SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND CULTURAL CHALLENGES OF THE BRICS SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND CULTURAL CHALLENGES OF THE BRICS Gustavo Lins Ribeiro Tom Dwyer Antonádia Borges Eduardo Viola (organizadores) SOCIAL, POLITICAL AND CULTURAL CHALLENGES OF THE BRICS Gustavo Lins Ribeiro Tom Dwyer Antonádia Borges Eduardo Viola (organizadores) Summary PRESENTATION Social, political and cultural challenges of the BRICS: a symposium, a debate, a book 9 Gustavo Lins Ribeiro PART ONE DEVELOPMENT AND PUBLIC POLICIES IN THE BRICSS Social sciences and the BRICS 19 Tom Dwyer Development, social justice and empowerment in contemporary India: a sociological perspective 33 K. L. Sharma India’s public policy: issues and challenges & BRICS 45 P. S. Vivek From the minority points of view: a dimension for China’s national strategy 109 Naran Bilik Liquid modernity, development trilemma and ignoledge governance: a case study of ecological crisis in SW China 121 Zhou Lei 6 • Social, political and cultural challenges of the BRICS The global position of South Africa as BRICS country 167 Freek Cronjé Development public policies, emerging contradictions and prospects in the post-apartheid South Africa 181 Sultan Khan PART TWO ContemporarY Transformations AND RE-ASSIGNMENT OF political AND cultural MEANING IN THE BRICS Political-economic changes and the production of new categories of understanding in the BRICS 207 Antonádia Borges South Africa: hopeful and fearful 217 Francis Nyamnjoh The modern politics of recognition in BRICS’ cultures and societies: a chinese case of superstition becoming intangible cultural heritage 255 Bingzhong Gao Zindabad! Modern contestation against the caste system in India 275 Pedro Lara de Arruda and Asleigh Kate Slingsby Socio-economic inclusion and justice: a comparative study of BRICS countries with a focus on India 301 Praveen Jha and Amit Chakraborty Income security systems in comparative perspective: Brazil and South Africa 335 Maria Paula Gomes dos Santos Summary • 7 PART THREE EMERGENT POWERS AND TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM The BRICS in the international system: very relevant countries, but a group of limited importance 383 Eduardo Viola Is the BRICS a harbinger of a new matrix of global governance in trade, energy and climate change? 391 Alexander Zhebit South Africa in the international politics of climate and energy 409 Kathryn Hochstetler Brazilian climate and energy policies and politics in the 21st century 425 Eduardo Viola and Matías Franchini Resource rents, resource nationalism and innovation policy: perspectives on Africa and the BRICS 453 Michael Kahn Russia in G20: lessons and opportunities for BRICS’S macroeconomic policy 475 Natalia Khmelevskaya Notes on contributors 497 Social, political and cultural challenges of the BRICS A symposium, a debate, a book Gustavo Lins Ribeiro For the almost 40 years of its existence, ANPOCS has contributed to introducing or consolidating new thematic areas in the academic agenda of debates in the Brazilian social sciences. Commensurate with this history, at the 37th Annual meeting, hosted in Águas de Lindoia, São Paulo, in 2013, we organized a large International Symposium, The BRICS and their social, political and cultural challenges on the national and international levels. There were six sessions of debates, gathered under the umbrella of “Development and public policies,” “Social inclusion and social justice,” and “Emerging powers and transformations in the international system,” followed by a final plenary session. Around 30 anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists and researchers in international relations from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, met over three highly productive days. As might be expected at ANPOCS, the encounter was marked not only by the diversity of countries and disciplines, but also by the theoretical and political diversity of the participants, something already apparent in the composition of the Brazilian coordinators of the Symposium. The book we have the pleasure to present here is just one tangible outcome of the papers and dialogues emerging from this encounter. Like the Symposium, the volume is divided into three sections. Looking to address 10 • Social, political and cultural challenges of the BRICS an international readership, it is published in Portuguese and English. The work may also be accessed via the ANPOCs portal, making it more readily available to researchers worldwide. WHY Unite 30 SOCiaL SCientists FroM THE BRICS at THE ANPOCS MeetinG? This question relates both to the importance of the BRICS and to the importance of the social sciences in these countries and, in particular, in Brazil. First of all, while the state and business leaders of the BRICS have deepened their relations and agendas of mutual interests over the last few years, the intellectuals and academics from this consolidating international block still have a long way to go. The lack of mutual knowledge needs to be reduced quickly. In our view it is more than time to search for a strategic approximation between the intelligentsia of the BRICS countries, which contain important academic communities, beyond the government initiatives that very often suffer from the excesses of officialdom. The block needs to be understood as a whole and individually, in terms of each of its components, in order to inform the general public and intervene where necessary in the correlated processes in a qualified way. The more knowledge that opinion makers and qualified interpreters have concerning the problems in their countries, the easier it will be to develop the complex foundations needed for cooperation and reciprocal exchange. We set out from the principle that the existence of a new block of global governance like the BRICS also creates the need for a closer approximation among their civil societies, a fundamental part of which are precisely academics and researchers, due to their capacity to produce and disseminate knowledge and information, influencing public opinion. In the academic world, as in other areas of social life, the interactions and exchanges inevitably become denser and more consolidated when we increase our levels of communication and exchange: in other words, when networks of mutual interests are constructed and maintained over Social, political and cultural challenges of the BRICS • 11 time. The participation in congresses is an important step but needs to be accompanied by the exchange of students and the establishment of shared research interests capable of generating more perennial alliances, deeper exchanges and more differentiated knowledge. We also wanted to stimulate a heterodox agenda as part of the internationalization of the Brazilian social sciences. Much has been said for and against South/South academic cooperation. This is a long debate in which I have participated for more than ten years through an initiative called “world anthropologies” (Ribeiro and Escobar, 2006, 2012; Ribeiro, 2006). Contrary to what some may hastily suppose, this move does not express a wish to discard the important contribution made by the hegemonic social sciences. But it does involve criticizing and looking to escape the overwhelming American hegemony, the continuation of which threatens to install a monotonous set of agendas, theories and propositions. We need to move beyond this metropolitan provincialism and make room for a provincial cosmopolitanism, thereby investing in heteroglossic cross- fertilization as a source of innovation and creativity. All the BRICS countries have well-established academic communities representing complex loci of enunciation within the geopolitics of knowledge. What we can learn from them is a universe yet to be more widely explored.1 Another source of inspiration for an intra-BRICS academic dialogue is the potential represented by comparing this diverse set of countries which have problems traditionally explored by the social sciences. For example: the large contingents of their populations living in social exclusion; urban violence; ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity; questions of national integration; the impacts and new relations formed by the globalized world; tensions between multicultural and intercultural proposals and national 1 In addition to the volume edited by myself and Arturo Escobar, the idea of exploring other academic traditions can also benefit from books such as those by Boskovic (2008); Das (2003); De L’Estoile, Neiburg and Sigaud (2002); Ntarangwi, Mills and Babiker (2006); Patel (2010); Uberoi, Deshpande and Sundar (2008); Yamashita, Bosco and Eades (2004), and the World Social Science Report (Unesco 2010). 12 • Social, political and cultural challenges of the BRICS homogenization; racial, interethnic and gender relations in tension; rapid social and cultural changes; environmental problems caused by economic growth; income concentration; economic growth and social inequality; public policies and social inclusion. The possibility of comparing the knowledge accumulated in the five countries undoubtedly has the potential to influence research agendas, favour the increase in mutual knowledge, as well as leave behind a problem typical of the social sciences that Norbert Elias (1989) called natiocentrism. The present volume represents a contribution in this direction. By stimulating us to think of unusual comparisons, the mere existence of the BRICS is already a stimulus to a heterodox interpretative imagination. The project as a whole, Symposium and book, are indices of the undeniable