Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung

International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies

Pedro Salgado

Pedro Salgado is an International Relations scholar, working on the intersection between the fields of Historical Sociology and Global Political Economy. He is currently a lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, having previously worked at the Federal University of Uberlândia, Federal University of Bahia, and Universität Kassel. His doctoral research at the University of Sussex looked at the process of Brazilian state-formation from the colonial period to late 19th century. His research agenda is centred around the geopolitical mediations between the development and global expansion of capitalism, and political transformations in states and the states-system throughout the colonial period and beyond. It has grown to encompass three main topics: (a) the geopolitics of colonial slavery and early capitalist development; (b) the colonial foundations of sovereignty and modern democracies, emphasising its legacies in terms of control over populations and exploitation of nature; (c) the methodological (and meta-theoretical) implications of the dialogue between a historicist interpretation of Marxism and decolonial theory. 

Publications:

Salgado, P., ‘Anti-Eurocentric Historicism: Political Marxism in a Broader Context’ in Historical Materialism, volume 29, issue 3, (2021): 199-223. Available here. 

Salgado, P., ‘The Transition Debate in Brazilian History: the Bourgeois Paradigm and its Critique’ in Journal of Agrarian Change, volume 21, (2021): 263-284. Available here. 

Salgado, P. Agency and Geopolitics: Brazilian State-Formation and the problem of Eurocentrism in ‘International Society’ narratives. Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 33 (3) (2020): 432-451. Available here

Bezerra, G.; Salgado, P.; Yamato, R. Escravismo Atlântico no Século XIX: construindo “o internacional” através do mar [Atlantic Slavery in the 19th Century: building ‘the international’ through the sea]. Monções, v. 8, n. 15 (2019): 424-457. Available here

Salgado, P. Historia, agencia y eurocentrismo en la Escuela Inglesa [History, Agency, and Eurocentrism in the English School]. Relaciones Internacionales, 41 (2019): 33-52. Available here

All Publications from Pedro Salgado:

  • COVID as the (Second) Death of Neoliberalism?

    Many influential voices have pointed out, with different degrees of optimism, that the COVID-19 pandemic might finally have ushered in the final days of neoliberalism. However, if we understand neoliberalism as a set of practices and institutional mechanisms that shield market relations from popular deliberation, we reach a different conclusion. In these terms, neoliberalism is not dying. If emergency measures are aimed more at safeguarding the profits of banks and large corporations than securing wages and welfare programmes, then this crisis is in fact an opportunity to increase wealth inequality, and not to address it as a problem.

  • The Crisis of Brazilian Universities: higher education under Bolsonaro

    The attack on science and knowledge production is known to be one of the main elements of the rise of the authoritarian right in the past decade. As one of the main global expressions of contemporary authoritarianism, Jair Bolsonaro is no exception to that. His government has been an important part of the context of difficulties for the higher education sector in Brazil, especially since research is highly dependent on public universities and funding agencies in the country. On top of that, the COVID pandemic in 2020 created difficulties for universities all around the world. If such a global crisis is expected to generate differentiated pressures across the Global North and South, the impact of authoritarian politics is surely prone to making the situation particularly delicate for universities.