Southern sensibilities: advancing third wave sociology of international relations in the case of Brazil

The sociology of international relations (IR) around the world has evolved from an initial wave of critiques of its dominant American core towards a second wave of peripheral explorations that find IR to be disappointingly similar around the world. Advancing a more recent wave that stresses Southern sensibilities, hybridity and peripheral agency, this article calls for attention to the heterogeneities, positionality struggles and vernacularisations of sociological hierarchies in peripheral IR. Taking Brazil as a case, it analyses peripheral IR as a field occupied by plural and competing positions on the question of how to engage with Northern theories and/or develop indigenous, Southern theories. The article shows how position-taking is structured by a rivalry among different schools of thought with their respective take on the import/indigenisation of IR theory—Brazilianising, provincialising and scientising IR—and how the hierarchy among seemingly recognisable debate positions is subverted when they travel to the periphery.