ABSTRACT
Explanations about what Brazil has been, what it is, and what it is becoming are very often connected to scripts of what it could have been and what it should become. This conclusion reiterates the main questions and arguments that were developed throughout the book about ‘Brazil’s emergence’, but it also presents some new indicators and discourses about what is now being called "the most serious crisis [in Brazil] in the century". While the phenomenon of ‘emergence’ was celebrated as the conquest of more authority for Brazil on the global stage, especially as Brazil was presented as a representative of developing countries in multilateral institutions, the discourses about Brazil as a global player were also perpetuating a spatiotemporal structure that rewards some societies at the expense of many others. In these discourses, the conditions for the fall are already set. As the book explored, within the field of possibilities and reasoning about Brazil’s emergence to the ‘global future’, power or empowerment have been conceptualized in a way that discursively inhibits any form of escape from the temporal and spatial confines of a world order marked by geopolitical and geoeconomic competition that perpetually produces winners and losers.
