Toward a BRICS Alliance? A View from Brazil

• In Event: Alliance Politics in an Era of Change

Abstract

There is a growing debate about whether the increasing security collaboration among the BRICS countries is challenging U.S. global leadership. To understand whether a BRICS-wide rising power alliance is feasible, it is crucial to examine middle-range powers’ views of such an alliance. This article does so by investigating Brazilian understanding of alliances and its views on forming a rising power alliance. It analyzes 452 academic articles on the country’s foreign relationships published on top local journals and key policy documents between 1990 and 2018. The finding shows that the alliance concept in Brazilian IR thinking has been applied to a wide range of international cooperation, and only 3% of articles in the database use the alliance concept to refer to security cooperation. Comparing with other countries and regions, Brazilian views of its relations with BRICS are more likely to contain discussions on economic and global governance issues. We also develop a statistic tool to predict Brazilian foreign policy preferences based on the observed academic data. We find no evidence showing Brazil has increasingly seen BRICS as more important than other nations for security reasons. While BRICS’ security cooperation is deepening, Brazil’s propensity for either turning the BRICS into an alliance or joining another security alliance of rising powers remains low.

Authors

• Zhen Han, University of British Columbia

• Mihaela Papa, Tufts University