It is rather undisputed that the United States has maintained its position of global primacy since the end of the Cold War. According to the current Bush- administration and the US National Security Strategy, this power will be used to fight terrorists as well as to encourage free and open societies on every continent. With this position held by the government, it becomes essential to know more about the US power to better understand world politics. What opinions an American foreign policy elite has on international politics in general and on the US power in particular, can be consideredto have a certain influence on the US governmental policy making and is hence an interesting object of analysis for an improved knowledge of the US power position. This thesis aims to analyse different foreign policy elite interpretations, both of the present US situation and of what can be expected in the near future. In addition to opinions on the power position itself, the question addressed is whether there seem to be any impact of modern theories of international politics among the elite and if these theories are relevant at all for policy- orientated estimations. The result of the analysis indicates at least some impact of neorealism, neoliberalism and social constructivism, while there tend to be no influence of feminist IR-theory. However, as a base assumption in this thesis, most modern theories of international politics are conceived as partly related to a realist tradition in the field of academics, and this might diminish the influence of the separate theories among the elite. Accordingly, nor can extreme theoretical differences be confirmed, neither can the differences be disregarded. A majority of the foreign policy elite representatives describe the present US position as unrivalled in all critical dimensions, with an unsurpassed military, economic, technological and cultural power. The opinions on the expected power position in the near future are more diverging and suggest different courses of development. However, as long as the US keeps the precedence of interpretation and attracts others to American values and ideas, in addition to a solid base of economic and military strength, the US power position will most probably last for a foreseeable future.

Este trabalho tem como objetivo analisar a política externa do governo Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002), a partir do estudo de seus condicionamentos internos e externos, da sua concepção programática e da atuação diplomática implementada, nos âmbitos regional, bilateral e multilateral. Tem como eixo central de análise a consideração de que a política externa do governo Fernando Henrique Cardoso foi marcada pelo apogeu e crise da matriz neoliberal de inserção internacional do Brasil que, desde o início dos anos 1990, tinha como pressupostos adaptação do Brasil ao processo de globalização e a adoção de políticas neoliberais (sobretudo privatizações, desregulamentação e abertura econômica). A nova diplomacia procurou construir a imagem do Brasil como uma liderança regional que procurava uma inserção global, como compensação à vulnerabilidade econômica externa, bem como procurou uma maior aproximação com os países desenvolvidos, uma postura de participação e aceitação das bases e regras do ordenamento internacional e um afastamento do discurso terceiro-mundista. Ressaltando as oportunidades geradas para os países que aderissem à nova ordem, essa política externa orientava-se pelo otimismo em relação às transformações internacionais e às reformas neoliberais. Entretanto, mesmo sob a matriz neoliberal, a política externa do governo Cardoso tem de ser explicada a partir de três matizações. Em primeiro lugar, já havia ocorrido um ajuste no discurso neoliberal com o governo Itamar Franco, cadenciando o ritmo da abertura e das reformas implementadas desde o início da década. Em segundo, a adesão ao neoliberalismo não foi integral, mostrando a persistência de traços do paradigma desenvolvimentista. A terceira matização corresponde à denominada inflexão e crise de matriz, que começou a operar a partir de 1999/2000, na qual a política externa foi sendo alterada. Foi nesta inflexão que o discurso da globalização assimétrica, ensaiado algumas vezes até no período de auge da matriz neoliberal, foi assumindo posição central na política externa brasileira. / The objective of the present work analyzes the international politics of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration. It includes a study on the administration’s internal and external conditions, its planned agenda, and its actual implemented diplomatic performance in the regional, bilateral, and multilateral political arenas. Central to the text’s analysis is the consideration that the international politics of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso administration was characterized by the apogee and crisis of the neoliberal matrix of Brazil’s global insertion which, since the early 1990s, had presumed Brazil’s adaptation to the globalization process and adoption of neoliberal politics (among them, privatization, deregulation, and liberalization). The new agenda sought to construct Brazil’s image as a regional leader in pursuit of global insertion, serving both to compensate for its vulnerable external economy as well as to create a closer approximation to developed nations. Brazil was to be placed in a position of participation and acceptance of the basis and the rules of the international order and to be distanced from the third-world rhetoric. Because of new opportunities for countries that adhered to the new order, Brazil’s international politics were encouraged by the optimism stimulated by international transformations and neoliberal reforms. However, even under the neoliberal matrix, the international politics of the Cardoso administration needs to be more thoroughly explained by the following three clarifications. Firstly, an adjustment had already occurred in the neoliberal discourse during the Itamar Franco administration, initiating a series of liberalizing reforms implemented since the early 1990s. Also, the adhesion to neoliberalism was not entirely supported, revealing how the ideological traces of the developing-country paradigm still persisted. The third clarification corresponds to the aforementioned change and crisis of matrix, which began to occur in 1999/2000, when international politics were undergoing transitions. It was in this turnover that the discourse on asymmetric globalization, which was addressed a few times until the height of the neoliberal matrix, assumed a central position in Brazilian foreign affairs.

As relações Brasil-África do Sul apontam para uma aproximação em novos termos desde o final dos anos noventa. Fazendo parte de um movimento mais amplo de redefinição das relações de poder no ambiente internacional, não é coincidência que tal desfecho tenha ocorrido ao final da bipolaridade. Do ponto de vista estrutural, retoma-se a busca de inclusão de potências médias, dentre as quais o Brasil e a África do Sul, no Conselho de Segurança da ONU, bem como uma maior participação nos processos decisórios globais de comércio. Na perspectiva conceitual ocorreu a mudança paradigmática para as noções de segurança humana e de desenvolvimento sustentável baseado na capacitação do homem. Nesse cenário de debate de reforma das instituições internacionais, despontaram candidatos de esquerda nos governos brasileiro e sul-africano, com suas agendas voltadas para a satisfação das necessidades sociais, incluindo combate ao HIV e à fome. A redefinição teleológica da ONU e a inserção pró-ativa brasileira acabou culminando numa agenda global pro misero liderada pelo Brasil. Sobre essas bases, ocorreu a reaproximação entre Brasil e África do Sul, negociada bilateralmente, mas formalizada numa aliança trilateral que incluiu a Índia, resultando no chamado IBAS, uma parceria de natureza multitemática, fortemente conotada com o humano e o social. / The Brazil-South África relations point out an approximation in new terms since the nineties ending. Being part of a bigger movement of redefinition of the power relations in international ambient, it is not coincidence that it had happened within de final of the bipolarity. From a structural view, there is a recall for inclusion of middle power potencies, like Brazil and South Africa, in the UN Security Council, as like as demanding more participation in the global decisional processes about trade. By the conceptual perspective, a paradigmatic change had happened in the notions of human security and sustainable development based on men capacitating. In this setting of debate about international institutions reform, candidates from left parties has became presidents in Brazil and South Africa, implementing agendas directed for the satisfactions of the social needs, like the fight against HIV infection e starvation. The teleological redefinition of UN and the Brazilian pro-active insertion has culminated in the pro misero global agenda under Brazil leadership. On these bases, has occurred the reapproximation between Brazil and South Africa, bilaterally negotiated, but formalized under a trilateral alliance that included India, resulting the named IBSA, a multi-thematic coalition, strongly denoted with the human and social ideals.

[pt] Partindo das rupturas políticas - simbolizadas pelo ano de 1989 - nos planos teórico e prático, esta pesquisa busca estudar a imaginação política crítica contemporânea. Tomando tal fio condutor, o presente estudo intenta criticar o estado-centrismo de alguns teóricos (Rosenberg, Colás e Panitch) de hoje. Ainda, propõe um diálogo entre outros dois críticos (Walker e Holloway), visando apreender tais limites imaginativos e sugerir - com auxílio da prática de certos movimentos sociais - outros modos de pensar os dilemas da soberania estatal e sua inclusão e exclusão do espaço político. / [en] Beginning from the point of political ruptures - symbolized by 1989 - on the theoretical and practical levels, this research critically explores the contemporary critical political imagination. Following this line of thought, this investigation aims at criticizing the state-centrism of some current theorists (Rosenberg, Colás and Panitch). Moreover, it proposes a dialogue between two other critics (Walker and Holloway), in order to explore and appreciate such imaginative boundaries and to suggest - with the help of certain social movements` practices - other ways of thinking through the dilemmas of state sovereignty and its inclusion and exclusion of the political space.

In 2005 the Swedish social democratic government settled a defense treaty with Saudi Arabia. Ten years later, a new Social democratic government ends the treaty. This thesis will study the Social democratic party’s motives behind their actions regarding the treaty. Kjell Goldmanns theory regarding the three fields of interest concerning state’s foreign policy, security policy, economy and international values, will serve as the theory and operationalization of this thesis. The thesis will operate an analysis of motives to study the main motives of the party’s actions during four events. After examining the actions of the Social democrats in media and the parliament, the thesis found that the party had changed their main motives between 2005 and 2015. Their main motives in 2005 were economical and in 2015 were their main motives international values, which reaches the conclusion that the Social democrats have changed their motives regarding the treaty.

Neoconservatism has long had a tenuous relationship with International Relations theory. Despite an abundance of explanatory material and its influence in US foreign policy, few works in IR have attempted to build a stand-alone theory out of it. Furthermore, previous work on the topic has resulted in an under-developed and poor understanding of the movement’s core ideas. The thesis redefines neoconservatism as a trifecta of i) a set of explanatory ideas on world politics, ii) an approach to foreign policy, and iii) an ideology that stems from the European Enlightenment, all the way to the present day. Using this expanded conceptualization, the thesis builds a theory out of what can broadly be considered an ideology. The theory takes the form of an ideal-type construct and emphasizes hegemony in the international system. It offers an explanation for the causes of alliances, as well as regional and systemic conflicts. The theory also adopts a prescriptive function and offers an account of foreign policy analysis. It is highly recommended that the assumptions of the theory that are laid out here be tested in future work.

While not uncontested, the finding that liberal democracies rarely, if ever, fight wars against each other represents one of the seminal discoveries of international relations (IR) scholarship. Nevertheless, 'democratic peace theory' (DPT) – the body of scholarship that seeks to explain the democratic peace finding – still lacks a satisfactory explanation for this phenomenon. In this thesis, I argue that a primary source of this failure has been DPT's failure to recognize the importance of collective identification and trust for the eventuation of the 'liberal peace'. Building on existing DPT scholarship, most of it Realist or Rationalist in its inspiration, but also employing insights from Constructivist and Cognitivist scholarship, I develop a new model of how specific forms of collective identification can produce specific forms of trust. On this basis, I elaborate a new explanation of the liberal peace which sees it as arising out of a network of trusting liberal security communities. I then elaborate a new research design that enables a more rigorous and replicable empirical investigation of these ideas through the analysis of three historical cases studies, namely the Canada-USA, India-Pakistan, and France-Germany relationships. The results of this analysis support the plausibility of my theoretical framework, and also illuminate four additional findings. Specifically, I find that (1) IR scholarship needs a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between agents and structures; (2) 'institutionalized collaboration' is especially important for promoting collective identification; (3) DPT scholarship needs to focus more attention on the content of the narratives around which collective identification takes place; and (4) dramatic events play an important role in collective identification by triggering what I term catharses and epiphanies. I close the thesis by reviewing the implications of my findings for IR and for policymakers and by suggesting some areas worthy of additional research.

The thesis explores the nature of executive leadership in international organisation. Executive leadership is often praised or blamed for outcomes in international agencies, and yet, the disciplinary literature fails to incorporate the executive head into institutional analyses of politics, power, and change over time. The thesis aims to address this lacuna and the role of executive leadership by analysing if and how it matters in international politics. The thesis draws on a composite literature from other areas of political research to establish what is known. A review of the literature and prevailing approaches to leadership studies reveals that an overwhelming majority of scholarship relies on exclusively structural or agential accounts of leadership. This somewhat determinist literature has distorted the limited knowledge on the nature of executive leadership in international organisation. Approaches that focus on agency-based explanations argue that executive heads matter greatly. Approaches that utilise structure to interpret executive leadership find that it matters little, if at all. Rejecting these narrow frameworks, the thesis uses a dialectical approach, supported by critical realism, to analyse four cases of executive leadership in the World Trade Organization to address the research questions and lacuna. The case studies draw on over 70 years of multilateral trade governance to reveal a set of core and subsidiary findings about politics, power, executive leadership, and change over time. The thesis argues that executive leadership matters, but that how it matters is contingent on the executive head and the circumstances of their term. By incorporating the executive head into the disciplinary literature, the thesis argues politics, power, and change over time can be more accurately understood.

[pt] A dissertação compreende a colonização das Américas como marco fundamental da política internacional moderna e defende a necessidade de engajamento da disciplina de Relações Internacionais com os povos indígenas, sobretudo ao compreender o caráter global das suas lutas políticas. Nesse contexto, o presente trabalho investiga as dimensões globais e coloniais das ameaças aos territórios indígenas, sobretudo as estratégias de dominação operadas no Território Indígena do Xingu, ameaçado pelas fronteiras econômicas do agronegócio e pela extração de madeira ilegal. Tendo a análise do bandeirantismo como fio condutor da dissertação, o trabalho está estruturado em quatro movimentos. O primeiro movimento apresenta o panorama histórico do Território Indígena do Xingu, por meio da intersecção entre a antropologia histórica crítica, a etnoarqueologia e a perspectiva pós-colonial, a fim de compreender as ameaças e resistências ao bandeirantismo e as consequências contemporâneas da situação colonial na primeira Terra Indígena demarcada no Brasil. O segundo movimento analisa, por um lado, a centralidade do bandeirantismo na colonização brasileira e, por outro, o seu papel na formação do capitalismo global e na subjetivação de um modo de vida imperial, baseado no eurocentrismo e no racismo. Em um terceiro momento, analisa-se estratégias coloniais de dominação para com os povos indígenas e seus territórios em dois momentos históricos distintos, identificando a continuidade, sob novas configurações, da ―guerra de conquista‖ após a independência. Por fim, o quarto movimento analisa as tensões territoriais e as estratégias de dominação que afetam o Território Indígena do Xingu na contemporaneidade, compreendendo como os discursos e práticas da política internacional operam localmente por meio da articulação entre as gramáticas da economia política e as hierarquias coloniais. Dessa forma, a dissertação argumenta que as ameaças aos territórios indígenas são consequências das próprias dinâmicas dos padrões de poder globais, forjadas a partir da colonização das Américas e da consolidação do capitalismo. As invasões aos territórios indígenas durante os séculos XVII e XVIII, orquestradas pelo projeto colonial e realizada pelos bandeirantes, foram fundamentais para o processo de estruturação dos padrões de poder globais, cujas dinâmicas violentas do modo de vida imperial constituem a base da política internacional moderna. Assim, engajar-se com a luta dos povos indígenas pelos seus territórios representa um engajamento com os atores e as disputas centrais da política internacional. / [en] The dissertation understands the colonization of the Americas as a fundamental milestone of modern international politics and defends the need for the discipline of International Relations to engage with indigenous peoples, especially by understanding the global role of their political struggles. In this context, it investigates the global and colonial dimensions of the threats to indigenous territories, especially the domination strategies operated in the Xingu Indigenous Territory, threatened by the economic frontiers of agribusiness and illegal logging. With the analysis of bandeirantismo as the guiding thread of the entire dissertation, the work is structured in three movements. The he first movement presents the historical panorama of the Xingu Indigenous Territory, through the intersection between critical historical anthropology, ethnoarchaeology and the postcolonial perspective, in order to understand the threats and resistances to bandeirantismo and the contemporary consequences of the colonial situation in the first demarcated Indigenous Land in Brazil. The second movement analyses, on the one hand, the centrality of bandeirantismo in Brazilian colonization and, on the other, its role in the formation of global capitalism and in the subjectivation of an imperial way of life, based on Eurocentrism and racism. The third movement analyzes the colonial strategies of domination towards indigenous peoples and their territories in two different historical moments, identifying the continuity of the "war of conquest" after independence. Finally, the fourth movement analyzes the territorial tensions and strategies of domination that affect the Xingu Indigenous Territory in contemporary times, understanding how the discourses and practices of international politics operate locally through the articulation between the grammars of political economy and colonial hierarchies. In this way, the dissertation argues that the threats to indigenous territories are consequences of the dynamics of global power patterns, forged from the colonization of the Americas and the consolidation of capitalism. The invasions of indigenous territories during the 17th and 18th centuries, orchestrated by the colonial project and carried out by the bandeirantes, were cricial to the process of structuring global power patterns, whose violent dynamics of the imperial way of life constitute the basis of modern international politics. Thus, engaging with indigenous peoples struggle for their territories represents an engagement with the central actors and disputes of international politics.

No abstract available / Political Sciences / M. A. (International Politics)