Rising powers and peacebuilding: what can Brazil contribute to stability and development?

Brazil’s role in Guinea Bissau, where it has focused attention on underdevelopment as a root cause of instability, points to its wider priority in international peacebuilding, argue Adriana Erthal Abdenur and Danilo Marcondes-Neto.

What kinds of contributions can rising powers make to international peacebuilding? Brazilian leaders have argued over the last decade that the country’s status as a developing country makes it well-suited to respond to challenges elsewhere in the global south. They have also long criticised what has been perceived as the excessive securitization of the United Nations (UN) and the corresponding relegation of international action on development to a second-order priority in peacebuilding.

This does not mean Brazil has shied away from contributing to security approaches where required. Brazil has increased its troop and financial contributions to UN peacekeeping missions: it forms the largest contingent of Force Commanders to the mission in Haiti, leads the naval component of the mission in Lebanon, and a Brazilian commands UN troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo. By demonstrating that Brazil is willing to take on traditional responsibilities in the maintenance of international peace and security, Brazil’s leaders hope to gain legitimacy for the country’s bid for a permanent seat at the UN Security Council.

Brazil has sought to carve out a normative role for itself in its condemnations of the use of force by the US and other NATO countries without authorization of the Security Council. In an attempt to temper the justification provided for interventions by the concept of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), in 2011 Brazil proposed the idea of Responsibility while Protecting (RwP). RwP re-establishes constraints upon the international community’s ability to override national sovereignty in the name of protecting populations. However, this normative discussion has remained very abstract and has lost steam since the concept was first launched.

Brazil has also tried to play a diplomatic role in mediation to address international security challenges. In 2010, Brazil worked with Turkey to broker a deal with Iran to transfer spent nuclear fuel. Nonetheless, the US—which had originally welcomed Brazil’s efforts to ease tensions over the Iranian nuclear programme—withdrew its support at the last minute. While the Brazilian government retains aspirations to play a bigger role in conflict prevention, the episode has made Brazilian leaders more wary of mediating on international security issues beyond its immediate region.

An emerging role for Brazil might be found in Guinea Bissau. The African country’s recurring instability, even 15 years after the end of its civil war, has never come near the centre of the international community’s security agenda. However, because Guinea-Bissau is also a former Portuguese colony, since the 1990s Brazil has taken an interest in, and advocated for, Guinea-Bissau within multilateral organisations—primarily the Community of Portuguese-Language Countries (CPLP) and the UN. After the turn of the millennium, when Brazil’s first Workers’ Party-led government made relations with Africa one of its foreign policy priorities, Lusophone Africa – including Guinea-Bissau – acquired new strategic significance within Brazil’s South-South cooperation.

In 2009, when the Security Council established the United Nations Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Guinea-Bissau (UNIOGBIS), Brazil was able to play a more direct role as part of UN efforts in the country when it assumed the presidency of the Guinea-Bissau configuration of the Peacebuilding Commission in 2007. In this position Brazil sought to promote socioeconomic development initiatives to complement security-oriented efforts despite the fact that much of the international community viewed Guinea-Bissau as a ‘narco-state’ through a narrow security lens.

While Brazil has contributed to security initiatives in Guinea-Bissau, for example through training for military and police forces, it has repeatedly sought to focus international attention on the country’s underdevelopment as one of the root causes of recurring political instability. Heavy reliance on cashew nuts as a cash crop, for instance, has perpetuated low economic diversity and made the local economy both precarious and susceptible to price fluctuations in the international market. In order to address this, Brazil has supplemented its UN role with bilateral development aid as well as South-South multilateral cooperation via the IBSA Fund, a joint initiative set up by the coalition comprising India, Brazil, and South Africa. Development projects in areas such as public health, education, and agriculture have been implemented.

Guinea-Bissau is not yet a success story for Brazil. A coup d’état in April 2013, which led to the suspension of development projects, demonstrated the country’s continued fragility. While its engagement has since resumed, Brazil still needs to garner international support for an approach which seeks to redress a perceived imbalance between security-sector reform and the promotion of socioeconomic development in order to interrupt the cycle of instability in a long-lasting manner. If it is able to do so, leveraging its south-south bilateral cooperation with Guinea-Bissau as well as its position within the UN and other multilateral forums such as IBSA, it may well find the role in international peacebuilding that it has been searching for.

Adriana Erthal Abdenur is a professor at the International Relations Institute of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-RIO). Danilo Marcondes de Souza Neto is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge.

Further reading:

Adriana Erthal Abdenur and Danilo Marcondes de Souza Neto. 2014. “Rising Powers and the Security-Development Nexus: Brazil’s Engagement with Guinea-Bissau” in Journal of Peacebuilding and Development 9, 1-17. Online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15423166.2014.950118#preview

Vincent Foucher. 2013. “Wade’s Senegal and its Relations with Guinea-Bissau: Brother, Patron or Regional Hegemon?” South African Institute of International Affairs, Occasional Paper 123. Online at: http://www.saiia.org.za/occasional-papers/wades-senegal-and-its-relations-with-guinea-bissau-brother-patron-or-regional-hegemon

Andrea E. Ostheimer. 2010. “The Structural Crisis in Guinea-Bissau’s Political System” in African Security Review 10: 4: 45–58. Online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10246029.2001.9627951#preview

“Brazil still needs to garner international support for an approach which seeks to redress a perceived imbalance between security-sector reform and the promotion of socioeconomic development in order to interrupt the cycle of instability in a long-lasting manner. ”

Adriana Erthal Abdenur and Danilo Marcondes-Neto