Abstract This article argues that the killing of Moïse Mugenyi Kabagambe at the ‘Tropicália’ kiosk in Rio de Janeiro exposes a constitutive limit in dominant normative theories of migration. Rather than treating the case as an episode of private violence or labor conflict, it reads ‘Tropicália’ as a scene in which border regimes operate beyond territorial admission, through racialized labor, documentation, policing, and everyday vulnerability. In doing so, the article challenges idealized and presentist approaches that evaluate migration primarily through questions of admission, state discretion, distributive duties, or the existence of a right to migrate. Such approaches misidentify the wrong at stake when they detach borders from the afterlife of slavery, colonialism, and Brazil's nineteenth-century projects of whitening and immigrant selection. The analysis unfolds in three steps. First, it reconstructs the limits of ideal theory in migration ethics and defends a non-ideal, reparative, and enfleshed mode of theorizing. Second, it traces how Brazilian nation-building produced a racialized grammar of desirable and undesirable mobility. Third, it reads the judicial archive of Kabagambe's murder against the grain, showing how legal and social narratives reproduce the very regimes of disposability they purport to document. The article concludes that an adequate political theory of migration must shift from admission-centered debates toward historically indexed duties of acknowledgement, repair, and institutional transformation.
Abstract This review analyzes ‘Democratic Commitment: Why Citizens Tolerate Democratic Backsliding’ by Natasha Wunsch (2025) and situates it within the literature on the microfoundations of democratic erosion. The book challenges explanations centered on polarization and material incentives by arguing that the key to institutional resilience lies in the degree to which citizens prioritize the liberal component of democracy. By combining survey data, focus groups, and conjoint experiments in Hungary and Poland, Wunsch identifies distinct voter profiles and shows that weak commitment to liberal principles helps explain tolerance toward illiberal candidates. The review highlights the book's main contribution — its integration of political culture, elite strategies, and electoral behavior into a unified framework — while also discussing scope conditions, such as the gap between normative commitments and vote choice, the modest role of partisanship, and unresolved issues of causal temporality. By restoring political culture to a central place in debates on democratic stability, the book offers an innovative and theoretically grounded account of contemporary democratic backsliding.
Abstract Research on subnational policy decision-making has revealed important institutional differences across Brazilian states. Yet these dynamics remain relatively understudied in Brazilian political science, where several federative units continue to be underrepresented. This research note examines Executive–Legislative relations in the state of Acre through the lens of theoretical typologies of interbranch interaction. The analysis covers 3,052 bills introduced between 2007 and 2022 across four legislative terms. Random-effects logistic regression models (GLMMs) are used to estimate the factors associated with bill approval, including ideological proximity between parties, caucus size, membership on the leadership board, affiliation with the governor’s party, and participation in electoral coalitions. The preliminary findings point to a politicized model in which party dynamics play an important role. At the same time, the results reveal institutional features associated with low levels of professionalization, institutionalization, and procedural universalism, alongside a high degree of discretion exercised by legislators holding leadership positions. The study also suggests new avenues for research on state legislatures in Brazil, particularly approaches that systematically incorporate into analytical models both the complexity of Executive–Legislative interactions and the varying degrees of professionalization among legislative assemblies.
Abstract The People’s Republic of China (PRC) military footprint is expanding globally, and one of the most notable examples of its contribution to international security is its involvement in United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations. By examining Chinese deployments to these missions, this article seeks to contribute to understanding the political economy of China’s expanding global military presence. Is China a responsible power or a self-interested, resource-seeking actor in the peacekeeping regime? Relying on an original dataset, the article presents an empirical strategy based on statistical analysis to evaluate both hypotheses, covering more than 30 years of Chinese involvement in UN peacekeeping operations. Economic indicators such as GDP and trade flows are used as independent variables. Although bivariate analysis shows that China’s GDP is strongly associated with personnel deployments, multivariate regression models show that the economic growth of host countries and commodity exports to China are also significant explanatory factors. On the other hand, total exports from host countries are not statistically significant and exhibit a negative, counter-intuitive relationship across all models. In addition to presenting these and other findings, the article offers a brief discussion of their implications.
Abstract In 2020, according to data from the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), women saw an increase in their participation in the electoral race for municipal legislatures. Similarly, the number of self-declared Black candidates also rose. Yet despite higher participation among both groups, and even with the support of affirmative action policies in that election cycle, we still observe a persistent pattern of underrepresentation of Black women. Existing scholarship shows that several variables shape the electoral participation of minoritized groups. Drawing on a qualitative approach, this article examines the trajectories and challenges faced by Black women candidates for city council in the 2020 elections, with the aim of identifying the key obstacles they themselves highlight as obstacles to their campaign development. In doing so, we seek to shed light on the dynamics that contribute to the continued underrepresentation of this group in Brazilian politics. Our research corpus consists of interviews conducted with Black women candidates in Brazil’s Northeast region. Overall, we identify key elements described by our interlocutors as central to the challenges they faced during the electoral process – factors that extend beyond campaign financing and include mental health, racial and gender-based violence, and limited familiarity with legal and electoral regulations, among others.
