Go Global or Go Home: Comparing the Regional vs. Global Engagement of Brazil and South Africa at the UN General Assembly

ABSTRACT

Brazil and South Africa have long been regarded as archetypical regional powers, commanding more resources than their neighbours, spearheading regional projects and pursuing high-profile global status. Yet, recent years have also evidenced how the engagement with their regions and acceptance as leading players is often ambiguous and incomplete. How does one ascertain that a regional power privileges either the regional or the global stage? Through an original dataset of Brazilian and South African output at the UN General Assembly between 1994 and 2013, we monitor sponsorship patterns and thematic preferences in order to verify whether these countries indulged their regional partners and topics. Our findings suggest that Brazil and South Africa favoured their immediate neighbourhoods but have gradually engaged their regions in different ways: while Brazilian emphasis on regional peers and themes declined over the years, South Africa developed an increasingly more regionalised UNGA agenda.

Acknowledgements

An earlier draft of this work was presented at the ‘Regional Powers Revisited’ Workshop, organised by the GIGA German Institute for Global and Area Studies in Hamburg on 26–27 April 2018, and at the 60th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association (ISA) in Toronto on 27–30 March 2019. We thank the organisers and participants for the feedback provided at both occasions. Full responsibility over the content and data of the article, however, remains with the authors alone.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supporting data

Supporting data for this work can be found at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NQ9VTT

Notes

1 The limitations of roll-call voting as empirical indicator of external preferences have been discussed at length by the literature (e.g. Häge and Hug 2016).

2 See Aeschlimann and Regan (2017) for a brief overview of UNGA procedures.

3 Our data can be found at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NQ9VTT. That includes all replication materials, the description of every procedure used for data collection and processing, as well as the list of regional groups, member countries and dictionaries of terms for the content analysis.

4 UNBISNET. Retrieved: 16 April 2018. http://unbisnet.un.org:8080/ipac20/ipac.jsp?profile=bib&menu=search#focus. Note that, as of 2019, the UN migrated this service to the ‘UN Digital Library’ platform. https://digitallibrary.un.org/

5 Content analysis was applied to final resolutions because drafts bring an extensive list of co-sponsors in the opening paragraph. Given how the content analysis also targets country names, drafts would present inaccurately inflated results. QDA Miner 5 and WordStat 8 software were employed.

6 According to Mashabane (2018), Africa accounted for 60 percent of the UNSC's agenda and 72 percent of the UN's peacekeeping budget in 2015/16.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES, Brazil) under Grant 88881.132436/2016-01; and by the Fundação para Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT, Portugal) under Grant SFRH/BPD/116700/2016.