LABMUNDO’s researchers encompass professors, young PhD’s, PhD candidates, master students and graduate students who work in distinct but integrated research aces, with the central objective of understanding and analysing the contemporary world order based on the major social, cultural, economic, environmental, technological and political transformations.
The organization of scientific production via dynamic networks, the analysis of the comprehensive totalities of the contemporary world-system and its effects on Brazilian foreign policy, its society, and the reality of some states (particularly Bahia and Rio de Janeiro), as well as understanding of the economic and political ascent of regional powers from the Geopolitical South are the essential features of this innovative academic front in the field of international relations.
LABMUNDO’s main objectives are to analyse the following issues:
a) The progress of economic globalization processes and their different dimensions (trade, financial, technological, environmental, political, cultural, social) that accentuate the tensions between integration and fragmentation, interdependence and autonomy, inclusion and exclusion;
b) The tensions between “the global” and “the national” as a locus of power, decision, conflict regulation and definition of development strategies;
c) The expansion of private and business actions to the detriment of public interests and regulation of collective goods, for example, in relation to the challenges of environmental protection, climate change, migration, human rights and collective security;
d) The changing conceptions about the territory and its regulation, considering the regional and local rebounds of the globalization in terms of development, mainly in peripheral and semi-peripheral countries of the world-system;
e) The transformation of the nation-state and the re-definition of politics evolving from a dynamic of exclusive and monolithic actors to a more pluralistic perspective of actorness in international relations (corporations, human rights NGOs, environmental movements, subnational entities, etc.);
f) The ascent of regional powers (South Africa, Brazil, China, India, Turkey …) in the regional and world orders, the coalitions and alliances they establish, the dynamics of South-South Cooperation that they develop, as well as their demands for governance reform (in trade, finance, and security, climate change, for example).