Brasil en los mecanismos interregionales afro-suramericanos:

El diálogo interregional existente entre África y América Latina ha sido marcado por momentos de fuertes interacciones y otros de distanciamiento. A partir del año 2006 se inicia un período de aceleración de estos lazos marcado por la creación del foro Cumbre América del Sur-África (ASA) y por la revitalización de la Zona de Paz y de Seguridad en el Atlántico Sur (ZOPACAS) impulsados por Brasil. Este artículo cuestiona la relevancia estratégica que tuvieron estos foros interregionales afro-sur-americanos en la política exterior de Brasil y en su estrategia de inserción internacional durante el período 2006-2013, año de la última Cumbre del ASA en Malabo y a partir del cual se inicia una etapa de desaceleración. Se argumenta que el dinamismo que conoció el diálogo interregional entre las dos costas del Atlántico Sur ofreció nuevos espacios de acción en los cuales Brasil ejerció un liderazgo promoviendo a la vez sus propios intereses e impulsando una difusión de ideas (ideational diffusion) a través de una acción retórica.

Gender Attitudes in Africa: Liberal Egalitarianism Across 34 Countries

This study provides a first descriptive mapping of support for women’s equal rights in 34 African countries and assesses diverse theoretical explanations for variability in this support. Contrary to stereotypes of a homogeneously tradition-bound continent, African citizens report high levels of agreement with gender equality that are more easily understood with reference to global processes of ideational diffusion than to country-level differences in economic modernization or women’s public-sphere roles. Multivariate analyses suggest, however, that gender liberalism in Africa may be spreading through mechanisms not typically considered by world-society scholars: Support for equal rights is largely unrelated to countries’ formal ties to the world system, but it is stronger among persons who are more exposed to extra-local culture, including through internet and mobile phone usage, news access, and urban residency. Forces for gender liberalism are conditioned, moreover, by local religious cultures and gender structures.

The Role of the German Political Foundations in International Relations

This study researches the international activities of German political foundations and their position within international relations theory. It juxtaposes the rationalist and constructivist approaches to the state and non-state relationship and the possible impact of transnational actors. The author uses a model of public diplomacy to systematically study the foundations’ transnational interaction processes. She integrates different public diplomacy approaches and assumes that public diplomacy occurs in a network environment. The study explores the foundations’ approaches to promoting democracy and managing conflict as collaborative or catalytic forms of public diplomacy. It conducts two case studies, one on the rule of law programme of the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in Southeast Europe and another on the activities of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung in Southern Thailand, by investigating those foundations’ strategies of ideational diffusion processes and networking, their soft power resources and their approaches to forming social relationships.

EU normative power and regionalism: Ideational diffusion and its limits

The ideational impact captured by Manners’s notion of normative power Europe (NPE) appears most distinct and potentially most consequential in the realm of regionalism. However, empirical research on the topic has been hampered by the focus on EU actorness and methodological difficulties. Drawing on diffusion theory, this article develops conceptual, theoretical and methodological foundations for conceiving NPE as ideational diffusion. It argues that Europe’s ideational influence on regionalism can be fruitfully understood as the largely indirect process by which the EU experience travels to other regions through socialization and emulation. Yet, as structural conditions vary across regions, EU ideational diffusion rarely leads to similar or even comparable institutional practices and outcomes. A choice-orientated approach is proposed for examining these claims empirically, which focuses on specifying the underlying counterfactual: political decisions in regionalism would have been different in the absence of the EU. The article concludes by outlining the analytical and normative promise of the proposed recasting of Manners’s original concept.