the comparative analysis that can validate the dissertation hypothesis.