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With reference to Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s plea to move beyond the single story, we take the complexities of the ‘Global South’ meta category as a starting point to explore what abandoning the quest for neatness can look like. Building on the main arguments put forward across this volume, our contribution centres around questions of position(alitie)s and self-reflexivity to engage with the persistent ambivalences of the ‘Global South’. We reflect on the unease stemming from explicit and implicit claims connected to the ‘Global South’ category and discuss its fluidity and plurality across space and time. Ultimately, we suggest embracing the notion of polyphony for approaching the ‘Global South’. A focus on polyphonies allows us to connect specific meanings and their implications with a broader take on the inherent complexities of macro categories. Working with and through polyphonies also helps us to recognise and engage with the evolving agency behind different uses of the ‘Global South’.

Having transformed its hinterland to become a major exporter of agricultural commodities, Brazil has, since the mid-2000s, set up a range of South–South cooperation (SSC) initiatives to export its agri-food policies and technologies to othe countries, mainly in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Both the domestic agricultural policies and SSC have been scrutinised and shaped by interactions with civil society actors, from peasant associations and trade unions to rights-based non-governmental organisations. This article explores modes of interaction and interdependence between different civil society and state actors in the context of SSC relating to food security and agricultural development. It analyses changes and continuities in civil society engagement, and mobilisation and de-mobilisation dynamics. Recently, the government’s de-prioritisation of the South–South agenda has been accompanied by very limited civil society activism. The article discusses why this needs attention and the challenges that need to be considered to reinstate productive state–civil society dynamics.

No marco analítico que concebe a política externa brasileira (PEB) como política pública e, portanto, submetida a controles democráticos, e com base nos recentes estudos que evidenciam a pluralidade de atores e agendas e a complexificação do processo decisório em política externa, busca-se aqui analisar as iniciativas participativas existentes no marco da PEB e a qualidade democrática do diálogo entre Executivo e sociedade civil nas agendas de política externa. O trabalho se apoia nos avanços dos estudos sobre participação democrática e busca identificar similaridades e diferenças em formatos e dinâmicas das iniciativas de participação no âmbito da PEB, verificando assim a existência de tendências e determinantes. Para tanto, são analisadas iniciativas participativas em quatro âmbitos da política externa, quais sejam, negociações internacionais multilaterais comerciais, integração regional, cooperação sul-sul para o desenvolvimento e direitos humanos.

In the past decades, postcolonial states like Brazil, India and South Africa have become major players in the field of international development cooperation, giving rise to competing citizen expectations about what this new role could and should be. This chapter uses the case of growing civil society mobilisation around the BRICS-led New Development Bank (NDB) to explore current domestic politics influencing foreign policy and the way these politics shape (and are shaped by) unfolding processes of value formation. By unpacking the ongoing negotiations and disputes between state institutions and organised civil society in Brazil, India and South Africa regarding the role played by these countries in the field of development cooperation, I argue that the intensification of collective action and citizen mobilisation represents the politicisation of this agenda domestically and reflects a possible shift in citizens’ expectations around foreign policy in countries that are simultaneously postcolonial and ‘rising power’ states. I also show how organised citizens’ emerging political values are shaped by conflicting expectations of postcolonial states’ development actions at home and beyond borders. Finally, I argue that while engaging with the external actions of these states, civil society groups in India, Brazil and South Africa bring to the transnational arena their multiple domestic political values and the political possibilities of voice and direct action.

While in the past decade there have been serious attempts to describe and understand the renewal of Brazil-Africa relations during the first decade of the twenty-first century, less has been said on Brazilian civil society role in participating and influencing this agenda. Seeking to enrich the growing scholarship shedding light on the institutional and/or partisan politics dimensions of the ‘African turn’ in Brazilian foreign policy under the Workers’ Party (PT), this chapter proposes to unpack Brazilian civil society engagement with this agenda. Combining foreign policy analysis, participation studies and transnational social movements theory, the chapter discusses who in Brazilian civil society sought to participate, influence and/or resist governmental South-South cooperation (SSC) initiatives with the African continent, the main issues driving this mobilisation and the coexisting forms and modes of civil society engagement around the Brazil-Africa agenda. Through actor and contentious politics tracing, this chapter maps the multifaceted, multi-scalar engagement and the historically bounded national and transnational political opportunities opened for Brazilian civil society actors to co-construct and/or resist official initiatives. The chapter also offers a glimpse of the current participation politics in the post-PT era.

The increased political significance of South-South Cooperation (SSC), globally and within Brazilian Foreign Policy, has produced a variety of SSC accountability-related disputes. This paper unpacks the ways in which accountability has been problematised and negotiated in the last decade between the competing stakeholders and publics of Brazilian SSC along three intersecting dimensions: geopolitical, bureaucratic and state-society relations.

Back in 2014, the BRICS created their New Development Bank (NDB), a new multilateral development bank geared to fund sustainable infrastructure in emerging and developing economies. This chapter maps out the key institutional, governance, and lending innovations pragmatically brought by the NDB, while critically locating those innovations in the longue-duree of development finance landscape and the re-emergence of South–South Cooperation. It argues that the Bank has yet to take on the knowledge and political challenges of institutional engineering and experimentation to develop ambitious thinking and robust institutional mechanisms to deal with the economic, social, and environmental development imperatives of financing sustainable infrastructure in the Global South.

In 2011, Brazil finally approved a Freedom of Information (FOI) Act that recognises and regulates the right to public information. However, scholars have paid insufficient attention to its impact on Brazilian foreign policy. How has the Brazilian ministry of foreign affairs responded and adapted to this new law? Has it been adequately implemented, and if not, in what ways? Also, how do these challenges in promoting transparent foreign policy connect to the broader debate about democratising Brazilian foreign policy? This article analyses the implementation of the FOI Act by mapping all the requests for information refused by the foreign affairs ministry since 2012, and exploring its legal and political justifications for withholding information. We further argue that the ministry’s adherence to the law is an important factor in the democratisation of foreign policy-making in Brazil.

Brazil is known for being one of the most unequal countries in the world. Since the 1990s many scholars, both in Brazil and those analyzing the country¹s trajectories from abroad, have been describing a decrease in country¹s inequalities. In this article we discuss the possible role of expanding citizen participation in policy making processes and overseeing their implementation in inequality reduction. To do so we explore the connections between the participatory mechanisms and the implementation of policies that are expected to reduce inequalities in two different participatory experiments that have taken place in Brazil: São Paulo municipal health councils and the country¹s participation in the Open Government Partnership (OGP). We argue that, despite their thematic and historical differences, there are good reasons to believe that these two participatory experiences sustained the expectations concerning their role in contributing to reduced inequalities. However, these cases suggest that their contributions were less determined by the quality of the participatory process, as defined by the deliberative democracy literature, than by the nature of political alliances and mobilization processes that supported these spaces.

The chapter explores, through Foreign Policy Analysis, Brazil’s trajectory in South–South development cooperation (SSDC), comparing President Dilma Rousseff’s first administration (2011–14) with Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s two terms (2003–10). In the context of presidential activism, increasing South–South relations and traditional donor prioritization of SSDC, Brazilian SSDC gained unprecedented attention under Lula. Despite the slowdown of presidential diplomacy, new priorities, budgetary cuts and the more challenging political and economic context during Rousseff’s mandate, coalitions have continued to mobilize, ensuring continuity in certain sectors of cooperation and expansion into new areas. The intersections among technical cooperation, financial cooperation and trade have also increased, while the national development cooperation framework remained institutionally and legally fragile.

In June 2009 inter-ethnic clashes between Han and Uyghur groups in the Chinese province of Xinjiang claimed 197 deaths and thousands of disappearances in less than a week. By April 2013, new inter-ethnic clashes had claimed more than 20 further deaths, and sporadic violence continues until today. In spite of their frequency, these clashes seemed to surprise the global public, as both the Uyghur and the dynamics of ethnic issues in China are relatively unexplored issues in global politics.