Peripheral Realism as colonial strategic culture for the global-South? On the critical concept reception in Brazilian foreign policy

The critical scholarship on the history of the realist tradition of International Relations (IR) – and the whole academic entrepreneurship – have denounced its American, Eurocentric, or Western at most (inter)subjective orientation. Amidst other theoretical approaches in the post-positivist turn in IR, it has exposed the colonial functions this discourse has played in the self-conception of both imperial powers and countries of the periphery of the system – mostly former European colonies – and their effective engagement in the game of world politics. A postcolonial turn has followed, multiplying efforts at producing emancipatory knowledge from the margins of the IR Western core. This paper investigates the reception of the concept of "peripheral realism," originally tailored by the Argentinean author Carlos Escudé in the 1990s, in the Brazilian foreign policy community. Though the concept is one of the most significant contributions to IR coming from Latin America in the last three decades, the idea has not been as impacting in Brazilian foreign policy discourse. Sometimes it is understood as an "entreguista" conception of abdicating autonomy in foreign policy in favor of an automatic alignment with the United States. In other opportunities, it gets mistaken for amoral pragmatist policies not fitting national traditions concerning its commitment to international law and the peaceful resolution of controversies. After all, few discrete passages used to justify a more consistent alignment with the great regional power register the limited effective influence of the concept on the political thought of the national foreign policy community. The contentious reception of the Argentinean concept, alongside the broader category of "realism," testifies to the resistance against the naturalization of a postcolonial project for Latin America, specifically the socialization of core and peripheral identities and roles. Still, this opportunity to check the critical reception of a subsidiary realist logic to the periphery may alternatively open emancipatory possibilities for the appropriation of the concept of realpolitik in the periphery – domestic politics and foreign policy – as a principle of prudence in the unresting search of more successful strategies of autonomy and development.