Negotiating foreign policy from below

Abstract

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.