Beyond Boundaries in Brazil: Innovating for Proliferation Prevention

Co-written by Managing Director Brian Finlay, Senior Advisor Johanna Mendelson Forman, and Scoville Fellow James McKeon,the newest report from the Stimson Center’s Managing Across Boundaries initiative, entitled Beyond Boundaries in Brazil: Innovating for Proliferation Prevention, examines Brazil’s role as a proponent of more holistic solutions for enduring security challenges. Brazil has experienced firsthand how domestic violence is linked to illicit trade and problems of porous borders. Their responses to security at home address the larger issues of nonproliferation, counterterrorism, and other challenges on the international security agenda that require cooperation among states and societies.

As President Dilma Rousseff began her second term as president on January 1st, she has an opportunity to address some of the transnational issues that this report discusses. Brazil’s vast frontier presents a new opportunity to expand economic development with its neighbors. But Brazil’s borders also present a security challenge that requires a comprehensive inter-agency approach to its borders over the next four years. Borders are a public good. Treated as such they can provide Brazil’s citizens and neighboring states with a broad range of benefits that arise from these shared spaces.

The nexus between security and development is one that Brazil has highlighted on numerous occasions on the international stage. This report identifies and analyzes Brazil’s current approach to border security. While forward-thinking, Brazilian policy makers could make tangible improvements by further augmenting its policy of security and development to its own borders. MAB’s report identifies the current challenges to Brazil’s border management strategy, along with proposed solutions to address the shortcomings and prevent proliferation.
 
MAB works to identify transnational challenges — from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and illicit trafficking, to terrorism, the spread of disease, counterfeit intellectual property and environmental crime — that threaten geostrategic stability, people and socio-economic development worldwide. We continue to develop innovative government responses, at the national, regional and international levels, identifying pragmatic public-private partnerships to mitigate these threats.

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