ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to explore the development of thinking about security in Brazilian IR between 1985 and 2010. Before that can be attempted, however, there is a need to establish the framework within which this form of thinking about security took place. The institutional and political context of the development of thinking about security in academia differs from that examined in previous chapters. As much as policy-advising power may be claimed by academic circles, Brazilian IR intellectuals are not able to legislate and/or establish state institutions (as was the case with the authoritarian sector of the armed forces in Chapter 3). They also do not have a closed body of thought that is concentrated and produced in one institution alone (as was the case of the ESG in Chapter 4). Thus, as part of an academic discipline, thinking about security needs to be contextualized within the general conditions of development of the discipline of Brazilian IR, the academic establishment that has harboured it and the historic conditions of its establishment. The chapter starts by exploring the development of the education system in Brazil and its relation to the ideas of national security. It then explores the history of IR as an academic discipline in Brazil as a way of politically contextualizing the place of IR intellectuals in the country. Finally it explores the idea of Brazilian identity in International Relations, laying the groundwork for the analysis of IR through the tenets of the TEA and worlding Brazil.
