Participation, Critical Support and Disagreement: Brazil-Africa Relations from the Prism of Civil Society

Abstract

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.