Dear colleagues,

‘Authoritarian neoliberalism’ in Brazil? Geographical perspectives on the causes and consequences of the rightward turn

 

Convenors:

Robert Coates, Sociology of Development and Change, Wageningen University

Matthew Richmond, Visiting Fellow, LSE Latin American and Caribbean Centre, and Research Associate, Centro de Estudos da Metrópole, São Paulo

 

The links between neoliberal ideology, populism and nationalism have long fascinated critical scholars. Stuart Hall’s Gramsci-inspired ‘great moving right show’ focussed on Thatcher’s state-instituted free-market doctrine, legitimated around ‘a veneer of active popular consent’ (see Huff and Van Sant, 2018). Some three decades later, with neoliberalism under pressure from globally interconnected economic, political, and environmental crises, the rightward ‘show’ is in full swing. An emerging body of work suggests ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ has arrived in Brazil – home to the world’s largest rainforest, mining and agri-business enterprises, and some of its biggest and most unequal cities (c.f. Bruff and Tansel, 2019; Saad-Filho, 2018).

 

Building on previous work exploring how leftist governments combined developmentalism with neoliberal elements (c.f Morais and Saad-Filho, 2011), Saad-Filho (2018) argues the election of new far-right President Jair Bolsonaro is characterised by the attempt to deepen unpopular neoliberal reforms. Unlike Brazil’s mainstream right, Bolsonaro combines neoliberal objectives with strongman leadership and a radical conservative and nationalistic discourse explicitly centred on attacks against internal and external “others”. For Huff and Van Sant (2018), the ‘rhetorical and superficial condemnation of “elite politics”, “corporate power” and “business as usual”’, by political actors like Bolsonaro, ‘often masks the deepening entrenchment of extractive capitalism, environmental colonialism, and the militarization of everyday life’. Increasing precarity and discontent alongside a decline in collective bargaining has been “highjacked” by the far right (Saad-Filho, 2018), helped along by social media manipulation with scant regard for the truth of social injustice and ecological degradation. With a history of military rule in Brazil, instability is also accompanied by anti-democratic elements in government as well as violent rhetoric, potentially prefiguring heightened state violence against both social movements and criminals (or those wrongly accused of being so).

 

These questions also have socio-spatial dimensions, linked to processes of development and political action in diverse urban and rural settings. Notwithstanding significant improvements in service provision and legal and regulatory frameworks associated with the City Statute, Brazil’s cities remain highly unequal, precarious and insecure (Maricato, 2017). While the far right draws much of its electoral support from middle and upper classes concentrated in urban areas and resentful of redistributive reforms, Bolsonaro also tapped into widespread working-class discontent about issues like crime (Richmond, 2018) and slow progress in addressing elite privilege in areas like pensions and tax (Garmany and Pereira, 2019). From autonomist-inspired urban social movements, to anti-corruption protests, to urban occupations by groups like the MTST, cities also remain key sites for street mobilisations by both left- and right-wing groups.

 

Brazil’s status as one of the world’s most urbanised countries is of course contrasted by radical rural change and internal migration. ‘Agro-neoliberalism’ (Ioris, 2018) and mineral extractivism (c.f. Raftopoulos and Poweska, 2017) expanded under all recent governments, with concessions granted to powerful ruralistas intent on removing environmental regulation. Bolsonaro’s authoritarian disregard for Indigenous rights accompanies his plans for Amazon roadbuilding, mining in indigenous territories, agribusiness expansion in the Amazon and Cerrado, and further dam building in the mould of Belo Monte, in a country with a terrible record on dam maintenance as the Brumadinho and Mariana disasters attest. All of this adds to a sense of a global (if non-uniform) market push for extractive and consumption-based growth at the expense of socio-spatial equality and biodiversity. However, such encroachments provoke resistance from peasant, indigenous and quilombola movements, as well as calls for the Brazilian left to rethink developmentalism in favour of radical rural and urban democratisation (Acosta and Gudynas, 2018; Scoones et al., 2017).

 

This session interrogates the notion of authoritarian neoliberalism in Brazil from a geographical perspective. We welcome wide-ranging papers shedding light on:

 

–      the conditions that gave rise to Brazil’s current political, economic and ecological conjuncture

–      spatial analyses of poverty, inequality, urban (in)security and economic crisis

–      geographies of electoral support for Bolsonaro and of right-wing social movements

–      the likely socio-spatial impacts of Bolsonaro’s political agenda, in urban and rural areas

–      environmental deregulation, biodiversity loss and threats to indigenous peoples in the Amazon, Cerrado, Mata Atlântica and beyond

–      emerging geographies of resistance to authoritarian neoliberalism

–      intimate linkage between rural and urban struggles under authoritarian neoliberalism in Brazil, and how these struggles might be unified

 

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask] by Wednesday 13th February.

 

 

References cited:

 

Acosta, A. and Gudynas, E. (2018). The Extreme Right in Brazil and Lessons for Renewing the Left in Latin America, Americas Program of the Center for International Policy: https://www.americas.org/the-extreme-right-in-brazil-and-lessons-for-renewing-the-left-in-latin-american [accessed 29 January 2019]

Bruff, I., & Tansel, C. B. (2019). Authoritarian neoliberalism: trajectories of knowledge production and praxis. Globalizations, 16(3), 233–244.

Garmany, J., & Pereira, A. W. (2019). Understanding contemporary Brazil. London; New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Huff, A. and Van Sant, L. Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology, Entitle blog, November 2018: https://entitleblog.org/2018/11/29/authoritarianism-populism-and-political-ecology/ [accessed 28 Jan 2019].

Ioris, A. A. R. (2017). Agribusiness and the neoliberal food system in Brazil: frontiers and fissures of agro-neoliberalism. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge.

Maricato, E. ‘The future of global peripheral cities’, in Angotti, T. (Ed.) Urban Latin America: Inequalities and Neoliberal Reforms, London: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 41-61.

Morais, L., & Saad-Filho, A. (2011). Brazil beyond Lula: Forging Ahead or Pausing for Breath? Latin American Perspectives, 38(2), 31–44.

Raftopoulos, M., & Powęska, R. (Eds.). (2017). Natural resource development and human rights in Latin America: state and non-state actors in the promotion of and opposition to extractivism. London: Human Rights Consortium, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Richmond, M. A. (2018) Bolsonaro’s Conservative Revolution, Jacobin, https://jacobinmag.com/2018/10/brazil-election-bolsonaro-evangelicals-security [accessed 30 Jan 2019].

Saad-Filho, A. (2018) ‘Privilege versus democracy in Brazil’, Jacobin, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/10/brazil-election-bolsonaro-haddad-lula-pt-democracy [accessed 26 Jan 2019]

Scoones, I., Edelman, M., Borras, S. M., Hall, R., Wolford, W., & White, B. (2018). Emancipatory rural politics: confronting authoritarian populism. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 45(1), 1–20.