This chapter explores how domestic political factors related to oil and gas resource nationalism and its path-dependency effect influence energy transition capabilities. Methodologically, the chapter adopts a qualitative case study approach in paired oil-rich countries, Kuwait, (UAE), Mexico, and Brazil.

It explores how the origins of each country’s resource nationalism have influenced their abilities to adapt to a post-hydrocarbon economy. Countries that have adopted social-based policies such as Kuwait and Mexico, transition to renewable energy more slowly in comparison with countries that have adopted market-based policies like the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Brazil. Understanding these factors expands the literature on energy-rich countries beyond the concepts of the resource curse and rentier states, allowing academics to propose theories that are better suited to the heterogeneous nature of energy-rich countries.

This chapter explores digital sovereignty claims in Brazilian activism on Mastodon, the most relevant development of federated social media. The free and open source software (FOSS) movement has always advanced digital sovereignty discourses, emphasizing bottom-up struggle for control and autonomy over technology. Federated social media are the open source response to the rise of corporate digital platforms and their proprietary business model. However, most narratives about FOSS struggles, including Mastodon, emerge from the core of the global capitalism. The specific appropriations of digital sovereignty discourses by Mastodon activists in the Global South and, in particular, in the BRICS are still understudied. This is even more relevant because of the history of technological sovereignty in the global periphery, in which bottom-up activism has been much closer to the state than in most FOSS narratives. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, and country data, the chapter contributes a nuanced understanding of how Brazilian activists articulate and shape digital sovereignty discourses. It finds out that Brazilian activism represents a step toward the politicization of the FOSS movement, but still attaches little value to the geopolitical dimension of social media struggles, departing from the historical contribution of FOSS activism in the Global South.

In a world of weaponized interdependence, middle powers have policy choices that can enhance their autonomy. However, having this policy space is not enough. In order to turn the policy space into policy enactment, domestic politics has to align in a particular way. This chapter considers India and Brazil as examples of “middle powers” and analyzes their capacity to enact autonomy and safeguard their digital sovereignty. The authors argue that when independent institutions’ interests are incorporated into the policymaking process and are not usurped by the parliamentary (political) process, they observe the enactment of autonomy-enhancing policies. Brazil’s and India’s data localization policies are illustrative case studies. While Brazil and India are both open democracies with a technoeconomic landscapes characterized by a similar technoeconomic landscape with a hybrid mixture of foreign-owned and domestically owned companies, they have adopted different data localization policies. The authors argue that the divergent paths of Brazil and India are due to the nature of the policymaking process. India’s policymaking incorporated the interests of independent institutions. In contrast, Brazil’s parliamentary process usurped policymaking power from its independent institutions and has not yet granted the mandate and tools to either existing or necessary new institutions, such as regulatory agencies, to address this emerging and already pressing set of issues. Thus, for countries to enact policies to enhance their digital sovereignty, the interests of independent institutions must be incorporated, and their power must be increased.

This chapter lays the theoretical foundation for the book by disentangling the myriad discourses and interpretations of digital sovereignty from the perspective of the Global South and emerging power alliances. It argues that BRICS countries symbolize the “rise of the rest” in an increasingly multipolar world, their digital policies critical to the future shape of global internet, and digital governance. In this book, the idea of digital sovereignty itself is viewed as a site of power contestation and knowledge production. Specifically, the chapter identify seven major perspectives on digital sovereignty in a complex discursive field: state digital sovereignty, supranational digital sovereignty, network digital sovereignty, corporate digital sovereignty, personal digital sovereignty, postcolonial digital sovereignty, and commons digital sovereignty. The chapter highlights the affinities and overlaps as well as tensions and contradictions between these perspectives on digital sovereignty with brief illustrative examples from BRICS countries and beyond. While a state-centric perspective on digital sovereignty is traditionally more salient especially in BRICS contexts, increasing public concern over user privacy, state surveillance, corporate abuse, and digital colonialism has given ascendance to an array of alternative perspectives on digital sovereignty that emphasize individual autonomy, indigenous rights, community well-being, and sustainability.

The main purpose of this chapter is to study gender inequality within the inventive activities in three emerging countries – Brazil, India, and Mexico – using the framework of knowledge economics. It aims to determine which factors that influence a growing propensity of women to be inventors help reduce gender inequality in knowledge economies. In addition, the chapter contributes policy proposals that aim at increasing female participation in inventive activities. The key questions for this research are as follows: What are the characteristics and dynamics of female inventive activities in emerging countries with different economic development paths? What factors influence women’s propensity to invent? Based on the results of the econometric model proposed in this chapter, the inventive variables, such as the stock of prior knowledge, the size of inventor teams, the type of patent holder, technological field, and the presence of foreign researchers – positively influence women’s propensity to become inventors in a differentiated manner in each country. These findings validate how some variables could influence the inclusion of a greater number of women in research teams and the deployment of their potential inventive activities. The chapter proposes policies aimed at reducing gender inequality in the knowledge economy.

This chapter examines how religious transformations in Latin America over the past few decades have influenced the rise of the right. Analyzing a five-wave panel study from the “Democracy on the Ballot” project, the authors show that Bolsonaro won much of his support from evangelicals and Pentecostals during the final month of the campaign. While they find little support for the notion that attending church or discussing politics there influenced vote choice, church leaders’ endorsements of Bolsonaro did in fact matter. Other relevant factors included attitudes on the importance of religion in one’s own life, one’s approval of church engagement in elections, anti-LGBT attitudes, and authoritarian parenting values.

This chapter examines the emergence of constitutional law in South America, showing how military politics in the Spanish and Portuguese empires had enduring impact on the formation of citizenship regimes in this region. It focuses on Brazil and Colombia as two divergent but also overlapping models of militarized constitutionalism. It assesses how both states acquired military and semi-imperialist features as their independence was consolidated. It also discusses how national processes of integration and citizenship formation were conducted by armies, such that, in Brazil in particular, the army was an early trier of democratic institution building.

This chapter studies the effect of Rede de Vizinhos (RdV or “Neighbor Network”) community policing program in Santa Catarina, Brazil, which aims to improve public safety and trust between citizens and police by facilitating real-time information about crime and public safety through dedicated WhatsApp instant messages groups with the participation of a police officer. We randomly allocated neighborhoods that would see the policy implemented into treatment and control groups, with the former being exposed to an information campaign through which we publicized induction meetings using Facebook. Despite reaching roughly 10 percent of Santa Catarina’s population, our study does not find a differential participation rate in the RdV campaign regions. Further, we don’t find evidence of increased perceptions over the police or improvements over criminal rates in treated neighborhoods. Our results suggest that despite their promise, (technology-enabled) community policing programs may fail to deliver substantial impacts given saturation dynamics and diminishing marginal returns – our baseline surveys indicated that 52 percent of respondents had heard already about the RdV program with 13.1 percent actively participating.

This chapter delves into evolving policy and regulatory dimensions shaping the emergence of hydrogen in the Latin American energy landscape. With a focus on three regional leaders – Chile, Colombia and Brazil – it explores the distinct strategic paths these countries are charting as they seek to position themselves in the burgeoning hydrogen economy. Chile, Colombia and Brazil, aiming to capitalize on their abundant (renewable) resources, have moved swiftly to outline ambitious hydrogen strategies and legislation. Despite this progress, as the chapter reveals, important regulatory challenges still limit their ability to fully tap the hydrogen well. Even as these obstacles persist, interest in hydrogen projects continues to soar, as exemplified by the numerous developed or in-development pilot projects pragmatically leveraging the existing frameworks. Ultimately, while clean hydrogen promises to usher in an era of sustainable development for Latin America, regulatory efforts matching policy ambitions will continue to be needed to successfully transition from promise to actual production.

This chapter presents a novel electoral strategy by which landowners have successfully influenced policymaking in democratic Brazil: a multiparty congressional caucus known as the Bancada Ruralista. It shows how agrarian elites finance the campaigns, encourage other producers to support, and subsidize the work of like-minded legislators independently of their partisan affiliation, as well as how legislators of agrarian origin collaborate across partisan lines. The chapter argues that Brazil’s Agrarian Caucus is the product of agrarian elites’ collective efforts to build a channel of electoral representation to protect their interests under democracy in a context of high political fragmentation. The threat of radical land reform during the democratic transition prompted landowners to engage in electoral politics. However, high political fragmentation among the agrarian elite rendered party-building unfeasible. The chapter discusses the advantages of an electoral, candidate-centered, multipartisan strategy over other strategies available to economic elites in democracies such as lobbying or party-building, and illustrates these advantages through the analysis of the Forest Code reform of 2012.

If one is looking for the mechanism connecting war to state formation in Latin America, the obvious place to start is the Paraguayan War (1864-1870), the single most deadly war in the history of the region. This chapter provides the most detailed discussion of this case in the state formation literature and a narrative covering state formation in the River Plate Basin (i.e., Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay). I discuss how earlier, lower intensity wars affected the balance between central and peripheral elites and take a brief detour to cover the effect of the Siege of Montevideo on Uruguayan politics, potentially explaining the current Uruguayan exceptionalism in terms of its state capacity levels. I then illustrate how preparation for war led to incipient state formation amidst polarization in all contenders of the Paraguayan War and discuss the war itself, illustrating how the result of contingent battles affected the domestic fate of the state formation. Finally, I discuss how war transformed political parties and the military, two key institutions, setting the basis for long term state capacity growth in the allies, and its decline in Paraguay.

This chapter contributes to understanding market design by examining the construction, mobilization, and contestation of facts and fetishes within an ongoing design process, introducing the notion of ‘factishing’ a market. The premise is that facts and fetishes are manufactured and interconnected, shaped by different market actors, and serve different purposes. This combination empowers multiple market actors to make market design work in practice and catalyses market innovation. This conceptualization draws on the empirical case of the Brazilian cancer pill, phosphoethanolamine. This substance was originally intended to ‘cure cancer’ and became the centre of a protracted conflict involving patients, researchers, a public university, physicians, courts, the regulatory agency, and legislators, intensely covered by national media outlets, culminating in the pill’s emergence in the market as a dietary supplement.