Description
The paper problematizes Brazil’s foreign policy of ‘active non-alignment’ in the context of the war in Ukraine, not to assess its strategic adequacy, but as a critical vantage point from which to interrogate a global order whose rules and representations the so-called Global South has been largely prevented from co-authoring. Drawing on critical geopolitics, we interpret Brazil’s stance as part of a broader contest over the very constitution of the geopolitical field and the criteria of legitimate participation within it. Amid renewed discourses of a “new Cold War,” which demand alignment and reproduce binary logics, the paper asks: what can we learn about world politics from a state´s foreign policy that claims to play while refusing to play by the rules? To explore this, the paper interrogates the enduring metaphor of the chessboard, often presented as a neutral image of international politics. We argue that this metaphor operates as a performative and disciplinary device that naturalizes hierarchy and polarization while silencing alternative imaginaries of the political. By situating Brazil’s foreign policy within this contested space, we highlight how the Global South both inhabits and disrupts the epistemic order that defines the “game” of geopolitics itself.
