Anthony Wynne Pereira | Kings College London - Inglaterra

Abstract

What explains the uneven capacity and quality of the Brazilian state, which combines agencies with high capacity and technical proficiency with others that are low in both? The development of a relatively high-capacity state in Brazil, albeit one with a large degree of variation in capacity across federal agencies and between the federal, state and local levels of government, remains under-explained in the literature on political development and state formation. The approach of this research project is to treat the development of the Brazilian state not as a single, unilinear process, but rather as a series of inter-related yet distinct organizational trajectories. The project proposes to use archival material that will reveal the particular circumstances of key moments in the history of four emblematic national state institutions. The focus here is on political debates, the actors involved in those debates, the logic embedded in the organizations in question, and the purposes that the organizations were supposed to embody and pursue. The selected organizations are the National Development Bank, the Federal Police, the Federal Public Ministry, and the Ministry of Social Development. The archival work on these organizations will be carried out in the first nine months of 2017. Permission to use the archives of the BNDES (located in Rio) and the Federal Police (Iocated in the National Archive in Rio) has already been obtained, while permission to research at the archives of the Federal Public Ministry and the Ministry of Social Development (both in Brasília) is anticipated and does not appear to be problematic. The purpose of the proposed stay at the Institute of International Relations (IRI) at the University of São Paulo (USP) from 1 March until 30 June 2017 is to take advantage of the highly qualified specialists working on related and complementary research topics there. I have been invited by my co-PI Dr. Janina Onuki to give a short workshop at IRI from 15 May until 19 of June, 2017. This workshop, offered for the graduate students, will be related to my research project and called "Inter-American Politics". It relates Brazilian state formation to the formation of other states in the Americas, and analyzes how states were influenced by common external events such as the Great Depression, the Cuban Revolution, the Cold War, and globalization. In addition, I will give a presentation at IRI on my research topic, and I am planning to participate in research group discussion on Brexit and the European Union negotiations, inside the Jean Monnet Project coordinated by IRI-USP. (AU)