Between global markets and domestic politics: Brazil's military-industrial collapse

Abstract

Concerns about Third World military industrialization, which animate a broad range of international security debates, often take for granted the South's capacity for sustained military-industrial development. A convergence of favourable conditions spurred rapid defence-sector growth in much of the South beginning in the late 1970s. But the increasingly competitive character of the global arms economy and the turbulent political situations of most would-be military industrializers have derailed this growth. The collapse of Brazil's defence sector in the early 1990s illustrates that the largest barriers to Third World military industrialization are not financial or technological but rather institutional. Simultaneous domestic-political and global-market changes destabilized the institutional foundation of Brazilian military-industrial growth, despite the defence sector's impressive technological, industrial, and political advantages. It has proven impossible to reconcile the military's domestic political needs in post-authoritarian Brazil with the global-market integration on which the sector's financial and technological development depends.