One step forward and two steps back: addressing Brazil's structural constraints to proceeding with the Global South as a political project.

While the Global South emerged as a collective political project in which states could pursue a more autonomous path to development through South-South Cooperation (SSC), there is no clear consensus on what SSC is, preventing the development of shared international guidelines and impacting on the States involved. Furthermore, in the case of Brazil, cooperation programmes are tied to governmental agendas rather than State agendas, preventing the emergence of a continuous political project centred on the Global South. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to examine these gaps by recalling the formation of Global South consciousness and the political changes in Brazil using a structuralist approach. We aim to present an up-to-date picture of the country's challenges by demonstrating how the lack of conceptual agreement affects SSC and what the longstanding problems are that make it difficult to turn the Global South and SSC into a State agenda in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]