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| Author(s): |
Diego Lopes da Silva
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Press: | Marília. 2018-06-05. |
| Institution: | Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp). Faculdade de Filosofia e Ciências. Marília |
| Defense date: | 2018-05-02 |
| Advisor: | Héctor Luís Saint Pierre |
| Abstract | |
How do South American countries fund their militaries? Militarization, understood here as the accumulation of coercive capacities, is an activity that demands the provision of large resources for relatively long periods. Despite this necessity, military investments in South America are carried out cyclically and episodically. The erratic nature of military spending is one of the main obstacles to national defense strategies. In this research, we argue that the cyclical character of militarization in South American countries is a result of certain specificities regarding their economic and state formation processes. The commodity-exporting economies and the political impediments to fiscal extraction yielded the state finances dependent on external financing sources, namely external borrowing, and commodity export revenues. These traits are fairly resilient and still influential to this day. In this predicament, militarization constitutes a revenue problem: the accumulation of coercive capacities will occur when external credit is available and/or commodity prices ascend. This hypothesis is subject to scrutiny in a case study on Venezuela’s military expenditures between 1970 and 2013 and in a study on the determinants of arms production in South America between 1960 and 2015. Our findings highlight the role of external indebtedness and revenues from commodity exports in financing South American militarization and shed light on the deleterious effects of economic reprimarization on domestic arms production. (AU) | |
| FAPESP's process: | 15/07197-0 - The dependence on defense resources imports and the construction of the South American strategic identity |
| Grantee: | Diego Lopes da Silva |
| Support Opportunities: | Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate |