Brazil’s Foreign Policy and Security under Lula and Bolsonaro: Hierarchy, Racialization, and Diplomacy

Abstract

This article outlines how Brazil’s state actors carry out racialized diplomatic performances, which coexist alongside the oppression of Black, Indigenous, and mixed-race Brazilians, and at times even affect their physical security. Moreover, these racialized diplomatic performances are a continuous feature of Brazilian foreign policy across the two presidencies compared here, but with important differences due to their divergent ideologies and policy goals. During the Lula (2003–10) administration, racialized enactments of national identity furthered Brazil’s commercial interests across the Global South while having a mixed impact on marginalized domestic populations. Invocations of Brazil’s position within global hierarchies, under Lula, allowed its Global South activism to advance alongside the violence Brazil’s security forces perpetrated during the MINUSTAH mission in Haiti and in Brazil’s favelas. Meanwhile, for the Bolsonaro (2019–22) administration, racialized appeals functioned as a method for minimizing and disavowing the political violence that occurred during his term. Bolsonaro employed Brazil’s hybrid national identity to downplay concerns over deforestation in the Amazon as external “neocolonialism” while centering the role of Christianity in his foreign policy. This article draws upon trade/commercial figures, public speeches, data from official visits, and other sources to illustrate these claims regarding hierarchy, racialization, and diplomacy.

Keywords:

• Brazil
• hierarchy
• racialization
• security
• Lula
• Bolsonaro
• diplomacy

International relations (IR) scholars are increasingly drawing attention to the role of race and racism within global hierarchies and sociopolitical orders. Specifically, race and racism function to rank states through pseudoscientific or Darwinian “evolutionary” models, thereby partially dictating their agency within world politics.¹ For example, Steven Ward argues a series of race-based insults during the early twentieth century led Japanese elites to develop feelings of anxiety toward what they perceived as a Western-led hierarchical order that would never improve Japan’s international standing.² Ayşe Zarakol, in turn, argues the marginalized status of Turkey and Japan vis-à-vis the West has affected each state’s sense of self, leading to the former being unable to fully apologize for the Armenian genocide, and the latter perpetrating human rights violations during World War II.³ Moreover, Ji-Young Lee explains how diplomatic routines and rituals have allowed Korea to survive for thousands of years, despite its close proximity to a much larger and imperialistic China.⁴ However, Japan, Turkey, Korea, and China are each usually framed within global politics as racially homogenous states, or as those whose racial composition is not central to their national or international identity.⁵

Scholars have also written about the position African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American states occupy within world politics, whereby histories of colonial oppression and legacies of racial hybridity and miscegenation (particularly for Latin America) influence their current approach to diplomatic engagement with the Global North. Oftentimes these theoretical conversations are positioned at the state level, without addressing how specific Latin American and Global South leaders perform contested national and racial identities, and subsequently employ them to further their political objectives. This article uses the contrasting case studies of Brazilian foreign policy during the presidential administrations of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–10)⁶ and Jair Bolsonaro (2019–22) to outline the impact of racially heterogenous or hybrid identities on hierarchy and diplomacy.

The central claims proceed in three steps. First, I detail how Brazilian state actors and diplomats can perform both White/Western/prosystemic and hybrid/Southern/postcolonial racial identities, even though these do not necessarily align with their personal identities. Most importantly, their audience and the political objective at hand inform the choice of which racialized identity to perform. Second, in dialogue with critical scholars, I contend these alternating and myriad racialized diplomatic performances of “self” and “other” coexist alongside the continued oppression and marginalization of Black, Indigenous, and mixed-race Brazilians, and at times even affect their physical security. And third, racialized diplomatic performances are a continuous feature of Brazilian foreign policy across the two presidential administrations examined here, but with important differences due to their divergent ideologies and policy goal intentions. For Lula, racialized diplomatic performances served to further Brazil’s commercial and power interests, but they had a mixed impact on the lives of Black, Indigenous, and mixed-race Brazilians. Meanwhile, for Bolsonaro, racialized diplomatic performances served as a convenient method for minimizing and disavowing the widespread internal political violence that occurred during his administration.

During the Lula administration, scholarly, media, and social attention focused on Brazil’s role in advancing the interests of Global South states within: the United Nations (UN) Security Council; the BRICS and IBSA groups, and other multilateral fora; global trade and commerce debates; and security issue areas, such as Iranian nuclear nonproliferation negotiations. Lula’s foreign affairs minister, Celso Amorim, was even called “the world’s best foreign affairs minister”⁷ by one Foreign Affairs commentator due to Brazil’s abounding presence in global matters. I argue that invocations of Brazil’s racialized position within the global hierarchy allowed its Global South activism under Lula to advance simultaneously with the violence Brazil’s security forces perpetrated during the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) from 2004 to 2017, and across Brazil’s favelas.

Conversely, during the Bolsonaro administration, overtly and decidedly racist thinking was present at the level of the state actor, considering Bolsonaro’s well-documented history of making racially insensitive comments in public. The Bolsonaro administration pursued closer relationships with other Global North actors racially coded as “White,” such as Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán, while backing away from multilateral efforts with Global South actors. Bolsonaro’s attraction to White, male, Global North leaders, coupled with his aversion toward South-South relations, exemplifies the persistent power of global racialized hierarchies in partially determining status and priorities within the global political order. Concomitantly, Itamaraty (as Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is commonly called) under Bolsonaro employed Brazil’s racially hybrid national identity, along with the nation’s position within the global hierarchy, to downplay concerns over heightened deforestation in the Amazon as external “neocolonialism”—while centering Christianity’s role in Brazilian foreign policy.

I begin this comparative case study between the Lula and Bolsonaro administrations by first grounding this article within the IR theoretical literature on hierarchy to then map out the oftentimes hidden role of racialization throughout various policy moments of the two presidencies. Methodologically, I employ a discourse analysis⁸ technique to parse out how racialization is instantiated within contemporary Brazilian foreign policy. To that end, I examined the official transcriptions of speeches⁹ delivered abroad by both presidents with an eye toward the wording and appeals to shared (or divergent) identities employed when speaking to Global North or South audiences. Then, I analyzed the destination and timing of each administration’s diplomatic visits and their intended objectives, before studying trends in international trade figures and partnerships under each president. In the coming sections I draw upon these sources, along with media accounts and other official government publications, as secondary data points to support and illustrate my claims. This article follows critical security studies’ aim of employing bricolage, or all available sources, to turn methodology “into a way of experimenting with an assemblage of concepts, methods, and empirical objects.”¹⁰ I conclude by reflecting on the applicability of this theoretical framework to other cases within security studies, and how this analysis expands our understanding of the persistent impact of hierarchy and racialization on global diplomacy and IR.

Hierarchy and Racialization in (and Beyond) Brazil

Over the past few decades, IR scholars have challenged the traditional centrality of anarchy and interstate relations within the field, calling attention to the significance of hierarchy and globalized relations across, between, and within states for structuring world politics.¹¹ Janice Bially Mattern and Zarakol describe three different logics for defining “hierarchy” in IR: trade-offs, positionality, and productivity.¹² The logic of trade-offs is represented, for instance, in David A. Lake’s work, where hierarchy is conceptualized as actors acquiescing to particular political orders due to the possible benefits of inclusion, akin to a “social contract theory” model of hierarchy.¹³ Positionality is seen instead as manifesting in hierarchical systems where status, stigma, and/or norm socialization function to “place” states within certain identities that have long-term political consequences, such as the socialization of peripheral states within the European Union (EU).¹⁴ The third logic, productivity, brackets the actor agency included in the previous two understandings of hierarchy and zeros in on how the institutionalization and routinization of hierarchies render “their practical, or performative ontology … hierarchies are cultures-in-action that are materialized through bodily activity and discursive regimes.”¹⁵

Meanwhile, other scholars have questioned the conventional IR story of a 1648–1970s period of international anarchy as factually inaccurate and instead posit that successive systems of imperial hierarchy have always coincided with internationalized anarchy.¹⁶ Imperial hierarchies have also historically informed the creation of international orders and placed limits on notions of “sovereignty,” dictating both within Europe and beyond “who has the right to intervene against whom.”¹⁷ The constitution of global hierarchies and imperial systems then can be understood as a relational phenomenon¹⁸ whereby “patterns of governance relations assemble to create overlapping and nesting political formations.”¹⁹ However, I would emphasize that “the opposite of hierarchy is equality; the opposite of anarchy is governance,”²⁰ meaning social systems of oppression (such as race) can play a preeminent (even if obfuscated) role within said global political orders and hierarchies. As an example of this nuance, the divergent wording, enforcement mechanisms, and stipulations within British-led treaty efforts to abolish the slave trade have been cited as reflecting Britain’s hierarchical view of the world: Portugal and the United States were seen as somewhat equal “civilized” states, whereas Muslim leaders and African tribes were seen as inferior and “barbarian.”²¹

One could argue any discussion of hierarchy and diplomacy within global politics must acknowledge the historic and ongoing role of imperialism, colonialism, and settler colonialism in producing structures that are thoroughly racialized at their cores. In other words, we must challenge the “norm against noticing,”²² which has permeated the field of IR since its inception regarding the overarching effect of racialization on diplomacy, war, and security-seeking behaviors. I employ here Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s definition of a racialized social system as: “societies in which economic, political, social, and ideological levels are partially structured by the placement of actors in racial categories or races,”²³ thereby producing racism that not only psychologically manifests within individuals, but also traverses all structures, ranging from welfare politics, to public health, to diplomatic protocols, to security initiatives.

Building on Bonilla-Silva’s conceptualization, Alexander D. Barder calls attention to the global racial imaginary of IR, or the work done by globalized ideologies to sustain violence against Black and Brown bodies and dialectics of inferior/superior, which take on the appearance of “material force” and dictate marginalized groups’ social reality around the world.²⁴ In summary, critical IR has increasingly positioned hierarchy over anarchy as better suited for making sense of the complex set of engagements that comprise global politics. Additionally, various scholars have highlighted how global hierarchies are inherently racialized—but their racialization is not fixed or flowing exclusively downward from North to South—rather, it is subject to local negotiations and struggles over power, as discussed below.

White Skin, Which Identity Performance?

In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon argues the process of colonization inculcates an “inferiority complex” in the colonized: “The feeling of inferiority of the colonized is the correlative to the European’s feeling of superiority … It is the racist who creates his inferior.”²⁵ Said differently, colonial subjugation engenders a deleterious psychological effect in colonized peoples of “inadequacy” that sets the parameters of their subsequent relations with Global North actors. Formal juridical “independence” is incapable of transforming the colonial ideational/structural system because colonial structures are geared toward ingraining the inferiority complex and using it as the recursive logic that justifies imperial domination. Fanon then critiques the Hegelian master/slave dialectic by bringing the role of race into the relationship and suggesting recognition is incapable of liberating postcolonial subjects:

For Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work … The Negro wants to be like the master. Therefore he is less independent than the Hegelian slave.²⁶

By arguing “for Hegel there is reciprocity,” yet within postcolonial arrangements none exists, Fanon contends the slave is incapable of leaving the master/slave dialectic because the master holds excessive power over their object reality and subjectivity formation.²⁷ Postcolonial states then face a twofold problem of overcoming the inferiority complex and assuming the rights and responsibilities of recognition. The result is that “the Negro wants to be like the master,” meaning postcolonial societies are organized to reproduce ex-colonial masters’ practices, rendering such societies more vulnerable to exploitation as they emulate the governing techniques of the metropolis.²⁸

Lélia Gonzalez contends the inferiority complex is transferred from colonial to postcolonial practices as Global South subjects internalize their alienation and subordination as “liberating,” misapprehending their resultant attraction toward the North/colonizer as agency and subjectivity formation.²⁹ Or, as Aníbal Quijano posits, the “coloniality of power” across Latin America functions to transform Eurocentrism into the expected cultural attraction to the point where “relations of domination came to be considered as ‘natural.’”³⁰ In effect, challenging Global North states and colonial regimes is not sufficient for undoing system-wide coloniality due to its embeddedness within both material and ideational factors—hence the difficult experiences of postcolonial states in navigating and dealing with sovereignty, (mis)recognition, and “flattened and idealized” statehood projects.³¹

Brazilian society then can be conceptualized as a particular spatialization of racialized postcolonial discourses and structures that simultaneously operates within a grander global racial imaginary.³² Within Brazil, fluid racial categories (such as branco, indígena, and negro), along with myriad other unfixed identities (such as alemão, italiano, japonês, mestiço, mulato, pardo, quilombola, sírio-libanês, etc.),³³ together form a social mosaic where racism is easily occluded. Nevertheless, racism is present and geared toward state-sponsored racial violence and the exclusion of Black, Brown, and Indigenous subjects. Racism in Brazil has historically been obscured by the myth of “racial democracy,” first advanced by Gilberto Freyre³⁴ in the 1930s to argue Portuguese colonization and plantation economies were more “benign” than those instituted by other European powers because they led to more racial miscegenation, which allegedly resulted in reduced social tensions postemancipation. The lack of juridical segregation or apartheid in Brazil is then erroneously interpreted as a result of “more humane” master–slave relations during colonization, rather than state-building that enforced racial hierarchies through more hidden methods.

A survey study of 208 Itamaraty³⁵ career diplomats, for instance, found that only 1 identified as Black (0.48%), 1 as Asian (0.48%), 39 as mixed race (18.75%), and the other 167 (80.29%) as White.³⁶ Another study, employing archival methods, similarly argues that, historically, only 10 out of 1,000 diplomats were Black at Itamaraty.³⁷ These results point toward widespread racial inequality within Brazil’s main foreign policy body, and its security community at large, considering about 56% of Brazilians identify as either Black or mixed race,³⁸ yet the state is almost exclusively represented by White-identifying diplomats. Moreover, affirmative action quotas have been in effect for Brazilian federal government positions since 2001³⁹ but have resulted in little change within the diplomatic corps due to its highly specialized entry exam that typically demands years of nonremunerated studying.

Itamaraty’s official data about the gender identity of its employees reveals that as of 2016 about 77.7% identified as male and 22.3% as female.⁴⁰ Thus, the ministry has been institutionalized as a predominantly White, elite, male space, and has taken limited action to diversify its ranks.⁴¹ These figures illustrate how race, class, and gender are articulated⁴² vis-à-vis each other and can magnify each other’s respective deleterious force, affecting the structure of Brazil’s foreign policy community. Articulated social structures of oppression also reflect the grander societal hierarchies in which they are embedded, or what some scholars term “racial capitalism,” meaning capitalist development has historically “pursued essentially racial directions,”⁴³ in conjuncture with ideologies to support its reproduction and continuity.

Critical scholars have attempted to elucidate these connections within Latin America’s societal hierarchies and its approach to external relations, in particular Marxist/dependency theory and feminist scholars.⁴⁴ Felipe Antunes de Oliveira, for instance, argues Brazil and Latin America’s current political crises leading to electoral openings for the far right (as represented by Bolsonaro) can be interpreted as “an outcome of never resolved deep social contradictions that emerge from the super-exploitation of labour and the consequent unequal exchange vis-à-vis central capitalist countries,” combined with the colonized bourgeoisie’s inability to revolutionize democratic politics.⁴⁵ Dependency theory has also been particularly adept at describing the economic exploitation of Latin America’s land and resources, as well as the incongruity between the internally dominant, while externally dominated, character of the region’s elite classes.⁴⁶ Rita Segato argues coloniality and patriarchal oppression overlap as women, Indigenous, and Afro-descended populations are allegedly provided with laws and policies by the Brazilian state to protect them, but in actuality the state has already destroyed (or monopolized) the institutions and community bonds that could truly shield them from harm.⁴⁷

My objective in the following sections is to build upon these contributions and frameworks to unpack and illustrate how Brazilian state actors’ racialized diplomatic performances interact with local and global hierarchies, affect security for marginalized groups, and influence foreign policy outcomes. For Lula, racialized diplomatic performances permitted Brazil’s internationalized persona of altruistic Global South diplomat to function next to the militarized policing of Haiti, as well as of Brazil’s favelas, without raising too many eyebrows or calling into question domestic racial hierarchies. Conversely, racialized diplomatic performances gave Bolsonaro a strategy and route for attempting to dodge global criticism, as domestic racial hierarchies were indeed called into question with respect to deforestation, political violence, and far-right activism, by labeling international critics as neocolonial actors and positioning himself as a defender of Christianity. Highlighting and making sense of Brazil’s nuanced, alternating racialized diplomatic performances is an important and necessary theoretical exercise as the influential Latin American state continues to face the world stage and search for its spotlight while contending with legacies of domestic inequality.

Lula in Africa and Haiti

Lula’s election in 2003 marked the first time a leftist was elected president in Brazil since the 1964 coup d’état that ushered in twenty years of military rule, followed by a gradual return to democracy in the 1980s. Consequently, multiple observers placed high hopes in the potential for his foreign policy program to challenge preexisting global hierarchies. In office, Lula drew upon Brazil’s postcolonial identity to agitate certain external and internal hierarchies,⁴⁸ yet there remained a certain degree of continuity and conformity in how his actions played out across other Global South states and for domestic marginalized groups. Said differently, there is a disconnect between the closer and capital-based partnerships Lula pursued with African and Middle Eastern states based on a shared postcolonial identity, and Brazil’s simultaneous violent participation in MINUSTAH and domestic policing practices. Overall, Lula’s expansive foreign policy initiatives, such as participating in the BRICS and IBSA groups, brokering nuclear disarmament talks between the United States and Iran, etc., have led to a voluminous scholarship,⁴⁹ but the role of racialization remains the missing link for understanding these initiatives and their influences on hierarchy and security.

During his two terms in office, Lula led fourteen diplomatic trips to the Middle East, including Israel, Palestine, and Iran, and trade with the region grew from $5.5 billion in 2003 to about $20 billion in 2010.⁵⁰ Lula also completed 12 trips to Africa, which included visits to 23 different states, and trade figures grew from $5 billion in 2003 to $26 billion in 2010.⁵¹ Lula’s “bold and activist” foreign policy,⁵² spearheaded by Amorim, established new consumer markets abroad for Brazilian foodstuffs and semi-industrialized products. Although these moves appear “positive” on the surface, considering their impact on Brazil’s economy and international standing, they stemmed from an unproblematic acceptance of neoliberalism⁵³ that invoked a shared racialized positioning within global hierarchies to legitimize its objectives.

On his first trip to Africa in São Tomé and Príncipe, Lula said:

I want to tell all of you about the joy of being in this brother country, São Tomé and Príncipe, inaugurating the first Embassy of my government, in these 10 months … For many years Brazil has had its back to Africa. And we think it is time to make up for lost time … Brazil has an ethical obligation, a political obligation and a moral obligation. Brazil can help São Tomé and Príncipe with many things. We will be able to contribute a lot in the area of agriculture, in the scientific and technological area, in the health area … If it turns out that the possibility of oil that is imagined in the waters of São Tomé and Príncipe is true, it is possible to say that, in a few years’ time, this small country could become one of the countries with the highest per capita income in the world.⁵⁴

Lula’s statement above employs Brazil’s partially connected racial identity to Africa, via slavery, to discursively establish a “natural” brotherhood with modern African states. This discursive move attempts to foster a friendly and appealing racialized performance for African leaders of “sameness” and “proximity” that highlights Brazil’s blackness while momentarily bracketing its whiteness. Lula’s speech act is nevertheless troubling because both he and Amorim, as well as most of Lula’s advisors, ambassadors, and ministers, were White Brazilians,⁵⁵ and the statement is being made in the context of pursuing export markets, commercial relations, and resources for Brazil’s White bourgeois elites. Put differently, despite the president’s rightful acknowledgment that Brazil has historically turned its back on Africa and focused on relations with other regions, his cordiality attempts to occlude racial capitalism—and the possibility of neocolonial extractivism in modern Africa—behind a friendly veneer of South-South cooperation and mutual development. The financial benefits of these racialized performances of blackness were not trivial, however, as Brazil’s trade with states outside the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development rose during the Lula years from 39% to 57% of all exports.⁵⁶ Or, as Armando Boito Jr. and Tatiana Berringer explain, under Lula and the Workers’ Party, Brazil’s marginalized and working classes began to participate in the production of foreign policy, but without challenging or breaking with the overarching neoliberal economic ideology in place both domestically and internationally.⁵⁷

Tellingly, right after Brazil’s “ethical” and “moral” obligation to assist African states’ development, reminiscent of the White man’s burden, Lula remarks Brazil is also available to help with petroleum exploration, thus creating a contradictory unity between decolonial and neoliberal ideologies. Lula’s social positioning as a leader elected with widespread support from Afro-Brazilian voters allowed him in this moment to subconsciously accept the “racial democracy” myth and speak on behalf of the nation’s Black consciousness and legacy, while furthering the export agenda of Brazil’s capital interests. Another example of this move came during 2009, when Lula stated about the global financial crisis: “It is not the Indigenous or Black people who should pay the bill (for the crisis), but those responsible for the crisis, who are the blue-eyed bankers.”⁵⁸ This logic temporarily positions whiteness, guilt, and capitalist greed as external to Brazil’s body politic and sense of “self,” while emphasizing the Black and Indigenous aspects of Brazil’s identity, neglecting to acknowledge Brazilian bankers’ and commercial elites’ positionality within both domestic and global hierarchies of power.

Previous scholars have pointed to Lula’s relations with Africa, and other Global South regions, as an improvement on the prior lack of engagement with these regions by discussing how Brazil provided considerable development assistance and aid.⁵⁹ I do not disagree with these claims, as these initiatives were certainly part of Lula’s efforts to challenge preexisting global hierarchies, and many of these projects achieved their desired policy intentions. Moreover, in various other issue areas, the Lula administration was better able to consistently challenge global hierarchies, such as intellectual property disputes at the World Trade Organization, his measured response to the nationalization of Petrobras’s oil and natural gas assets by neighboring Bolivia, diplomatic support for the Palestinian cause, etc. As an additional caveat, commercial export growth with African and Middle Eastern states benefitted Black and mixed-race Brazilians, as well as local consumers in these regions.

Instead, my discussion here seeks to recenter the discursively predetermined role “Africa” holds within the global racial imaginary of IR vis-à-vis the constitution of race and global relations of power, and how Brazil’s legacy of slavery and racial hybridity allowed a non-Black Brazilian head of state to perform an identity of blackness/hybridity at least partially for commercial gain. Or, as Stacie E. Goddard and Daniel H. Nexon explain, “Structures have form, that is to say, they differ in how they arrange and position actors in the international system,”⁶⁰ and this in turn affects how state actors approach various global regions and the identity they choose to perform (or not) while engaging with them diplomatically. For instance, Lula remarked three days later in Mozambique:

This relationship that Brazil intends to maintain with African countries is not a relationship of an imperialist country with a vocation of hegemony. We are already tired, we have already been colonized, we have already freed ourselves from hegemonism. We now want partnership, we want camaraderie, we want to work together to build an equitable international policy, for multilateral and democratic bodies so that we have equal opportunities.⁶¹

It is difficult to entirely accept this “new” relationship at face value as one inherently opposed to imperialism and hegemony when it is tied to searching for oil deposits and expanding sales. Lula’s words advance the erroneous logic that because a state has been colonized it is naturally free of colonizer impulses. As presented earlier, colonization instills an inferiority complex within the colonized that warps their psychological understanding of “self” and “other” to the point of viewing oppression as liberating. Lula’s speech acts exemplify how a fragmented Brazilian postcolonial subject comes to terms with its racial anxiety by presenting the anxiety on the world stage as an unproblematic acceptance of blackness to masquerade persistent domestic racialized hierarchies and encompass political violence as legitimate. I describe this in the next section.

Brazil’s Intervention in Haiti and Domestic Policing

Despite Lula’s anti/counterhegemonic narrative described above, Brazilian foreign policy under his watch still aimed toward exercising global leadership and “rising” in the global political ranks. Lula’s ambitious desire for an increased profile on the world stage created tensions as new and old claims to regional primacy and attempts to broker or participate in issue areas between Global North and South actors ran into the enduring legacies and power of global racial hierarchies. For MINUSTAH, Brasilia provided over 2,000 troops over the course of the UN-led mission in Haiti, making it the mission’s largest contributor,⁶² and the mission was commanded almost exclusively by Brazilian generals, such as Augusto Heleno, Carlos dos Santos Cruz, and Edson Leal Pujol.⁶³ The racialized violence of Brazilian military personnel against Black Haitian bodies was subsequently largely bracketed by invoking Brazil’s shared blackness and peripheral world status,⁶⁴ without acknowledging its higher position within the global racialized hierarchy, or at least that of its White elites.

Haiti holds a specific psychological role in Western history as a space of Black insurrection that attempted to upend the global racial order by challenging the Hegelian master/slave dialectic on terms that were unacceptable to Europe.⁶⁵ Military participation in Haiti, then, is a hypervisible, via TV and other media coverage, way to send a subconscious message of power and control, effectively suppressing the “spectre of Haiti”⁶⁶ that haunts Brazil’s postcolonial subjectivity. Officially, MINUSTAH was an international humanitarian mission to combat urban gangs, crime, and civil unrest in Haiti. Effectively, MINUSTAH served also as a training program for political violence, considering Brazilian and other soldiers were accused of human rights abuses, extrajudicial killings, sexual assaults, shooting at civilians from helicopters, and other heinous acts.⁶⁷ This exemplifies what Paul Amar terms the emerging “human-security state,” which marks specific subjects for surveillance and militarized control via sexualized, gendered, and racialized securitization processes that are developed within “governance laboratories in the Global South.”⁶⁸

Furthermore, Brazil’s military engagement in Haiti focused on urban hilly areas, such as the Cité Soleil slum in Port-au-Prince, where it was responsible for combating gang-related crimes. This context provided an ideal topography for the testing and perfecting of anti-insurgency and militarized urban policing tactics, which could then be transposed back onto Brazilian favelas in Rio de Janeiro and elsewhere.⁶⁹ Concurrently, the United States spent $8,905,893 on numerous training programs for Brazilian military personnel and police officers over the course of Lula’s presidency.⁷⁰ A total of 3,042 Brazilian nationals participated directly in US-sponsored military training programs, with a steady increase in the number of police officer participants (especially from Rio de Janeiro) during Lula’s and subsequent administrations. Considering these figures, MINUSTAH can be partially interpreted as providing the discursive cover for Brazil to frame itself as a regional leader or hegemon concerned with “bringing peace to Port-au-Prince shantytowns,”⁷¹ while acquiring and refining policing tactics that could be employed on domestic civilian populations to uphold spatial practices of racism.

In preparation for the 2014 World Cup, 2016 Summer Olympics, and 2016 municipal elections, federal military “interventions” and the deployment of “Pacifying Police Units” (UPPs) across favelas in Rio de Janeiro⁷² became a quotidian occurrence that purposefully employed veteran troops from the MINUSTAH mission and the militarized policing skills they acquired overseas.⁷³ Violence against Black Brazilians and neocolonial techniques of population control are not a new development in this context. What ensued post-MINUSTAH, however, was a more professionalized and overtly militarized approach to favela policing via the UPPs and federal interventions, whereby these urban settings were reimaged as enemy territory and battlegrounds that had to be reconquered with tanks, helicopters, drones, and other military-grade weaponry.⁷⁴ Police militarization of favelas, post-MINUSTAH, contributed to an expanded state policy of racialized violence, or “Prosperity without Peace,”⁷⁵ whereby despite gross domestic product and income growth during the Lula years, body counts continued to rise throughout the favelas as in previous times of economic stagnation. Citing various studies, Maria Helena Moreira Alves and Philip Evanson explain:

From 1991 to 2007, there were never fewer than 5,741 (1998) or more than 8,438 (1994) homicides in a given year [in Rio de Janeiro]. These counts did not include people killed in so-called acts of resisting the police and people who disappeared. If one adds these numbers to the official homicide count, the annual figure is higher than 10,000.⁷⁶

This trend of rising death figures across the favelas, which disproportionately affects Black and mixed-raced Brazilians, has only grown since the Lula years. In 2019, 75.5% of all homicide victims throughout the country were Black or mixed race, but they accounted for only 56% of the country’s population.⁷⁷

Brazil’s diplomatic overtures toward African and other Global South states under Lula exemplifies a more benign example of the interaction between racialization, security, and hierarchy within Brazilian foreign policy. Increased trade and export growth were economically beneficial for all Brazilians, as both White commercial elites, as well as Black and mixed-race individuals, gained social mobility from expanded employment and access to credit. Likewise, these foodstuff exports contributed to the food security of dozens of Global South states, even as their underlying diplomatic conception depended on a problematic performance of blackness by Lula and his foreign affairs team. However, participation in MINUSTAH is a more troubling illustration of the Janus-faced performances that Brazil’s racial identity allows its state actors, whereby the endemic violence in both Haiti and the favelas showcases the persistent identity insecurity of many Latin American actors. Or, as Fanon pointed out, “The colonized subject is a persecuted man who is forever dreaming of becoming the persecutor.”⁷⁸

Bolsonaro in Washington and the Amazon

In contrast to Lula, Bolsonaro was elected on a far-right platform, vowing to fight crime and leftist ideologies,⁷⁹ and he enthusiastically took full advantage of the racialized logics and structures of the global political order to further domestic forms of violence and oppression. During Bolsonaro’s tenure beginning in January 2019, Itamaraty reduced its diplomatic proactivity vis-à-vis Africa and the Middle East, MERCOSUL, and the BRICS—and instead focused on closer relations with the Global North and actors racially coded as “White.”⁸⁰ The arguments offered in the following sections are that, firstly, Bolsonaro’s “attraction” toward White and Global North actors can, in part, be explained by the enduring power of globalized racial hierarchies. And, secondly, despite Bolsonaro’s reorientation of Brazilian foreign policy toward the Global North and White actors via a discourse of “Christianity,” he nevertheless carried out racialized diplomatic performances to deflect criticism for his domestic policies and political violence during his term, in particular regarding the Amazon.

Brazil’s foreign policy approach under Bolsonaro was consistently articulated through a frame of “defending Christianity,” along with other far-right conservative tropes,⁸¹ as showcased in his first speech at the UN:

It is inadmissible that, in the 21st century, with so many instruments, treaties and organisms aimed at safeguarding rights of all sorts, there are still millions of Christians and people from other religions who lose their lives or their freedom due to their faith.⁸²

Toward the end of the speech, he added:

During the last decades, we have allowed ourselves to be seduced, unwittingly, by ideological systems of thought which sought not truth, but absolute power. Ideology took root in the areas of culture, education, and media, dominating means of communication, universities, and schools. They also try to destroy our children’s innocence, perverting their most basic and elementary identity, the biological one. The politically correct has come to dominate public debate, to cast out rationality and replace it with manipulation, with the repetition of clichés, and with slogans. Ideology has invaded the very human soul to cast out from it God and the dignity which He invested upon us.⁸³

Following a Lacanian logic of “anxiety” and “lack” that drives subjectivity formation, Marco A. Vieira has argued Brazil’s postcolonial subjectivity is motivated by a feeling of lack and anxiety regarding whiteness, a deficiency that must be corrected by resignifying its racial hybridity as a positive subjectivity marker.⁸⁴ Bolsonaro’s speech act at the UN, then, temporarily brackets Brazil’s racial anxiety of self by presenting it on the world stage as a uniform actor, willing to participate in the political order and fight the alleged threat of a global secular and pluricultural human-rights-based order.⁸⁵ Numerous scholars have remarked on the discursive connections between Christianity, colonialism, and the resultant dehumanization of Black, Brown, and Indigenous subjects⁸⁶ through the creation of what Aimé Césaire described as a “Christianity = civilization, paganism = savagery”⁸⁷ dialectic. Bolsonaro’s 2018 electoral campaign slogan was “Brazil above all, God above everyone,” which is eerily similar to the Nazi slogan, “Germany above all” (Deutschland über alles),⁸⁸ and functioned to insert religious and White nationalist fervor into public discourse via veiled appeals to both well before his election. Once in office, Bolsonaro chose Ernesto Araújo as his minister of foreign affairs, who outlined the foundations of their worldview and subsequent foreign policy agenda in an op-ed in the New Criterion titled “Now We Do”:

My detractors have called me crazy for believing in God and for believing that God acts in history—but I don’t care. God is back and the nation is back: a nation with God; God through the nation. In Brazil (at least), nationalism became the vehicle of faith, faith became the catalyst for nationalism, and they both have ignited an exhilarating wave of freedom and new possibilities … Tony Blair’s spokesman Alastair Campbell famously said of Britain: “We don’t do God.” Well, in Brazil, now we do.⁸⁹

Bolsonaro and Araújo went beyond words as they instituted a racialized distancing from the Global South via a full embrace of “Christianity” and sought political and commercial relations with leaders racially coded as “White,” “Global North,” and conservative. Bolsonaro hosted Viktor Orbán at his inauguration, and visited Donald Trump in Washington and Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem, but did not visit any African states during his term in office. While in Jerusalem, Bolsonaro floated the idea of transferring Brazil’s embassy from Tel Aviv, mimicking Trump’s prior move,⁹⁰ and halting Brazil’s traditional support for Palestine. Bolsonaro declared unequivocally in Jerusalem, “We seek to expand our business interests, we want to bring Brazil closer and closer to what is best in the world.”⁹¹ “Best” being a reference to Israel and the United States, and a discursive shift away from Lula’s prior emphasis on the Global South and historically marginalized communities.

Only after much criticism from scholars and domestic business leaders did Bolsonaro visit the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia in October 2019, toward the end of his first year in office. As a result, Brazil struggled under Bolsonaro to regain the commercial traction it once held in the region; trade with Arab states reached only $12.1 billion in 2019.⁹² Bolsonaro’s attraction to Trump, Netanyahu, and Orbán, along with his concomitant aversion toward Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, recalls Bially Mattern’s provocation: “Soft power works by attraction … Attraction is a rather subjective experience, which raises the question of what makes something or someone alluring to some and not to others.”⁹³ Bially Mattern’s response is that soft power’s attraction is counterintuitively grounded in hard-power calculations and coercion. Bolsonaro’s desire for foreign direct investments and military technology transfers, as well as the calculus of global/regional security concerns, then, partially explains his attraction to these actors.

However, I would add to this framework and suggest racial desires and global racialized hierarchies also inform who is seen as an attractive foreign policy connection and who is not. As Fanon posited, the “inferiority complex” drives postcolonial subjects to attach themselves to White subjects, in Fanon’s example through biracial marriages, to advance their social rank and cast off their feeling of “insufficiency.”⁹⁴ Bolsonaro and Araújo’s quest for a close alignment with far-right Global North actors can be interpreted as a similar, but diplomatic, move, revealing a subconscious impulse that something “better/superior” is to be gained from closer engagement with Global North/White actors. Bolsonaro’s attraction toward the Global North betrays an ontological insecurity⁹⁵ (or insecurity of the self and one’s identity) not only on his part, but also on the part of Brazilian society and its elites, vis-à-vis their status and position within global politics due to the country’s racially heterogenous identity. This is an insecurity and anxiety that Bolsonaro is attempting to ease, at least temporarily, via attachment to Global North actors.

Furthermore, not only are all the leaders Bolsonaro attempted to befriend racially coded as White, but they are also male, showing an implicit drive behind his foreign policy thinking to affirm ontological stability via whiteness, masculinity, and conservativism, presented as interlocking markers of status. Bolsonaro’s Christianity = whiteness = superior motif has a particularly violent history in Latin America where, since the arrival of Spanish and Portuguese settler-colonists, Indigenous dispossession and African slavery were legitimized as net positive institutions due to the accompanying efforts that expanded Christianity. Bolsonaro’s emphasis on Christianity, and disregard for differing voices and lifestyles, was consistently foreshadowed during his campaign. As Ricardo Barbosa Jr. and Guilherme Casarões explain, during a 2017 campaign rally he connected religion to his domestic and foreign policy platforms by stating: “We are a Christian country. God is above all! We must end this nonsense of a secular state! It is a Christian state! We will make Brazil for the majority. Minorities must bow to majorities! Either they adapt or they disappear!”⁹⁶ Subsequently, these words were put into action as Bolsonaro expanded domestic political violence against those not racial coded as “White,” while continuing to espouse Christian values and even drawing upon postcolonial rhetoric, as discussed below.

Insecurity in the Amazon under Bolsonaro

Despite the rhetorical invocation of Christianity and whiteness when dealing with Trump, Orbán, and other Global North actors, Brazil’s heterogenous racialization within the global racial imaginary of IR simultaneously allowed Bolsonaro to employ the nation’s hybrid racial identity when downplaying criticism from other Global North states. For instance, in the same UN speech where Bolsonaro lambasted Marxism and centered God in his foreign policy, he also responded to certain EU leaders and their worries over increased deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, stating:

Our Amazon is larger than the entirety of Western Europe and remains practically untouched … However, the sensationalist attacks we have suffered from a large portion of the international media due to the fires in the Amazon have awaken our patriotic feeling. It is a fallacy to say that the Amazon is the heritage of humanity and a misconception, as scientists say, to say our forest is the lungs of the world. Availing themselves of such fallacies, one or another country, instead of assisting, fell in with the press’s lies and behaved disrespectfully, with a colonialist spirit. They questioned that which is most sacred to us: our sovereignty! One of them, on occasion of the G7 Summit, dared to suggest applying sanctions to Brazil without even hearing us.⁹⁷

Bolsonaro concurrently conjures fighting communism, defending Christianity, and stopping neocolonialism—discursive contradictions that underscore Brazilian state actors’ habitual engagement in a back-and-forth relationship vis-à-vis the state’s racial identity, depending on which is more convenient at the time. Said differently, responding to Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, and other White Global North leaders concerned with increased deforestation required an enactment of the country’s peripheral world status, and implicitly its Indigeneity and blackness, to partially deflect international backlash.⁹⁸ Additionally, Bolsonaro’s statement draws upon the political motif of national sovereignty to define external criticism as an attack on Brazil’s independence, which, historically, postcolonial state actors frame as a laudable act. Yet the intended aim of Bolsonaro’s strategic performance of postcoloniality is to minimize judgment from the global community, so the physical insecurity that heightened incursion into the Amazon bears down upon lower-class and Indigenous Brazilians can continue.

Specifically, Bolsonaro enacted drastic shifts in federal policy that facilitated deforestation, extractivism, and political violence in the Amazon since January 2019; his government refused, firstly, to continue the process of Indigenous land demarcation as mandated by Brazil’s 1988 constitution and, secondly, to enforce existing laws that protect Indigenous lands and the environment.⁹⁹ These two de facto policy alterations signaled to ranchers, loggers, miners, and other private interests they could proceed with deforestation (mostly through suspicious “wildfires”) without fearing interference from the state.¹⁰⁰ For example, during Bolsonaro’s first year in office, the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA), which is responsible for enforcing environmental regulations, issued 34% fewer citations for infractions than in the previous year, the lowest citation rate since 1995.¹⁰¹ During 2019, some 54,000 cubic meters of wood from the state of Pará alone were shipped to the United States, Europe, and elsewhere without direct IBAMA authorization, as had previously been customary to ensure they were not logged illegally.¹⁰² It is both ironic and contradictory that Bolsonaro employs postcolonial discourses of national sovereignty to shield his government from criticism, while inviting and looking the other way regarding domestic and foreign actors’ increased investment in and exploitation of natural-resource-intensive sectors across the Amazon.

Bolsonaro subsequently fired Ricardo Galvão, the director of the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), which is responsible for the yearly calculation of the deforestation rate in the Amazon, claiming he doubted the validity of the institute’s alarming deforestation rate estimates for 2019.¹⁰³ Bolsonaro also appointed Damares Alves, a conservative and proselytizing Evangelical pastor, as minister of women, families, and human rights, and Ricardo Salles, who holds an anticonservation and anti-environmentalist record, as minister of the environment.¹⁰⁴ During 2019 alone, seven Indigenous tribal leaders in Brazil were murdered, the highest rate in over a decade.¹⁰⁵ Most recently, and perhaps most disturbingly, since Bolsonaro left office, reports emerged in early 2023 from Brazil’s largest Indigenous reservation in Roraima state, home to the Yanomami peoples, of a humanitarian crisis spurred by the intrusion of illegal gold miners during Bolsonaro’s administration.¹⁰⁶ Officials are estimating about 570 Yanomami children have died since 2019 due to poor nutrition or mercury poisoning (a byproduct of gold mining),¹⁰⁷ and numerous other individuals in this community are in a state of severe malnutrition and need urgent medical care.¹⁰⁸ This points toward a possible omission on the part of the Bolsonaro administration when it came to providing security, food, and medical care for this Indigenous reservation, responsibilities the Brazilian federal government has historically sought to assume for vulnerable Indigenous communities.

Shortly after being elected president, Bolsonaro declared to the press, “Indians are human beings like us. They want to be entrepreneurs, they want electricity, they want doctors, they want dentists, they want cars, they want to travel on airplanes.”¹⁰⁹ Ironically, these words illustrate the ontological distance between Bolsonaro’s personal view of “self” and whom he is framing as Indigenous “others” who allegedly want to be more like him and other contemporary Brazilians. Yet Bolsonaro is still willing and able to draw upon legacies of coloniality in his international speeches to defend intrusion on the lives and livelihoods of these very same Indigenous subjects. Moreover, this discourse moves to incorporate Indigenous people within a core neoliberal regime where consumption is positioned as the subject’s “natural” ultimate aim. However, unlike Lula when he sought commercial ventures in Africa, Bolsonaro’s placement of Indigenous subjectivity squarely within a logic of individuality, entrepreneurship, and neoliberal productivity seeks to rob of them of their sovereignty and legitimize violence against their ontologies and lifestyle, without affording them many socioeconomic opportunities.

Additionally, as Bolsonaro’s words and actions toward vulnerable domestic Indigenous groups lay bare, in Brazilian society “threats” can be racially coded¹¹⁰ and rendered jointly with classist, gendered, and other elements that affect marginalized groups, and which do not fit within the typical IR frame of external military threat. Instead, these “threats” can be wide-ranging and perceived even as hazards to one’s identity and understanding of “self,” and are responded to with both discursive and political violence, resulting in physical security being a form of White privilege within Brazil.¹¹¹ Case in point: after a year of massive deforestation and encroachment on Indigenous lands, once again attempting to discursively minimize and deflect his policy actions so that physical insecurity could continue to run rampant in the Amazon basin, Bolsonaro proclaimed claimed in January 2020:

Without a doubt Indians have changed. They are evolving. Everyday Indians increasingly become human beings just like us. Thus, making Indians integrate more and more into society and become truly the owners of their Indigenous lands.¹¹²

Indigenous Brazilians were not the only marginalized racial group that faced heightened political violence and insecurity under Bolsonaro. The administration also came under scrutiny for giving police an implicit carte blanche to kill alleged “criminals,” a practice that disproportionately affected Black Brazilians.¹¹³ Most notoriously, in May 2021 Rio de Janeiro’s police conducted its bloodiest single-day raid in history, killing twenty-eight civilians in the predominantly Black favela of Jacarezinho, despite previous orders from the Brazilian Supreme Court to suspend such raids.¹¹⁴ The COVID-19 pandemic also had a disproportionately negative impact on Black Brazilians, resulting in a mortality rate of 55% for Black Brazilians hospitalized due to COVID-19 compared to only 38% for White patients,¹¹⁵ and with over 600,000 total COVID-19 fatalities during Bolsonaro’s term.¹¹⁶ Bolsonaro’s mismanagement of the pandemic and unwillingness to enact public health policies or provide appropriate medical care even led to a Brazilian Federal Senate investigation; the final report recommended him for trial at The Hague for crimes against humanity.¹¹⁷ Thus, as Bolsonaro discursively deployed narratives of a “colonialist spirit” to cast aside condemnation at the UN, bodies piled up behind him in favelas, Indigenous communities, and COVID-19 wards. In summary, the back-and-forth of racialized identity performances that Bolsonaro opportunistically conducted had physical, and—as described here extensively—violent impacts on the lives of countless Brazilians.

Altering Global Racialized Hierarchies

By describing the varying invocations of racial identities by state actors in a heterogenous society such as Brazil’s, and its resultant benign to harmful outcomes, this analysis draws attention to the theoretical and social justice work still needed to fully uproot global racialized hierarchies and design new foreign policy approaches and development agendas that address the shortcomings outlined above. An analysis of the Lula administration has shown how a well-intentioned actor can still produce mixed outcomes due to the limits that global racialized hierarchies place on one’s ability to individually transform the system. The Bolsonaro administration, in turn, presented the considerably more problematic and deleterious impacts of a state actor that does not view racial equality as a goal worthy of pursuit and is given the power to enact new foreign policy discourses and initiatives.

As of this writing, Lula narrowly defeated Bolsonaro in Brazil’s 2022 presidential election, earning a third presidential term and another opportunity to challenge and contest global racialized hierarchies. To that end, I would call specific attention to some of Lula’s more heralded foreign policy actions as a possible starting point for thinking through what a more comprehensively nonracialized foreign policy agenda would look like—for example, activism in the G77 and World Social Forum, acceptance of Haitian refugees after the 2010 earthquake, and his support for issue-area settlements through peaceful diplomatic negotiations instead of armed conflict. What these actions have in common is that a profit motive is not readily apparent in any of them, signaling a decolonized foreign policy is more sustainably pursued in the absence of capitalist, patriarchal, racial, and other pressures. Foreign policy initiatives are most effective at dismantling global racialized hierarchies when they frame and constitute spaces where racial equality is (1) seen as a worthwhile goal; (2) understood as a social system of power and oppression that interacts with gender, class, sexuality, and other markers of difference; and (3) comprehended beyond purely economic or utilitarian logics.

Lastly, global racialized hierarchies might serve as a useful theoretical and conceptual framework for understanding both historic foreign policy moves and how Global South states, particularly those in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, navigate the present US-Chinese rivalry and other international dilemmas. This framework could also be useful for understanding how the rise of middle powers, such as Turkey, India, South Africa, etc., along with Brazil, fails to reduce political violence and strife within these states, even as their leaders oftentimes call for alterations within the global political hierarchy. This article is an initial attempt at opening this type of theoretical dialogue by breaking down divisions between scholars from different periods and regions, as well as domestic/international political dichotomies.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Camille Amorim, Sarah Brooks, Zoltán Búzás, Silvia Ferabolli, Chris Gelpi, Ben Kenzer, Marcus Kurtz, Erin Lin, Vinícius Mallmann, Jennifer Mitzen, Dom Pfister, André Reis, Alex Stoffel, Inés Valdez, and Sara Watson for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this article, as well as the participants at the Research in International Politics workshop at The Ohio State University and at the Brazilian Foreign Policy Analysis Lab workshop at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. The author would also like to thank the APSA Fund for Latino Scholarship and the Department of Political Science at The Ohio State University for their generous funding.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

José O. Pérez

José O. Pérez is a PhD candidate in political science at The Ohio State University.

Notes

1 Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam, eds., Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (London: Routledge, 2014); Alexander D. Barder, Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Errol A. Henderson, “Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism in International Relations Theory,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 26, no. 1 (2013): 71–92; Robert Vitalis, “The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture: Making Racism Invisible in American International Relations,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29, no. 2 (June 2000): 331–56.

2 Steven Ward, “Race, Status, and Japanese Revisionism in the Early 1930s,” Security Studies 22, no. 4 (October–December 2013): 607–39; Steven Ward, “Status, Stratified Rights, and Accommodation in International Relations,” Journal of Global Security Studies 5, no. 1 (January 2020): 160–78.

3 Ayşe Zarakol, “Ontological (In)security and State Denial of Historical Crimes: Turkey and Japan,” International Relations 24, no. 1 (March 2010): 3–23.

4 Ji-Young Lee, “Diplomatic Ritual as a Power Resource: The Politics of Asymmetry in Early Modern Chinese-Korean Relations,” Journal of East Asian Studies 13, no. 2 (August 2013): 309–36; Ji-Young Lee, “Hegemonic Authority and Domestic Legitimation: Japan and Korea under Chinese Hegemonic Order in Early Modern East Asia,” Security Studies 25, no. 2 (April–June 2016): 320–52; David C. Kang, “The Theoretical Roots of Hierarchy in International Relations,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 58, no. 3 (September 2004): 337–52.

5 This is not to dismiss the ethnic and religious heterogeneity within these states or its impact on their identity, as well as the forms of discrimination and oppression it engenders—but rather to differentiate this from the racial heterogeneity and system of difference that is uniquely trans-Atlantic, Western, and manifested within Latin American identities.

6 Lula was elected as a member of the leftist Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores) and Bolsonaro by the far-right Social Liberal Party (Partido Social Liberal). However, Bolsonaro left this party in 2019 after disagreements with party leadership. In 2021, Bolsonaro joined the center-right Liberal Party (Partido Liberal). Lula was elected to a third term in late 2022, to succeed Bolsonaro, but new/ongoing foreign policy choices in his third term are beyond the scope of this article.

7 David Rothkopf, “The World’s Best Foreign Minister,” Foreign Affairs, 7 October 2009, https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/07/the-worlds-best-foreign-minister/.

8 Roxanne Lynn Doty, “Foreign Policy as Social Construction: A Post-Positivist Analysis of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy in the Philippines,” International Studies Quarterly 37, no. 3 (September 1993): 297–320.

9 All speeches delivered abroad by both Lula and Bolsonaro while in office, as well as their foreign diplomatic visits and itineraries, are available via the Biblioteca Presidência da República, http://www.biblioteca.presidencia.gov.br/presidencia/ex-presidentes.

10 Claudia Aradau et al., eds., Critical Security Methods: New Framework for Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2015), 7.

11 Janice Bially Mattern and Ayşe Zarakol, “Hierarchies in World Politics,” International Organization 70, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 623–54; John M. Hobson and J. C. Sharman, “The Enduring Place of Hierarchy in World Politics: Tracing the Social Logics of Hierarchy and Political Change,” European Journal of International Relations 11, no. 1 (March 2005): 63–98; Meghan McConaughey, Paul Musgrave, and Daniel H. Nexon, “Beyond Anarchy: Logics of Political Organization, Hierarchy, and International Structure,” International Theory 10, no. 2 (July 2018): 181–218.

12 Bially Mattern and Zarakol, “Hierarchies in World Politics,” 634.

13 David A. Lake, Hierarchy in International Relations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).

14 Rebecca Adler-Nissen, Opting Out of the European Union: Diplomacy, Sovereignty and European Integration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

15 Bially Mattern and Zarakol, “Hierarchies in World Politics,” 641. Their examples of this logic include: Alexander D. Barder, Empire Within: International Hierarchy and Its Imperial Laboratories of Governance (London: Routledge, 2015); David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); Cynthia Weber, Simulating Sovereignty: Intervention, the State, and Symbolic Exchange (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

16 Hobson and Sharman, “Enduring Place of Hierarchy in World Politics”; see also David C. Kang, “Hierarchy and Legitimacy in International Systems: The Tribute System in Early Modern East Asia,” Security Studies 19, no. 4 (October–December 2010): 591–622.

17 Edward Keene, “International Hierarchy and the Origins of the Modern Practice of Intervention,” Review of International Studies 39, no. 5 (December 2013): 1079. Emphasis in the original.

18 Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and Daniel H. Nexon, “Relations before States: Substance, Process and the Study of World Politics,” European Journal of International Relations 5, no. 3 (September 1999): 291–332.

19 McConaughey, Musgrave, and Nexon, “Beyond Anarchy,” 182.

20 McConaughey, Musgrave, and Nexon, “Beyond Anarchy,” 184.

21 Edward Keene, “A Case Study of the Construction of International Hierarchy: British Treaty-Making against the Slave Trade in the Early Nineteenth Century,” International Organization 61, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 311–39.

22 Vitalis, “Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture,” 333.

23 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation,” American Sociological Review 62, no. 3 (June 1997): 469.

24 Barder, Global Race War, 11.

25 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto Press, 2008 [1952]), 69.

26 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 172.

27 Marco Vieira, “The Decolonial Subject and the Problem of Non-Western Authenticity,” Postcolonial Studies 22, no. 2 (2019): 150–67, Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

28 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004 [1961]), 15–20.

29 Lélia Gonzalez, “Por um Feminismo Afro-latino-Americano” [Towards an Afro-Latino-American feminism] 9 (1988): 14, https://edisciplinas.usp.br/mod/resource/view.php?id=174405. All quote translations are the author’s unless otherwise specified.

30 Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America,” International Sociology 15, no. 2 (June 2000): 216–17.

31 Charlotte Epstein, “The Productive Force of the Negative and the Desire for Recognition: Lessons from Hegel and Lacan,” Review of International Studies 44, no. 5 (December 2018): 805–28; Julia Gallagher, “Misrecognition in the Making of a State: Ghana’s International Relations under Kwame Nkrumah,” Review of International Studies 44, no. 5 (December 2018): 884.

32 Silvio Almeida, O Que É Racismo Estrutural? [What is structural racism?] (Belo Horizonte: Letramento, 2018); Jaime A. Alves and João Costa Vargas, “The Spectre of Haiti: Structural Antiblackness, the Far-Right Backlash and the Fear of a Black Majority in Brazil,” Third World Quarterly 41, no. 4 (2020): 645–62.

33 Darcy Ribeiro, The Brazilian People: The Formation and Meaning of Brazil, trans. Gregory Rabassa (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000 [1995]).

34 Gilberto Freyre, Casa-grande e Senzala [The masters and the slaves] (São Paulo: Global, 2003 [1933]). Freyre’s work would later be problematized as racist by Florestan Fernandes and subsequent scholars.

35 Itamaraty does not keep official data on the racial composition of the diplomatic corps, allegedly due to federal privacy laws.

36 Karla Gobo, “Da Exclusão à Inclusão Consentida: Negros e Mulheres na Diplomacia Brasileira” [From exclusion to consented inclusion: Black people and women in Brazil’s diplomacy], Política & Sociedade 17, no. 38 (January/April 2018): 454.

37 Petrônio Domingues, A Nova Abolição [The new abolition] (São Paulo: Selo Negro, 2008), 149.

38 IBGE, “Características Gerais dos Domicílios e dos Moradores 2019” [General characteristics of households and dwellers 2019], Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios Contínua 2019, 8, https://biblioteca.ibge.gov.br/visualizacao/livros/liv101707_informativo.pdf.

39 Mala Htun, “From ‘Racial Democracy’ to Affirmative Action: Changing State Policy on Race in Brazil,” Latin American Research Review 39, no. 1 (2004): 60–89.

40 Gobo, “Da Exclusão à Inclusão Consentida,” 448.

41 Abdias do Nascimento, O Genocídio do Negro Brasileiro: Processo de um Racismo Mascarado [The genocide of the Black Brazilian: Process of a masked racism] (São Paulo: Perspectivas, 2016), chap. 8.

42 Michael C. Dawson and Emily A. Katzenstein, “Survey Article: Articulated Darkness: White Supremacy, Patriarchy, and Capitalism in Shelby’s Dark Ghettos,” Journal of Political Philosophy 27, no. 2 (June 2019): 264.

43 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed Press, 2000 [1983]), 2.

44 Felipe Antunes de Oliveira, “Who Are the Super-Exploited? Gender, Race, and the Intersectional Potentialities of Dependency Theory,” in Dependent Capitalisms in Contemporary Latin America and Europe ed. Aldo Madariaga and Stefano Palestini (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 101–28; Flávia Biroli, Gênero e Desigualdades: Limites da Democracia no Brasil [Gender and inequality: The limits of democracy in Brazil] (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2018); Armando Boito Jr. and Tatiana Berringer, “Brasil: Classes Sociais, Neodesenvolvimentismo e Política Externa nos Governos Lula e Dilma” [Brazil: Social classes, neodevelopmentalism and foreign policy under Lula and Dilma], Revista de Sociologia e Política 21, no. 47 (September 2013): 31–38; Mariano Féliz, “Neodevelopmentalism and Dependency in Twenty-First-Century Argentina: Insights from the Work of Ruy Mauro Marini,” trans. Richard Stoller, Latin American Perspectives 46, no. 1 (January 2019): 105–21; Verónica Gago, Marta Malo, and Luci Cavallero, La Internacional Feminista: Luchas en los Territorios y Contra el Neoliberalismo [The Feminist International: Struggles in the territories and against neoliberalism] (Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2020); Claudio Katz, Dependency Theory after Fifty Years: The Continuing Relevance of Latin American Critical Thought, trans. Stanley Malinowitz (Leiden: Brill, 2022); María Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia 25, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 742–59; Rita Laura Segato, “Gênero e Colonialidade: Em Busca de Chaves de Leitura e de um Vocabulário Estratégico Descolonial” [Gender and coloniality: In search of keys and a strategic decolonial vocabulary], E-cadernos CES 18 (2012): 106–31.

45 Felipe Antunes de Oliveira, “The Rise of the Latin American Far-Right Explained: Dependency Theory Meets Uneven and Combined Development,” Globalizations 16, no. 7 (2019): 1146; Antunes de Oliveira, “Who Are the Super-Exploited?,” 104.

46 Antunes de Oliveira, “Who Are the Super-Exploited?”; Féliz, “Neodevelopmentalism and Dependency in Twenty-First-Century Argentina”; Katz, Dependency Theory after Fifty Years.

47 Segato, “Gênero e Colonialidade.”

48 André Luiz Reis da Silva and José O. Pérez, “Lula, Dilma, and Temer: The Rise and Fall of Brazilian Foreign Policy,” Latin American Perspectives 46, no. 4 (July 2019): 169–85; Paulo G. Fagundes Visentini and André Luiz Reis da Silva, “Brazil and the Economic, Political, and Environmental Multilateralism: The Lula Years (2003–2010),” Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 53 (2010): 54–72; Marina Duque, “‘The Rascals’ Paradise’: Brazilian National Identity in 2010,” in Making Identity Count: Building a National Identity Database, ed. Ted Hopf and Bentley B. Allan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 47–62.

49 Sean W. Burges, “Brazil as a Bridge between Old and New Powers?” International Affairs 89, no. 3 (May 2013): 577–94; Antônio Carlos Lessa, “Brazil’s Strategic Partnerships: An Assessment of the Lula Era (2003–2010),” Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 53 (2010): 115–31; Maria Regina Soares de Lima and Mônica Hirst, “Brazil as an Intermediate State and Regional Power: Action, Choice and Responsibilities,” International Affairs 82, no. 1 (January 2006): 21–40; Miriam Gomes Saraiva, “South-South Cooperation Strategies in Brazilian Foreign Policy from 1993 to 2007,” Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 50, no. 2 (2007): 42–59; Oliver Stuenkel and Matthew M. Taylor, eds., Brazil on the Global Stage: Power, Ideas, and the Liberal International Order (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Armando Boito and Tatiana Berringer, “Social Classes, Neodevelopmentalism, and Brazilian Foreign Policy under Presidents Lula and Dilma,” trans. Gregory Duff Morton, Latin American Perspectives 41, no. 5 (September 2014): 94–109.

50 Celso Amorim, “Brazil and the Middle East: Reflections on Lula’s South-South Cooperation,” Cairo Review of Global Affairs 2 (Summer 2011): 52–53.

51 Celso Amorim, “Brazilian Foreign Policy under President Lula (2003–2010): An Overview,” Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 53 (2010): 234.

52 Amorim, “Brazil and the Middle East,” 48.

53 This is not to imply that neoliberalism is universal or without local, popular, and micro-level contestation and negotiation; rather, neoliberalism can be constituted through and within the folds of local identities and subjectivities, thereby regimenting political economies, as argued by Verónica Gago, Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

54 Biblioteca Presidência da República, “Discurso do Presidente da República, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, na cerimônia de inauguração da Embaixada do Brasil na República Democrática de São Tome e Príncipe” [Speech by the president of the republic, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, at the inauguration ceremony of the embassy of Brazil in the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe], 2 November 2003, http://www.biblioteca.presidencia.gov.br/presidencia/ex-presidentes/luiz-inacio-lula-da-silva/discursos/1o-mandato/2003/02-11-2003-discurso-do-pr-luiz-inacio-lula-da-silva-na-cerimonia-de-inauguracao-da-embaixada-do-brasil.pdf/view.

55 Lula, specifically, tends to draw on his origins in the Brazilian northeast, a region known for its racial miscegenation, to position himself as a racially ambiguous (or not completely White) Brazilian. Yet it would be difficult to argue most (or perhaps even many) Brazilians, or African leaders, view Lula as Black, thereby positioning him incongruously vis-à-vis the discourse he attempted to present while visiting African states.

56 Amorim, “Brazilian Foreign Policy under President Lula (2003–2010),” 216.

57 Boito and Berringer, “Brasil.”

58 Américo Martins, “‘Governos dos países ricos são culpados pela crise,’ diz Lula” [“Governments of rich countries are to blame for the crisis,” says Lula], BBC, 14 September 2009, https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/noticias/2009/09/090911_entrevistalula1_ji.

59 Yvonne Captain, “Brazil’s Africa Policy under Lula,” Global South 4, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 183–98; José Flávio Sombra Saraiva, “The New Africa and Brazil in the Lula Era: The Rebirth of Brazilian Atlantic Policy,” Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional 53 (2010): 169–82.

60 Stacie E. Goddard and Daniel Nexon, “The Dynamics of Global Power Politics: A Framework for Analysis,” Journal of Global Security Studies 1, no. 1 (February 2016): 11. Emphasis in the original.

61 Biblioteca Presidência da República, “Discurso do Presidente da República, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, no jantar oferecido pelo Presidente de Moçambique, Joaquim Chissano” [Speech by the president of the republic, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, at the dinner hosted by the president of Mozambique, Joaquim Chissano], 5 November 2003, http://www.biblioteca.presidencia.gov.br/presidencia/ex-presidentes/luiz-inacio-lula-da-silva/discursos/1o-mandato/2003/05-11-2003-discurso-do-pr-luiz-inacio-lula-da-silva-no-jantar-oferecido-pelo-presidente-de-mocambique.pdf/view.

62 Amorim, “Brazilian Foreign Policy Under President Lula (2003–2010),” 225–26.

63 Under Bolsolaro, Heleno rose to the post of secretary of institutional security, dos Santos Cruz to the post of secretary of government, and Pujol to commander of the Brazilian army.

64 Marina G. Duque, “Recognizing International Status: A Relational Approach,” International Studies Quarterly 62, no. 3 (September 2018): 577–92.

65 Barder, Global Race War, chap. 1; Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009); Robert Shilliam, “What the Haitian Revolution Might Tell Us about Development, Security, and the Politics of Race,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 50, no. 3 (July 2008): 778–808; Adom Getachew, “Universalism after the Post-Colonial Turn: Interpreting the Haitian Revolution,” Political Theory 44, no. 6 (December 2016): 821–45.

66 Alves and Costa Vargas, “Spectre of Haiti”; W. Alejandro Sánchez Nieto, “Brazil’s Grand Design for Combining Global South Solidarity and National Interests: A Discussion of Peacekeeping Operations in Haiti and Timor,” in Global South to the Rescue: Emerging Humanitarian Superpowers and Globalizing Rescue Industries, ed. Paul Amar (New York: Routledge, 2013), 161–78.

67 See Keeping the Peace in Haiti? An Assessment of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti Using Compliance with its Prescribed Mandate as a Barometer for Success (Cambridge, MA; São Paulo: Harvard Law Student Advocates for Human Rights and Centro de Justicia Global, 2005), https:/www.fidh.org/IMG/pdf/KeepingthepeaceJusticiaGlobal-4.pdf; Amélie Gauthier with Pierre Bonin, “Haiti: Voices of the Actors: A Research Project on the UN Mission” (FRIDE working paper, 2008); Gustavo Gallón, “Report of the Independent Expert on the Situation of Human Rights in Haiti, Gustavo Gallón,” United Nations Human Rights Council, 2014, https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/766939?ln=en.

68 Paul Amar, The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 6.

69 See Monica Hirst, “Latin American Armed Humanitarianism in Haiti and Beyond,” Relaciones Internacionales no. 55 (2018): 213–26.

70 Author’s calculations based on US Department of State annual “Foreign Military Training Report” to Congress for fiscal years 2003 to 2010, https://2009-2017.state.gov/t/pm/rls/rpt/fmtrpt/index.htm. The annual funding amount has only grown since the Lula administration.

71 Amorim, “Brazilian Foreign Policy under President Lula (2003–2010),” 225.

72 The authority over such operations technically falls under the responsibility of state governors in Brazil. However, there have been “federal interventions” in Rio de Janeiro state and elsewhere in Brazil over the past 20 years, whereby the federal government temporarily takes over the security-maintenance responsibilities of local officials. Likewise, these federal interventions became more common and intense under Lula’s successors: Dilma Rousseff, Michel Temer, and Bolsonaro. The point here, though, is these interventions have purposefully drawn upon and employed the same militarized troops and skills acquired during MINUSTAH for domestic policing purposes.

73 See Jaime Amparo Alves, The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); Jean-Philip Struck, “Exército no Rio: 25 Anos de Fracassos” [The army in Rio: 25 years of failure], DW, 27 February 2018, https://www.dw.com/pt-br/exército-no-rio-25-anos-de-fracassos/a-42750301.

74 For a detailed analysis of militarized police tactics and operations in the favelas, see Marielle Franco, “UPP: A Redução da Favela a Três Letras: Uma Análise da Política de Segurança Pública do Estado do Rio de Janeiro” [UPP: The reduction of the favela to three letters: An analysis of the public security policy of the State of Rio de Janeiro] (master’s thesis, Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2014). Franco was elected to the Rio de Janeiro city council and was subsequently assassinated on 15 March 2018 after opening investigations into police violence and corruption in the favelas.

75 Maria Helena Moreira Alves and Philip Evanson, Living in the Crossfire: Favelas Residents, Drug Dealers, and Police Violence in Rio de Janeiro (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 30–32.

76 Alves and Evanson, Living in the Crossfire, 31.

77 See Anúario Brasileiro de Segurança Pública [Brazilian yearly review of public security] (São Paulo: Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública [FBSP], 2005–19), https://forumseguranca.org.br/anuario-brasileiro-seguranca-publica/; Daniel Cerqueira et al., Atlas da Vioência 2019 [Atlas of violence 2019] (Rio de Janeiro; São Paulo: Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada / FBSP, 2019), 49, https://forumseguranca.org.br/atlas-da-violencia/.

78 Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 16.

79 Wendy Hunter and Timothy J. Power, “Bolsonaro and Brazil’s Illiberal Backlash,” Journal of Democracy 30, no. 1 (January 2019): 68–82.

80 For instance, the Bolsonaro administration broke a long-stranding Brazilian diplomatic tradition of a new president’s first trip abroad being to neighboring Argentina and instead choose the World Economic Forum in Switzerland as his first, leaving Argentina for the sixth trip of the year. During his initial year in office, Bolsonaro visited the United States on three separate occasions, and only at the end of the year did he conduct lightning-round visits to five non-Western states: Japan, China, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia.

81 Ricardo Barbosa Jr. and Guilherme Casarões, “Statecraft under God: Radical Right Populism Meets Christian Nationalism in Bolsonaro’s Brazil,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 50, no. 3 (2023): 669–99.

82 Ministério das Relações Exteriores, “Speech by Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro at the Opening of the 74th United Nations General Assembly,” 24 September 2019, https://www.gov.br/mre/en/content-centers/speeches-articles-and-interviews/president-of-the-federative-republic-of-brazil/speeches/speech-by-brazil-s-president-jair-bolsonaro-at-the-opening-of-the-74th-united-nations-general-assembly-new-york-september-24-2019-photo-alan-santos-pr.

83 Ministério das Relações Exteriores, “Speech by Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro at the Opening of the 74th United Nations General Assembly.”

84 Marco A. Vieira, “(Re-)imagining the ‘Self’ of Ontological Security: The Case of Brazil’s Ambivalent Postcolonial Subjectivity,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 46, no. 2 (January 2018): 142–64.

85 Guilherme Stolle Paixão e Casarões and Déborah Barros Leal Farias, “Brazilian Foreign Policy under Jair Bolsonaro: Far-Right Populism and the Rejection of the Liberal International Order,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs 35, no. 5 (2022): 741–61.

86 Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000 [1972]); Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 65–68; Lélia Gonzalez, “A Categoria Político-cultural de Amefricanidade” [The political-cultural category of Amefricanidade], Tempo Brasileiro 92 (1988): 69–82.

87 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 33.

88 Bolsonaro fired his secretary of culture, Roberto Alvim, in January of 2020 after Alvim paraphrased Joseph Goebbels in a speech, provoking outcries of racism from the public. See “Secretário de Cultura é demitido após discurso semelhante a de ministro de Hitler” [Culture secretary is fired after speech similar to that of Hitler’s minister], G1, 17 January 2020, https://g1.globo.com/jornal-nacional/noticia/2020/01/17/secretario-de-cultura-e-demitido-apos-discurso-semelhante-a-de-ministro-de-hiltler.ghtml.

89 Ernesto Araújo, “Now We Do,” New Criterion 37, no. 5 (2019): 37.

90 Dan Williams, “Brazil Opens Israel Trade Mission in Jerusalem, Short of Full Embassy Move,” Reuters, 31 March 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-brazil/brazil-opens-israel-trade-mission-in-jerusalem-short-of-full-embassy-move-idUSKCN1RC097.

91 Presidência da República, “Discurso do presidente da República, Jair Bolsonaro, na assinatura de acordos entre Brasil e Israel: Jerusalém/Israel” [Speech by the president of the republic, Jair Bolsonaro, at the signing of agreements between Brazil and Israel: Jerusalem/Israel], 31 March 2019, https://www.biblioteca.presidencia.gov.br/presidencia/ex-presidentes/bolsonaro/discursos/discurso-do-presidente-da-republica-jair-bolsonaro-na-assinatura-de-acordos-entre-brasil-e-israel-jerusalem-israel.

92 Arab Brazilian Chamber of Commerce, “Arabs Became 3rd Largest Destination of Brazilian Exports,” Brazil-Arab News Agency, 29 January 2020, https://anba.com.br/en/arabs-became-3rd-largest-destination-of-brazilian-exports/.

93 Janice Bially Mattern, “Why ‘Soft Power’ Isn’t So Soft: Representational Force and the Sociolinguistic Construction of Attraction in World Politics,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 33, no. 3 (June 2005): 584–86.

94 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, chap. 2.

95 Jennifer Mitzen, “Ontological Security in World Politics: State Identity and the Security Dilemma,” European Journal of International Relations 12, no. 3 (September 2006): 341–70.

96 Barbosa and Casarões, “Statecraft under God,” 685.

97 Ministério das Relações Exteriores, “Speech by Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro at the Opening of the 74th United Nations General Assembly.”

98 Stephen M. Walt, “Who Will Save the Amazon (and How)?” Foreign Policy, 5 August 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/05/who-will-invade-brazil-to-save-the-amazon/.

99 Federal Supreme Court, “Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil,” 2019, http://www.stf.jus.br/arquivo/cms/legislacaoConstituicao/anexo/brazil_federal_constitution.pdf.

100 MapBiomas, “Relatório Anual do Desmatamento do Brasil: 2019” [Annual report on deforestation in Brazil: 2019], 2019, https://s3.amazonaws.com/alerta.mapbiomas.org/relatrios/MBI-relatorio-desmatamento-2019-FINAL5.pdf.

101 Danielle Brant and Phillippe Watanabe, “Sob Bolsonaro, Multas Ambientais Caem 34% para Menor Nível em 24 Anos” [Under Bolsonaro, environmental fines fall 34% to lowest level in 24 years], Folha de São Paulo, 9 March 2020, https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/ambiente/2020/03/sob-bolsonaro-multas-ambientais-caem-34-para-menor-nivel-em-24-anos.shtml.

102 Jake Spring, “Exclusive: Brazil Exported Thousands of Shipments of Unauthorized Wood from Amazon Port,” Reuters, 4 March 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-environment-lumber-exclusive/exclusive-brazil-exported-thousands-of-shipments-of-unauthorized-wood-from-amazon-port-idUSKBN20R15.

103 See INPE, “A Estimative da Taxa de Desmatamento Por Corte Raso Para a Amazônia Legal em 2019 é de 9.762 km²” [The estimate of the deforestation rate for the legal Amazon in 2019 is 9,762 km²], Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais, 18 November 2019, http://www.inpe.br/noticias/noticia.php?Cod_Noticia=5294; Ernesto Londoño, “Bolsonaro Fires Head of Agency Tracking Amazon Deforestation in Brazil,” New York Times, 2 August 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/world/americas/bolsonaro-amazon-deforestation-galvao.html.

104 Bolsonaro’s cabinet lacked Black, Indigenous, or pardo representation, and his administration had a paucity of Black staffers, while showcasing open hostility to racial quotas and affirmative action initiatives and working to defund programs dedicated to social inclusion.

105 Patrícia Figueiredo, “Número de mortes de lideranças indígenas em 2019 é o maior em pelo menos 11 anos, diz Pastoral da Terra” [Number of deaths of indigenous leaders in 2019 is the highest in at least 11 years, says Pastoral da Terra], Globo News, 12 October 2019, https://g1.globo.com/natureza/noticia/2019/12/10/mortes-de-liderancas-indigenas-batem-recorde-em-2019-diz-pastoral-da-terra.ghtml.

106 Anthony Boadle, “Brazil Readies Task Force to Expel Miners from Yanomami Lands, Officials Say,” Reuters, 1 February 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazil-prepares-task-force-expel-miners-yanomami-lands-indigenous-leader-says-2023-01-31/.

107 During Bolsonaro’s tenure, gold become the state of Roraima’s second-largest export, behind only soy, even though the state does not have any federally sanctioned gold mines. See João Fellet, “Roraima Exporta 194 kg de Ouro à Índia sem Ter Nenhuma Mina Operando Legalmente” [Roraima exports 194 kg of gold to India without having any legally operating mines], BBC, 12 June 2019, https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/internacional-48534473.

108 Tom Phillips, “Lula Accuses Bolsonaro of Genocide Against Yanomami in Amazon,” Guardian, 22 January 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/22/lula-accuses-jair-bolsonaro-genocide-yanomami-indigenous-amazon.

109 See Sarah Mota Resende, “‘No Que Depender de Mim, Não Tem Mais Demarcação de Terra Indígena’, Diz Bolsonaro a TV” [“As far as it depends on me, there is no more demarcation of Indigenous lands”, says Bolsonaro on TV], Folha de São Paulo, 5 November 2018, https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2018/11/no-que-depender-de-mim-nao-tem-mais-demarcacao-de-terra-indigena-diz-bolsonaro-a-tv.shtml.

110 Zoltán I. Búzás, “The Color of Threat: Race, Threat Perception, and the Demise of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1902–1923),” Security Studies 22, no. 4 (October–December 2013): 573–606.

111 Lucas Guerra, “Security as White Privilege: Racializing Whiteness in Critical Security Studies,” Security Dialogue 52, no. S1 (November 2021): 28–37.

112 See Gustavo Uribe, “‘Cada Vez Mais o Índio É um Ser Humano Igual a Nós’, Diz Bolsonaro” [“Increasingly, the Indian is a human being just like us,” says Bolsonaro], Folha de São Paulo, 23 January 2020, https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2020/01/cada-vez-mais-o-indio-e-um-ser-humano-igual-a-nos-diz-bolsonaro.shtml.

113 Roberto Simon and Brian Winter, “Trumpism Comes to Brazil,” Foreign Affairs, 28 October 2018, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/brazil/2018-10-28/trumpism-comes-brazil.

114 Terrence McCoy, “Rio Police Were Ordered to Limit Favela Raids during the Pandemic. They’re Still Killing Hundreds of People,” Washington Post, 20 May 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/05/20/brazil-police-rio-jacarezinho-favela-raid/.

115 Pedro Baqui et al., “Ethnic and Regional Variations in Hospital Mortality from COVID-19 in Brazil: A Cross-Sectional Observational Study,” Lancet Global Health 8, no. 8 (August 2020): E1018–26; Carlos Madeiro, “Covid Mata 55% dos Negros e 38% dos Brancos Internados no País, Diz Estudo” [Covid kills 55% of Black people and 38% of White peoples hospitalized in the country, study says], UOL, 2 June 2020, https://noticias.uol.com.br/saude/ultimas-noticias/redacao/2020/06/02/covid-mata-54-dos-negros-e-37-dos-brancos-internados-no-pais-diz-estudo.htm.

116 BBC, “Covid Map: Coronavirus Cases, Deaths, Vaccinations by Country,” 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-51235105; José O. Pérez and Vinícius Mendes, “The Intersectionality of Health (In)security: Healthcare, Disposable Workers, and Exposure within Brazil’s Pandemic Politics,” Security Dialogue 54, no. 2 (April 2023): 155–72.

117 Jack Nicas, “Brazilian Leader Accused of Crimes against Humanity in Pandemic Response,” New York Times, 19 October 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/19/world/americas/bolsonaro-covid-19-brazil.html.