In the midst of a rapidly shifting global economy, Brazil has emerged as a powerful new player on the geopolitical stage. Against all odds, the Latin American nation managed, in just three years, to repay a 2002 $15.5 billion IMF bailout loan thanks to aggressive economic restructuring and a series of alliances that have placed it at the center of political and economic power in the region. From the outside, Brazil is a poster child for neoliberal capitalism. Yet inside the country, the lives of the Brazilian people are still marked by vast inequities in wealth and access to social services--a striking disparity with the nation's newfound power in the global economy. In June of 2013, protests against the increasing costs of public transportation swelled to mass demonstrations against the Rousseff government's failure to address this disparity, leading many to wonder whether the popular movements in Brazil may be just powerful enough to shift the nation's influence towards a wholly new economic model based in regional integration. The New Brazil explores this disparity. Will the nation serve as the glue that holds together the Latin American states, distancing themselves from the neoliberalism of the United States and Canada? Or will Brazil simply become another world superpower, able to subject the rest of Latin American to its will? Only time will tell. Raul Zibechi is a journalist and social-movement analyst based in Montevideo, Uruguay. He is the author of numerous books including Dispersing Power and Territories in Resistance, both published by AK Press.

Chronicling the dramatic history of the Brazilian Amazon during the Second World War, Seth Garfield provides fresh perspectives on contemporary environmental debates. His multifaceted analysis explains how the Amazon became the object of geopolitical rivalries, state planning, media coverage, popular fascination, and social conflict. In need of rubber, a vital war material, the United States spent millions of dollars to revive the Amazon's rubber trade. In the name of development and national security, Brazilian officials implemented public programs to engineer the hinterland's transformation. Migrants from Brazil's drought-stricken Northeast flocked to the Amazon in search of work. In defense of traditional ways of life, longtime Amazon residents sought to temper outside intervention. Garfield's environmental history offers an integrated analysis of the struggles among distinct social groups over resources and power in the Amazon, as well as the repercussions of those wartime conflicts in the decades to come.

The essential introduction to the comparative analysis of national grand strategies.

The Palgrave International Handbook of Gender and the Military provides a comprehensive overview of the multiple ways in which gender and militaries connect. International and multi-disciplinary in scope, this edited volume provides authoritative accounts of the many intersections through which militaries issues and military forces are shaped by gender. The chapters provide detailed accounts of key issues, informed by examples from original research in a wealth of different national contexts. This Handbook includes coverage of conceptual approaches to the study of gender and militaries, gender and the organisation of state military forces, gender as it pertains to military forces in action, transitions and transgressions within militaries, gender and non-state military forces, and gender in representations of military personnel and practices. With contributions from a range of both established and early career scholars, The Palgrave International Handbook of Gender and the Military is an essential guide to current debates on gender and contemporary military issues.

This book looks at the development of thinking about security in Brazil between 1930 and 2010. In order to do so, it develops a new framework for thinking about intellectual history in Brazil and applies it to the development of knowledge on security in that country. Building on the Gramscian literature on ‘late modernization’ and ‘conservative revolution’ and drawing on the idea of ‘Emotional Theory of Action’ proposed by Brazilian sociologist Jessé Souza, this book sets out to establish an innovative framework with which to analyse the development of ‘thinking about security’ in Brazil in three specific historic contexts. This theoretical framework is then used to argue that one specific discourse of Brazilian identity has been the main source of knowledge production in that country since the 1930s. In doing this, the book offers thought-provoking arguments about the role of intellectuals in Brazil and reassesses the exclusionary ideas embedded in the politics of identity and security. This book not only introduces a novel framework to analyse intellectual production outside the core, it also sheds light on how security has been historically thought of outside the core and will be of interest to students and scholars of International Relations, Critical Security Studies and Latin American Studies.

Rare Earth Frontiers is a work of human geography that serves to demystify the powerful elements that make possible the miniaturization of electronics, green energy and medical technologies, and essential telecommunications and defense systems. Julie Michelle Klinger draws attention to the fact that the rare earths we rely on most are as common as copper or lead, and this means the implications of their extraction are global. Klinger excavates the rich historical origins and ongoing ramifications of the quest to mine rare earths in ever more impossible places. Klinger writes about the devastating damage to lives and the environment caused by the exploitation of rare earths. She demonstrates in human terms how scarcity myths have been conscripted into diverse geopolitical campaigns that use rare earth mining as a pretext to capture spaces that have historically fallen beyond the grasp of centralized power. These include legally and logistically forbidding locations in the Amazon, Greenland, and Afghanistan, and on the Moon. Drawing on ethnographic, archival, and interview data gathered in local languages and offering possible solutions to the problems it documents, this book examines the production of the rare earth frontier as a place, a concept, and a zone of contestation, sacrifice, and transformation.