Causal Explanation in Brazilian International Relations

Abstract How do Brazilian IR scholars tailor causal explanations in their research? Searching for causes has become paramount to the scientific endeavour in the social sciences, and in recent years the lexicon of causality has come under scrutiny, with many scholars revising the standard Humean and covering law approaches to cause. Far from being consensual, current philosophical and meta-theoretical debates in IR reveal a rather kaleidoscopical picture of causation. However, Brazilian IR scholars seem to remain unfamiliar about what it means to advance causal claims. In this paper, I have a twofold goal: to advance the causal talk by rehearsing recent meta-theoretical debates on causality; and to examine the ways Brazilian IR scholars in the subfield of Brazilian foreign policy analysis (BFPA) tailor causal explanations. To achieve the latter, I perform a cartography of the articles published in five Brazilian top-tier journals in the discipline – Brazilian Political Science Review, Dados, Contexto Internacional, Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais and Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional – from 2018 through 2022. I conclude that BFPA research is founded primarily in non-Humean understandings of causality, but Brazilian scholars might benefit from further awareness on the various meanings of causal explanation.