Geopolitics and Cooperation in the South Atlantic

Since the end of the Cold War, several bilateral initiatives and multilateral organizations, such as the Zone of Peace and Cooperation of the South Atlantic (ZOPACAS), the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP), and the African Union, have contributed to the consolidation of the South Atlantic as a Zone of Peace and Cooperation. However, the region’s potential for strategic and economic growth continues to attract geopolitical interest. A central element in this process of promoting peace and cooperation has been the strengthening of the field of International Development Cooperation (IDC). IDC is considered a foreign policy tool in the academic literature, although not all governments see the relevance and appropriateness of robust cooperation programs in the same way. Especially in the context of issues such as peace and cooperation, international defense cooperation becomes a tool for strengthening the material, technical and scientific capacities of the countries of the South. The objective of this booklet is to present a collection of thematic defence cartography images of the South Atlantic, with a focus on international initiatives. This document is a publication of the project “The Potential of Defense Cooperation in the South Atlantic” winner of the FLAD Atlantic Security Award 2022, promoted by the National Defense Institute (IDN), the Luso-American Development Foundation (FLAD), and the Atlantic Centre. An innovation of the project is the use of thematic cartography made possible by the collection of data and the creation of original images such as maps, graphs, and timelines, which will be publicly available. The development is the responsibility of the project author in collaboration with the Cartography Team of the World Political Analysis Laboratory (LABMUNDO), a research center located at the Institute of Social and Political Studies of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (IESP-UERJ). Some of the images presented here were originally published in the Atlas of Brazilian Defense Politics and are freely available in the LABMUNDO Map Library.