Democracy and Brazil

Democracy and Brazil: Collapse and Regression discusses the de-democratization process underway in contemporary Brazil.

The relative political stability that characterized domestic politics in the 2000s ended with the sudden emergence of a series of massive protests in 2013, followed by the controversial impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. In this new, more conservative period in Brazilian politics, a series of institutional reforms deepened the distance between citizens and representatives. Brazil’s current political crisis cannot be understood without reference to the continual growth of right-wing and ultra-right discourse, on the one hand, and to the neoliberal ideology that pervades the minds of large parts of the Brazilian elite, on the other. Twenty experts on Brazil across different fields discuss the ongoing political turmoil in the light of distinct problems: geopolitics, gender, religion, media, indigenous populations, right-wing strategies, and new forms of coup, among others. Updated analyses enriched with historical perspective help to illuminate the intricate issues that will determine the country’s fate in years to come.

Democracy and Brazil: Collapse and Regression will interest students and scholars of Brazilian Politics and History, Latin America, and the broader field of democracy studies.

Bernardo Bianchi is a visiting professor at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Brazil. Prior to joining PUC-Rio, he was postdoctoral fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel of the Brazilian Government (CAPES) at the Free University of Berlin, Germany. His main research interests are Political Philosophy, History of Philosophy and Contemporary Political Theory, as well as Social Theory.

Jorge Chaloub is an adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF), Brazil. His research interests include Political Theory, Brazilian Political Thought, Political Philosophy, Social Theory, History of Contemporary Brazil and Sociology of Law.

Patricia Rangel holds a PhD in Political Science by the University of Brasilia and a post-PhD in Sociology by the University of Sao Paulo, with a research stay at the Latin American Institute at the Freien Universität Berlin. She has co-edited titles as Gender and Feminisms: Argentina, Brazil and Chile under Transformation; (EDUSP, 2019) and;Women’s Political Participation in Latin America; (Konrad Adenauer Stiftung - Brazil, 2018); She works in the fields of Political Science, Gender Studies and Feminist Research.

Frieder Otto Wolf is Honorary Professor at The Free University of Berlin, Germany. An active member of the German Green Party from 1984 to 1999, Wolf served as deputy in the European Parliament from 1994 to 1999. He is a fellow at the research institute of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and sits on the advisory boards of the journals Das Argument, Historical Materialism, Cosmopolitiques and Écologie et Politique. He works in the fields of political philosophy, radical philosophy, critical Marxism, and the epistemology of the social and historical sciences, with an emphasis on applications to the fields of political ecology and alternative economic strategies.