Introduction: Turnaround and let-down: making sense of Brazil and Africa after the surge

By improving political connections under a common South-South aegis, promoting new trade opportunities and expanding the disbursement of significant amounts of development cooperation, Brazil quickly secured a foothold of its own in Africa between 2003 and 2014. However, in the face of a political meltdown and of controversial judicial investigations back home, Brazil’s inversions in Africa have since then essentially collapsed. This abrupt turnaround calls for a more critical exegesis of the years of expansion. What were the main successes and failures of Brazil’s overall strategy towards Africa? And what does the dramatic change of events, with Brazil moving from a pivotal player to an almost invisible one in merely half a decade, tell us about the possibility of a new pick-up of interest for Africa? This introduction to the edited volume takes stock of the main trends in previous literature over the character and content of Brazil’s foreign policy towards the continent and sets the ground for the following chapters.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

From opportunity seeking to gap filling: Reframing Brazil in Lusophone Africa

This chapter inquires whether Brazil’s headways in Africa over recent years were organic in nature and in content or, in fact, were achieved at the expense of other previously established actors. By reframing Brazil’s agenda towards African lusophone countries in juxtaposition to the perceived external downturn of Portugal, the propitious context and consequences of a new player on the continent can be best brought into evidence. The push-and-pull forces enacted by both Brazil and Portugal towards Lusophone Africa are explored through the aftermath of the 2012 military coup in Guinea-Bissau and the adhesion of Equatorial Guinea to the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP) in 2014. The chapter offers a reinterpretation of Brazil’s net gains in Africa and argues for its fragility and susceptibility to changing political-economic cycles.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio