The last two chapters will focus on one project , and the other three will provide a broader account of Brazilian South South cooperation. Here, what is lost in terms of depth is hopefully gained in terms of breadth. Had I focused only on the cotton project, for instance, I probably would not have had a real notion of the heterogeneity and shifting character of this phenomenon called “Brazilian SouthSouth cooperation”, and might have generalized an experience that turned out to be in fact quite particular, even within Embrapa itself. This is due not only to the way I entered the field, but to the way I left it. In other words, it has to do with the highly politically charged character of the phenomena that I am proposing to describe here . As with other ethnographies of developers, many things – important things – had to be either addressed indirectly or left out of writing altogether for ethical reasons. As Rottenburg remarked, differential access to information is itself part of the game in development networks, so there will always be a potential for interference and even harm by the ethnographer’s “external” gaze.20 My transit from field to desk – a step that, when completed, would normally mean the conclusion of the PhD project cycle – has been therefore shaped by a prospect: the reverse path, from desk back to field. In fact,procona flower transport containers I have had a previous experience with an academic publication going back to the field in a way that was, from my perspective, “unfaithful” to it.
I know already of a couple of field interlocutors who have quoted some of my writings about Brazilian South-South cooperation. This dissertation is therefore not a detached account, but, to use Jensen and Rödje’s Deleuzian-Strathernian idiom, a “specific exploratio[n] of multiple concrete interfaces at which … experimentation with the real takes place” . This way, it can be brought into generative connections with other academic works on similar phenomena, and hopefully also with the field: as these authors have further suggested, “if the relation between the explanation and explained is destabilized and rendered flexible, then one’s ambition cannot be to achieve a more or less adequate ‘matching’ of the two. Instead the aspiration must be to create associations that mutually enrich and reciprocally transform each part of the material” . By thus nurturing this dissertation’s relational potentials vis-à-vis both academia and the field in a direction that I see as productive for both domains, I hope it can be a step towards a more robust representation of / intervention on the emerging practical and discursive interfaces of South-South cooperation. This chapter looks at South-South cooperation as an emergent trend within the international development landscape. What was described in the vignette with which I opened the Introduction is not something one would encounter as frequently, say, even ten years ago. Both Brazil and China have been entertaining cooperative relations with various parts of the African continent since decolonization and even before that, but not with the same extension, purposefulness, systematicity, or visibility of today. And even though many of the processes, institutions, and individual actors engaged in contemporary South-South cooperation did exist previously, I suggest that the interfaces into which they are being brought together since the last decade or so are, indeed, emergent.
This claim is based on Brazil’s recent rise as a provider of cooperation, but the growing body of works on other emerging donors indicate that some of the trends I observed may be more generally shared among them. As virtually all commentators, academic and not, of these proliferating global interfaces remarked, the agents and processes that have been brought together under the rubric of SouthSouth cooperation are multiple, shifting, ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory. South-South cooperation is itself a contested term, not only in academia but in the field: various actors and institutions currently struggle with or against each other to codify it and stabilize their own account of what South-South cooperation is or should be. But in spite of the complexity of stakes and narratives, a claim that has been widely shared by those purporting to speak about, or in behalf of, it in Brazil and elsewhere is that it is something different than the development aid provided by Northern donors and multilateral institutions during the last half-century or so. This claim to difference is found both in self-accounts by emerging donors and in views on them by Northern donors and the recipients of cooperation. Difference may have opposite signals: competition or complementarity, positivity or negativity. Thus, one of the common framings of South-South cooperation has been neoimperialism; in this view, emerging donors would be merely reproducing the rapacious intentions and behaviors of their Northern counterparts, and even more perniciously because couched in a cloak of Third World solidarity. Another option is a negative assessment of emerging donors by those who stand by development aid: that through their heterodox and unaccountable practices, new donors would be jeopardizing the good work achieved by traditional aid thus far. A third perspective, which shares the latter’s sympathy towards traditional aid, views South-South cooperation as an embryonic, incomplete phenomenon, that has yet to catch up with the more mature form of development cooperation found in the global North and in multilateral institutions such as the World Bank or UNDP.
Finally, and closing the circle of this four-legged matrix, critics of Northern development aid may see in emerging donors a hope out of the latter’s neocolonial grasp over the global South. Between these poles, in practice there are multiple hybrids and combinations. During fieldwork, the most prevalent views involved the latter two; rarely did I come across manifestations of the first two among Brazil’s African partners. In Brazil and elsewhere in the emerging global South , even official self-accounts do not always fit squarely in one such options. In its multiple manifestations in the various governmental and nongovernmental arms involved in the provision of South-South cooperation, emerging donors’ views on themselves may also span polar ends: ranging from an oppositional, Third-Worldist discourse that they should remain independent from the North and frame their practices against those of traditional development aid , to a conciliatory, North-friendly narrative that South-South cooperation is here to complement, rather than to replace or oppose, aid delivered by traditional donors. Although my interlocutors in Brasília used to be much more explicit about these kinds of self-accounts than those implementing cooperation activities on the ground, I found more or less coherent versions of these two views among all of them – not rarely, ambivalently combined in the same person. The question of difference between South-South cooperation and its North-South counterpart found in the field also characterizes this dissertation’s engagement with the available literature. In the absence of an ethnographically and theoretically robust body of ethnographic works on emerging donors, this chapter’s privileged academic interlocutors will be studies based on development initiatives led by Northern donors or multilateral agencies. Two mainstream currents will be privileged here: works inspired by Foucault’s notions of discourse and governmentality , and actor-based approaches .The debates prevalent in this literature drew attention to three inter-related analytical domains, which this chapter will approach: historical genealogies of development cooperation; organizational architecture and dynamics; and discourse and de-politicization. Section 1 will sketch a brief historical account of South-South cooperation based on its relations with traditional development aid,procona valencia going back and forth between global scales and Brazil’s more situated standpoint. Against the backdrop of this situated genealogy, Sections 2 will set the terms for a discussion, to be pursued further in this dissertation, about whether, and in which sense, would South-South cooperation imply a re-politicization of a phenomenon marked, according to much of the anthropological literature on development aid, by de-politicization. Section 3 will provide an account of the organizational architecture and dynamics of Brazilian South-South cooperation, based on data collected during fieldwork and on secondary sources.
The chapter will conclude by claiming that this emerging phenomenon calls for an analytics capable of attending to open-endedness, ambivalences and contradiction, as well as to the historical density of particular South-South relations. I suggest that generative insights in this direction may be found in discussions on the postcolonial question in Latin America and elsewhere; the next chapter will put some of these to work with respect to Brazil-Africa relations.Brazil and other emerging donors are hardly newcomers to the international development scene. From its early beginnings, the Western development apparatus has included them, but mostly in the condition of beneficiaries of aid. This experience as recipients is relevant for their current transition to providers of cooperation, but this relation is not a simple one to track empirically . Moreover, South-South cooperation provided by individual countries is never an isolated, unidirectional effort, but part of a broader historical tide that has also included other emerging donors. This is a story about a changing world order, about an emerging multi-polar world that would have outgrown the regulatory shoes crafted by the hegemonic geopolitics that spanned much of the twentieth-century. It is a story told by many narrators, including – and claims to North-South opposition notwithstanding – the international development community itself. How would the story of international development, told by so many in the academic literature , look like from the other side of the North-South hemispheric divide? In historical approaches to South-South cooperation, a common way to begin has been with the emergence of the global development apparatus at large and the “making of the Third World” that ensued . From this perspective, SouthSouth cooperation shares Northern development’s two chief, interrelated historical vectors: the emergence of the global multilateral system in the aftermath of the World Wars, within which developing countries participated initially as subaltern parties and recipients of aid; and decolonization in Africa and Asia, which led to the formation of what would become the Third World. It was not until then that broad-based alignments across what is now best known as the global South could emerge as a formal engagement between independent nation-states. Against this broader historical canvass, Mawdsley singled out more particular “drivers or contexts” in her comprehensive work on emerging donors: “socialism, the NonAligned Movement, the United Nations South-South cooperation initiatives, the oil price rises in the 1970s, and European Union expansion” . The last two have little relevance for the case of Brazil, and in the others, it has participated quite differently than other emerging donors such as China, India, or Russia. A loyal, though at times ambivalent, member of the Western block along with most of Latin America, Brazil has been less permeable to the Cold War juggling for allegiances that marked decolonization in much of Asia and Africa.Cold War geopolitics was, on the other hand, key for understanding the early engagements within and between Asia and Africa during decolonization. Besides the former Soviet Union and China, smaller socialist countries such as Cuba, Vietnam and those in Eastern Europe participated in pioneer experiences of South-South collaboration in various domains, from financial to military, from technical to diplomatic . The non-aligned movement was also a direct outgrowth of Cold War politics, but emerging around a commitment not to align with either of the two blocs. If Harry Truman’s iconic 1949 Point Four program is widely referenced in both the academic and the development literature as marking the birth of international development,the 1955 Bandung Conference is often raised as a key historical landmark for horizontal cooperation between Third World nations.Even if the Conference’s original twenty-nine members – all from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East – were not equally committed to neutralism, they closed ranks firmly around the question of decolonization.Both in Bandung and in its sequel, the Non-Aligned Movement, Brazil and most of Latin America participated only as observers. As independences were gradually achieved and most of the original Bandung and non-alignment leaders eventually left power, the politico-ideological character of early alignments across the nascent Third World gradually gave way to pragmatic drives of a geopolitical and economic order . As will be seen, even if foreign aid was not a major theme in the Non-Aligned Movement, the purchase of the latter’s political language in contemporary South-South cooperation, including in Brazil, is remarkable.