Negotiating Uncertainty: Brazil's Strategic Autonomy in a Contested Global Landscape

Amid intensifying great power rivalry and the progressive erosion of the liberal rules-based order, this paper introduces the concept of "adaptive autonomy" to analyze Brazil's contemporary foreign policy posture. Defined as a composite strategic behavior practiced simultaneously across geoeconomic, crisis management, and institutional dimensions, adaptive autonomy integrates Kuik's hedging framework with the Active Non-Alignment doctrine theorized by Fortín, Heine, and Ominami, grounded in the historical periodization developed by Lessa and Doratioto (2025). The paper argues that behavioral flexibility in bilateral relationships, strategic distancing under normative pressure, and normative entrepreneurship in multilateral governance are mutually constitutive dimensions of a single coherent posture, whose analytical logic is assessed against its structural limits and comparative scope.