Brazil as the Future of the World: The Peripheralization Thesis and the Global Far Right
Source: Rodrigo Nunes. "Brazil’s Far-Right Trajectory Is a Warning for Us All." October 24, 2026. jacobin.com
The Gist
The author argues that rich countries aren't the model the rest of the world will follow; instead, places like Brazil, built around harsh economic exploitation, show where the world is headed. As the rich countries lose protections and inequality rises, they are starting to look more like Brazil, and the global far right is best understood by looking at it there.
Conclusion
Brazil and other peripheral countries, rather than the US and Western Europe, best reveal the direction of the contemporary global far right, because the world is undergoing a 'Brazilianization' in which brute exploitation, social disintegration, and authoritarian management of surplus populations become the dominant social logic.
Premises
- Modernization theory's assumption that peripheral countries will eventually resemble the developed core is false, because development is relational (like chess, not a race) and the periphery's growth is structurally subordinated to the core's, so dependency reproduces itself.
- Modernization in all spheres (political institutions, labor relations, culture) does not follow automatically from economic growth; in Brazil, capitalist expansion has operated through a symbiosis in which the 'modern' feeds off and reproduces the 'archaic' (e.g., favelization, cheap domestic labor).
- Since the late 1980s the core itself has seen rights and institutions rolled back, with material advancement coexisting with severe exploitation and inequality, so economic growth no longer guarantees democracy or social protections, and postwar progress may have been a temporary blip.
- Brazil was shaped from the outset by the dictates of economic reason as a site of production for the world system, so it prefigures a world where brute exploitation is the dominant social logic.
- The global horizon of expectation is increasingly set by peripheral zones, both within metropolises (a 'planet of slums') and in former colonies that act as laboratories for authoritarian control of surplus populations and police states compatible with parliamentary democracy.
- The US and Western Europe's relatively dominant position in the international division of labor allows promises of national redemption that mask the likely future of privately managed breakdown, climate collapse, inequality, superfluous populations, and protected enclaves.
Assumptions
- The dependency-theory account of center-periphery relations is basically correct.
- The contemporary far right is fundamentally driven by and expressive of social disintegration and economic exploitation rather than primarily cultural, ideological, or contingent political factors.
- Trends observed in Brazil are generalizable to very different countries with different institutions, histories, and positions in the global economy.
- The late-20th-century rollback of core rights indicates a durable structural trend rather than a cyclical or reversible one.
- Brazil's past (colonial and slave-based extraction) is predictive of the core's future.
- Far-right appeal in the core is largely a distraction (national redemption narratives) from underlying structural decline.