Brazil’s position towards the War in Ukraine sheds light on fundamental ambiguities of Brazil’s contemporary self-representations. While Brazil has traditionally defined itself in relation to its identification with the West, it has simultaneously recognized and often claimed its significant place in the “Global South”, either as a Latin American country or as part of coalitions balancing against a western-centric order, such as BRICS. These multiple self-representations have favoured foreign policy analyses that emphasize the country´s ambiguous stance in the international order. This article proposes to take Brazil´s non-alignment as an analytical prism to reflect on the in-between spaces and categories that emerge from polarizing narratives of the liberal international order. By adopting the theoretical lens of liminality in International Relations (Rumelili, 2012), the article shows how the narrative on the “new Cold War” in the context of the war in Ukraine (re)produces liminal spaces as different actors, such as Brazil, are unsuccessfully forced into established social categories, which in turn exposes the very instability of polarities in international politics, such as West and East or North and South, and of the liberal world order itself.

Brazil has come in for a lot of criticism for some of the positions it has taken in response to what has been called a period of ‘permanent crisis’ in world politics. European leaders in particular have shown themselves to be perplexed about what they consider to be contradictory positions in response to two crises in particular: the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the Israeli war in Gaza in response to the Hamas terrorist attacks on 7 October 2023. Yet, the Brazilian response to these crises should not have come as a surprise. Using the conceptual frameworks of Complexity and Human Systems Dynamics, as well as complexity mapping as an illustrative model, this paper argues that the Brazilian positions to these crises are both predictable and internally coherent. What is lacking is mutual knowledge and understanding of these positions. Increasing such understanding is critical as a way of working together more effectively stopping the waste of political capital on issues over which outsiders have little to no influence.

This study aims to provide an overview of the consequences arising from the Brazilian military junta’s adoption of Institutional Act No. 5 in December 1968. In particular, it highlights the effects of departing from the rule of law and the subsequent implementation of methods and measures that characterise the phenomenon known as authoritarian constitutionalism. The study systematically examines the effects of the Act on the mechanisms that safeguard freedom and human rights. The analysis demonstrates that AI-5 serves as a prime example of legal nihilism and played a significant role in the institutionalisation of state terror during Brazil’s period of illiberal rule. This period reinforced the State’s long-standing institutional instability and the ongoing challenges to the legitimacy of power and the rule of law that persist to this day.

Since the 1950s, when the deliberate settlement of the Amazon began, with a rapid influx of people, the Brazilian Amazon has faced various threats because of the demands associated with unsustainable economic development. During the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, environmental policies were marginalized, including through the legislative and regulatory dismantling of forest protection and the financial sapping of environmental institutions, which favored uncontrolled logging of equatorial forests. Therefore, deforestation increased yearly during the Bolsonaro administration, accompanied by increased greenhouse gas emissions. That is why the article aims to answer the question of what role the international community can play in protecting the Amazon rainforest, given its essential role in regulating the climate regionally and globally. The research methods include formal institutional analysis of relevant legal documents and decision analysis. The research and analysis of states’ individual and collective actions lead to the conclusion that economic pressure has been applied to influence the Bolsonaro administration.