The Faces of Authoritarianism and Strategies of Dissent in Contemporary Brazil, edited by Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos and Katerina Hatzikidi, 2025, UCL Press
As military dictatorships across Latin America were displaced by competitive political systems in the 1980s and 90s, it seemed natural to delineate a binary distinction between “authoritarianism” and “democracy”.
Social sciences were duly dominated by the study of democratisation in which a plethora of metrics were developed to identify the degree to which “transition” away from authoritarian rule and then “consolidation” of democracy per se had been achieved.
In particular, scholarship identified and discussed the main obstacles to consolidating democracy in political cultures that for decades had been shaped by authoritarian governments and deep inequalities.
Enthusiasm for the new democratic politics initially propelled the left to power across the region in the so-called “pink tide” in which Brazil, and in particular its Workers’ Party (PT) under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula), played an influential role.
The dramatic shift from one regime to another that was marked in Brazil most visibly by the 1988 democratic Constitution appeared to reinforce the binary distinction popular in the field.
But then came the resurgence of conservative forces, and more recently from within them a populist, authoritarian far-right.
In the run up to crucial Brazilian elections in October in which the left is once again facing the challenge posed by the authoritarian populism of Bolsonarismo—this time in the form of his son, Flávio Bolsonaro—scholars are reassessing.
They are no longer concentrating solely on the distinction, and hence notional competition, between authoritarian and democratic politics, but on historical and structural factors that explain authoritarian expressions, resistance to them and why they are reproduced.
This represents an important shift in thinking away from the understanding of authoritarianism as a political legacy that we had believed, or hoped, had been marginalised, to one of it as a live and persistent threat to democracy today.
In short, if we want to understand contemporary Brazilian democracy, we must explore how this term is understood on both right and left, and the mechanisms that generate authoritarian threats to it.
After all, as the editors point out: “Despite his well-known views on the 1964–85 civil-military dictatorship, human rights and majority rule, Bolsonaro insists that he is a democrat.” [our emphasis]
The Faces of Authoritarianism and Strategies of Dissent in Contemporary Brazil is an effort to get to grips with the contemporary structural conditions and circumstantial elements that best inform Bolsonarismo and the dissent it generates.
That is not to ignore Brazil’s authoritarian and militaristic legacies: as the editors point out, although Jair Bolsonaro’s populist politics were arguably circumstantial and opportunistic, his authoritarian inclinations were of a much longer duration with deep historical roots.
Accordingly, studies about Brazil seeking to identify the foundations of authoritarianism have often harked back as far as the 1930s, suggesting a long continuity of factors.
Editors Katerina Hatzikidi and Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos write: “The dictatorship of the Estado Novo period, the foundation of modern Brazil and also its imperial and colonial histories were all explored, to a greater or lesser extent, as instances of a long-standing authoritarianism—a phenomenon which, although it might share characteristics with authoritarianisms elsewhere, was unmistakably national.”
Inevitably, the Bolsonaro years after 2018 themselves were also initially assessed with an eye on these historical antecedents, as scholars sought to dissect this populist’s success in terms of an “illiberal backlash” against the 1988 Constitution that attacked its cherished shibboleths: equal democratic participation and tolerance of minorities.
However, key moments within Brazil at least five years before Bolsonaro came to power has prompted some scholars to ask whether the country was already undergoing a process of “de-democratisation”.
A watershed for some scholars began with the street protests of June 2013 initially against increases in bus, train, and metro ticket prices but escalating to include a host of issues such as political corruption and police brutality.
For others, a crisis of democracy began in 2014 when the Brazilian Social Democratic Party officially questioned the 2014 electoral result after the PT candidate, Dilma Rousseff, secured a narrow win in the second round of presidential elections.
By 2016, with Rousseff’s controversial impeachment and the subsequent “authoritarian neoliberalism” of Michel Temer’s administration, the die was well and truly cast.
Either way, the editors suggest, growing polarisation since has divided Brazilian society into opposing moral and political camps and fostered a new “conservative subjectivity” that reflects something greater than disenchantment or a simple backlash.
They cite Rosana Pinheiro-Machado and Lucia Scalco to argue that the rise of conservatism in Brazil “is also the expression of deep-seated political legacies and structural phenomena that had been sidelined for many years but never stopped working behind the scenes”.
Contributors in this collection together seek to explore those phenomena, and in particular how conservative, religious and internationally networked forces were catalysts for Bolsonaro’s right-wing authoritarian government in 2018–22.
The four sections of the book consider Bolsonarismo in the then domestic and international political context; institutional struggles involving state and non-state actors, the private sector and civil society; how anti-democratic subjectivities are constructed among evangelical Christians; and how tensions over democratic and authoritarian practices play out in the relationships between local politicians and their constituencies.
Marcos Nobre explores structural political factors that have empowered the far-right within Brazilian conservatism, such as “coalition presidentialism” and an undue obsession with parties and party systems as they traditionally functioned—one thing the far-right has successfully challenged.
In a fascinating chapter, Ariel Goldstein considers the sheer internationalism of Bolsonarismo and its links with the “global family” of the far-right.
Katherine Bersch, Gabriela Lotta and Daniel Thomas explore bureaucratic resistance to Bolsonaro and the tensions this generated.
Katerina Hatzikidi situates questions of physicians’ autonomy during the Prevent Senior healthcare scandal against the Bolsonaro government’s pandemic mismanagement, which is then explored in more detail by Lorena Barberia, Natália de Paula Moreira and Isabel Seelaender Costa Rosa.
In an interesting section, Manoela Carpenedo examines the role of religion in the formation of “regimes of truth” in Brazilian society and how it can provide discourses and practices to mobilise conservative masses. Similarly, David Lehmann investigates how religious beliefs about the supernatural among evangelicals may fuel a susceptibility to conspiracy theories.
Aaron Ansell seeks to situate attitudes towards Bolsonaro within rural perspectives on political corruption and, taking a tangential approach, Flávio Eiró researches politicians’ perspectives towards the urban poor and how the latter engage with the political process.
The Faces of Authoritarianism and Strategies of Dissent in Contemporary Brazil offers an original approach to understanding the right in Latin American politics that presents contemporary phenomena of authoritarian populism in all their novel complexity.
Yet, as Flávia Biroli says in his “Afterword”, the contributors “do not miss what was already there—the opportunities for illiberal and authoritarian alternatives to be nurtured in a deeply unequal social context, in which resentment and insecurities take form under long-lasting hierarchies of power that constitute the lived experiences of democracy.”
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Categories: Brazil, South America