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As President Barack Obama spoke a few words in Portuguese at Rio de Janeiro's Municipal Theatre drawing upon similarities between Brazilian and U.S. Histories and making reference to Brazilian culture, analysts believe that Brazil's relationship with the United States over trade and foreign policy has warmed as a sustained applause echoed throughout the theatre. "Our journeys began in similar ways," Obama said during his speech. "We became colonies claimed for distant crowns, but soon declared our independence. We welcomed waves of immigrants to our shores, and eventually cleansed the stain of slavery from our land," Obama said. Eduardo Eugenio Gouvea Viera, who represents FIRJAN Brazil's leading industry federation said "It was an historic speech. The message he gave was that the most worthy value to Brazilians and Americans is freedom," Viera told Brazil's official Agencia Brasil reports CNN. Abdias Nascimento, a representative of Brazil's Movimento Negro, said Obama's speech was "profound. Obama succeeded in striking the most sensitive chords in the souls of Brazil and Americans." In stark contrast, former Environment Minister Marina Silva, criticized Obama for abstaining from mentioning the environment and emissions trade negotiations, issues that have divided Brazil and the U.S. Early Sunday, President Obama's entourage made its way to Rio de Janeiro's infamous favela (a Portuguese word for "shanty") Cidade de Deus, whose social issues of drug wars and racial disparity were memorialized in the film "City of God" oringally "Cidade de Deus," directed by Fernando Mirreille and Katia Lund that was nominated for an Academy Award. The Obamas' visit to the favela was a symbolic if not an historic gesture that was well received by the Brazilian public in a nation known for its strong African heritage but a less than favorable record on racial and class discrimination. Favela residents cheered the arrival of the first family and Cidade de Deus schoolchildren watche

A question of interest to scholars of International Politics concerns the manner in which weaker states attempt to influence stronger ones. This article offers a case study of one recent exercise in coalition-building among southern powers as a vehicle for change in international relations. It analyzes the global interests, strategies and values of India-Brazil-South Africa (IBSA) and the impact of the IBSA Dialogue Forum on the global order. Five major points are outlined. First, common ideas and values shape the global discourse of the emerging coalition. Second, soft balancing based on a value-driven middle power discourse is a suitable concept to explain IBSA's strategy in global institutions. Third, institutional foreign policy instruments such as agenda-setting and coalition-building are pivotal elements of IBSA's soft balancing approach. Fourth, the trilateral coalition suffers from considerable divergence of interest in global governance issues and limited potential gains of its sectoral cooperation, particularly in trade, due to a lack of complementarities of the participating economies. Finally, despite these obstacles the IBSA Forum has impacted the global order in recent years as a powerful driver for change. India, Brazil and South Africa have contributed to an incremental global power shift in their favour. The southern coalition also induced a change in the character of multilateralism and, in particular, its procedural values.

"The concept of "new social movements," characterized by a focus on identity, cannot readily be transferred to a Latin American context. Latin America never experienced the postmaterialist turn that led some to call certain European social movements "new." In addition, as the case of black organizing in Brazil demonstrates, identity-based Latin American social movements are much older than the literature suggests. What was indeed a Latin American novelty of the 1980s was the massive emergence of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In the case of Brazil, these organizations emerged in response to new financial opportunities provided by international donors and the coercive and paternalistic actions of states, a reality that the concept of new social movements is unable to capture. Both the long history of identity-based organizing and the emergence of NGOs can be explained by focusing on political opportunities and changing protest repertoires."

Based on ethnographic research conducted with the Network of Healthy Communities in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, this article examines how grassroots leaders have sought networks and partnerships as a strategy to amplify and strengthen their work, particularly

Has democracy promoted poverty alleviation and equity-enhancing reforms in Brazil, a country of striking inequality and destitution? The effects of an open, competitive political system have not been straightforward. Factors that would seem to work toward

"There is a widespread perception that power is shifting in global politics and that emerging powers are assuming a more prominent, active and important role. This article examines the role of emerging powers such as China, India, Brazil and South Africa (BASIC) in climate change politics and the extent to which their rise makes the already difficult problem of climate change still more intractable-due to their rapid economic development, growing power-political ambitions, rising greenhouse gas emissions and apparent unwillingness to accept global environmental 'responsibility'. By reviewing the developments in global climate politics between the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and Rio+20, this article unsettles the image of a clear shift in power, stressing instead the complexity of the changes that have taken place at the level of international bargaining as well as at the domestic and transnational levels. Within this picture, it is important not to overestimate the shifts in power that have taken place, or to underplay the continued relevance of understanding climate change within the North-South frame. Emerging powers will certainly remain at the top table of climate change negotiations, but their capacity actively to shape the agenda has been limited and has, in some respects, declined. Even though emerging powers have initiated and offered greater action on climate change, both internationally and domestically, they have been unable to compel the industrialized world to take more serious action on this issue, or to stop them from unpicking several of the key elements and understandings of the original Rio deal. At the same time, developing world coalitions on climate change have also fragmented, raising questions about the continued potency of the 'global South' in future climate politics"

Participatory democracy has been studied as an auxiliary to state processes and as an institutional and cultural part of social movements. Studies of the use of participatory democracy by the Zapatistas of Mexico and the Movimento Sem Terra (Landless Movement-MST) of Brazil show a shared concern with autonomy, in particular avoidance of demobilization through the clientelism and paternalism induced by government programs and political parties. Both movements stress training in democracy (the experience of "being government") and the obligation to participate. Detailed examination of their governance practices may be helpful to communities building democratic movements in other places.

this change at the top level arose from years of steady electoral growth (notably, in Brazil and Uruguay), while in other countries it was the fruit of social movements capable of overthrowing neoliberal parties and governments (Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuel

Comparative analysts argue that democracies spend less on military policies than authoritarian states, a claim that was applied to Brazilian electoral democracy by Hunter (1997). In fact, Brazil behaves as an outlier and military spending has continued to

Experiences with racism and age negatively affect how Afro-Brazilians in Salvador and So Paulo rate democracy. Older cohorts are more likely to rate democracy high compared to younger cohorts who rate it as low. Respondents in Salvador tend to rate democracy lower than respondents in So Paulo. Moreover, interviews reveal that as citizens believe they are not accorded full rights, they do not agree that Brazil's political system is fully democratic. Studies examining democracy in Brazil and racial politics throughout the diaspora would benefit from examining racialized experiences of citizens, rather than simply including the demographic variable of race. It is these experiences that affect rating of democracy rather than ascribed notions of race.

Moyano's story was movingly retold by Villa El Salvador Mayor Jaime Zea exactly 16 years later, at the World Conference on the Development of Cities held last week in Porto Alegre in the south of Brazil. http://www.aupeace.org/node/2914 Zea had tak

In this article we first trace the ideological development and collective framing of the World Social Forum (WSF) as a non-hierarchical gathering for collaboration and networking within the global justice movement. We then analyze the consequences of organizational design, thematic resonance, and technological innovations implemented to produce more open and horizontal collaboration. We do this by conducting two-mode network analysis of organizations that facilitated sessions and workshops during two separate meetings (2003 and 2005) of the WSF in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Our findings indicate that organizational affiliations were less hierarchical in 2005, but we uncover mixed results from analyzing patterns of interaction produced by individual organizations and groups of organizations. Finally, we discuss the implications of such macro-level innovations on the dynamics of multi-organizational fields (collaboration, coalition building, and thematic resonance) and the contributions of such an approach to the study of transnational organizational networks.

This article analyzes Brazilian grand strategy under President Luiz Incio Lula da Silva. During Lula's eight years in office, he pursued a multitiered grand strategy aimed at hastening the transition from U.S. and Western hegemony to a multipolar order more favorable to Brazilian interests. Lula did so by emphasizing three diplomatic strategies: soft balancing, coalition building, and seeking to position Brazil as the leader of a more united South America. During Lula's time in office, this strategy successfully raised Brazil's profile and increased its diplomatic flexibility, but the country still faces several potent strategic dilemmas that could complicate or undermine its geopolitical ascent.

This paper analyzes the case of Porto Alegre, Brazil as a counter-hegemonic global city. Porto Alegre is a city with no particular relevance to neoliberal globalization that, nevertheless, was launched to a global scale by transformations in local governance. New mechanisms of deliberative democracy captured the attention of social actors constructing a movement of globalization from below, making Porto Alegre the de facto capital of the World Social Forum. In this paper I focus on the educational policies created in the city, which expanded the social imaginary in education and are a key component of Porto Alegre's 'globalization'.

"In this article we discuss the failure of social movement theories to adequately understand and theorize locally based, grassroots social movements like the landless workers movement in Brazil, 'livability movements' in third-world cities, and living wage movements in the USA. Movements such as these come to the attention of most social movement analysts only when the activists who participate in them come together in the streets of Seattle or international forums like the World Social Forum. To date, it is the transnational character of these protests that have excited the most attention. Building on scholarship that looks at the link between participatory democracy and social movements, this article takes a different tack. We show how some social movements have shifted their repertoire of practices from large mass events aimed at making demands on the national state to local-level capacity building. It is the local struggles, especially the ways in which they have created and used institutions in civil society through extending and deepening democracy, that may be the most significant aspect of recent social movements, both for our theories and for our societies. Yet these aspects have received less attention, we believe, because they are less well understood by dominant social movement theories, which tend to focus on high-profile protest events. We look at the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement and the Justice for Janitors Campaign in Los Angeles to illustrate the important terrain of civil society as well as the role of community organizing."

"The military regimes of 1964-1989 in Chile, Argentina, and Brazil implemented a code of legitimacy that appealed to various secular beliefs rooted in civil society at the same time that they fostered a common myth of religious legitimation-that of defending "Western Christian civilization." It was under this umbrella that military groups and religious actors faced each other and/or established alliances. In this cultural politics, religious actors that had previously been excluded from the power game sought to support and/or be recognized by the state as allies in the construction of a belief in the legitimacy of the dictatorships."

This article explores the implications of transitions to democracy for the economic policymaking process in developing countries. Democracy is supposed to give citizens oversight of their political leaders, while providing leaders with electoral incentive