Brasil e diplomacia da saúde : uma análise sobre a inserção internacional do país e a pandemia de Covid-19.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed everyone’s lives. With a global magnitude and scale of spread, the disease has had unprecedented impacts on the world economy and international relations. Brazil, already fragile in its economic and political conjuncture, was hit by the pandemic, causing a health emergency and domestic political crises; at the same time, the country has become one of the world’s epicenters in the spread of the virus. The interconnection between countries accentuated by the pandemic highlighted the importance of the responder power of external action. In this way, the present research aims to analyze the patterns of Brazilian international insertion and understand the confrontation of the COVID-19 pandemic in the country through the prism of foreign policy. The essay is presented through a descriptive-qualitative approach, using the conjunctural analysis method, in view of the need to study an event in its course. As a technique, the main resource was bibliographic research through a literature review, especially from books, scientific publications and newspapers in their online format. For that, the theoretical contribution of the liberal paradigm of International Relations was used to interpret the external action of States, contemplating the vision of Complex Interdependence and especially in the Foreign Policy Analysis as a tool for analyzing the foreign policy of specific governments, contemplating their plurality of actors and interests. Thus, the patterns of Brazilian international insertion and the general guidelines of Brazilian foreign policy from 1990 onwards, with emphasis on the country’s role in health diplomacy, were rescued to analyze the Brazil’s external action and establish comparisons with the current period. Therefore, after checking an overview of the pandemic in the country and the performance of Brazilian foreign policy in the face of COVID-19, it was noticed a rupture in the use of historical diplomatic standards and a distancing from tools such as health diplomacy, reflecting in the domestic sphere and implying adversities in the positioning of the country in the international system.