Brazilian Political Science Review

e0001

Authors: Dolores Rocca Rivarola

This paper, which is part of wider research on the transformation of political linkages in Argentina and Brazil, analyzes a specific dimension: political activist training. It seeks to understand how transformations such as weaker partisanship and intense political fluctuation manifest in the way activists have defined and experienced political training. I examine narratives in interviews held between 2007 and 2015 with four generational groups of activists, classified according to the historical period in which they engaged in youth activism. All of them were members of government-supporting organizations during the Kirchner (2003-2015) and Workers’ Party administrations (2003-2016). The issue of activist training is relevant if we consider the paradoxical survival of political and partisan activism in a context of electoral volatility and leaders circumventing parties to establish a direct political bond with citizens. Also, while early political socialization has been given considerable attention in the literature, the issue of internal political training – once people have become members of an organization – has not. The findings show a reconfiguration of what activist training used to convey in the past, as well as impacts and challenges over training brought about by these organizations’ access to government.

e0003

Authors: Artionka Capiberibe

This article examines the activities of cross-cultural evangelical missions among indigenous peoples in Brazil and explores how these activities fit into the policies of Jair Bolsonaro’s government. The aim is to show how these missions relate to three federal government policies that are currently threatening the existence of indigenous peoples – policies that are expressed in the moral, anti-environmental, and national security agendas. This article argues that the element connecting these different sets of interests is a notion of individual freedom that directly opposes the idea of collective rights and, therefore, represents an expression of anti-democratic values.

e0005

Authors: Thiago Rodrigues, Mariana Kalil

Since the 1960s, the Brazilian defense policy toward the Amazon has been oriented by the security/development binomen. This was simultaneously a directive for the Brazilian authoritarian regime and for US defense doctrine for the Americas. We argue in this paper that despite the structural influence of US hemispherical security and defense strategy, the formulation of an Amazonian defense strategy by the Brazilian military responded to peculiarities attached to local military historical practices regarding civilizational values, concepts of security and development, and geopolitical targets. We claim that Brazilian defense strategy towards the Amazon is a local manifestation of a biopolitical approach to both the forest and its natural resources and to its population. It is our goal to point out that the local version for the duality security/development has been a manifestation of a set of technologies of government in a biopolitical strategy.