Next Workshop: Agency and Geopolitics – Brazilian State-Formation and the Problem of Eurocentrism in International Historical Sociology, with Pedro Salgado (Uberlândia)

August 17, 2021 –
From Political Marxism And The Social Sciences

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The Center for Advanced International Theory (CAIT) and the Political Marxism Research Group will be hosting a presentation by Dr. Pedro Salgado Dutra (Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Economics and International Relations at the Federal University in Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, Brazil), on ”Agency and Geopolitics – Brazilian State-Formation and the Problem of Eurocentrism in International Historical Sociology’.

The talk will be held on Monday 1 April, 3-5pm, at Pevensey 1, 2A1 (Sussex).

Abstract: Narratives that explain the rise of modern international order through structural processes, such as the ‘globalisation of international society’ or ‘intersocietal combination’, face difficulties to capture the peculiarities of state formation beyond Europe. To overcome this limitation, this paper develops a historicist reading of Political Marxism to argue that class agency remains analytically productive to understand the social and geopolitical struggles that shape diverse extra-European cases of transition towards modern sovereignty in their historical specificities. This argument is developed through a reconstruction of the Brazilian historical experience within a transatlantic perspective. Here, transformations in statehood need to be understood as an outcome of disputes between its landowning oligarchy against Portuguese colonialism, geopolitically mediated by British informal empire throughout the early 19th Century. This moves narratives of state-formation beyond the transposition of European experiences to other contexts by stressing the agency of non-European subjects in the making of their own history.

Bio: Pedro Salgado is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Economics and International Relations at the Federal University in Uberlândia (Minas Gerais – Brazil), working within the sub-fields of Critical IR Theory, International Historical Sociology, and International Political Economy. He completed his PhD in the IR department at the University of Sussex, entitled ‘The Peculiarity of Brazilian State-Formation in Geopolitical Context: The Challenge of Eurocentrism in International Relations and Political Marxism’, supervised by Prof. Benno Teschke and Prof. Ben Selwyn. Pedro also holds an MA degree in International Relations from the University of Sussex, and BAs in Law (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) and Social Sciences (State University of Rio de Janeiro).