ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an evolutionary perspective on political science analyses of Brazilian foreign policy. My argument is twofold: first, taking foreign policy seriously moved from the outside in. From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, most research was initiated in the United States. The expansion in Brazil of international relations (IR) undergraduate programs in the 1990s and the consolidation of graduate programs in the 2000s have allowed for a second movement, from the inside out, as the production of Brazilian scholars became more internationalized. Second, the evolution of Brazilian foreign policy research happened in four waves, which, to a large extent, emulate the evolutionary process of IR as a discipline. The first wave corresponded to a descriptive-normative phase, in which scholars and practitioners (diplomatic and military officials in particular) engaged in foreign policy debates in search of the best policy. The second wave related to the development of the first ‘scientific’ approaches, which drew on mainstream political science/IR literature, notably realist theories of international politics, to make sense of Brazil as a rising power in the 1970s and onwards. The third wave refers to studies of bureaucracy and foreign policy. This wave chiefly focused on Itamaraty and its relationship with presidents, Congress, and other ministries. The fourth and final wave, drawing on the framework of foreign policy as public policy, addresses the relationship between non-state actors and Brazilian foreign policy in an increasingly democratic and interdependent context.
