On October 25, Brazil will almost certainly hold a runoff in its presidential election, perhaps the most important the country has held since its return to democracy in 1985. One candidate is likely to be the right-wing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the ex-president Jair Bolsonaro. He is almost certain to face incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is seeking an unprecedented fourth term. Join us after the election to hear post-election analysis from two leading political scientists and experts on Brazil.
Speaker:
Rebecca Abers has a Ph.D in Urban Planning from UCLA and is professor of Political Science at the University of Brasilia, Brazil, where she teaches and conducts research on social movement, state-society relations and institutions. She is the coauthor (with Margaret Keck) of Practical Authority: Agency ad Institutional Change in Brazilian Water Politics. She is also the author of Inventing Local Democracy: Grassroots Politics in Brazil, as well as other publications in English and Portuguese.
Fabio de Sa e Silva is Associate Professor of International Studies and Wick Cary Professor of Brazilian Studies at the University of Oklahoma and an affiliated fellow of Harvard Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession. He is the author of numerous high-impact studies on law, lawyers, and democracy in Brazil, with a particular focus on anti-corruption discourses. Currently, he is one of the conveners of the Project on Autocratic Legalism (PAL), an LSA International Research Collaborative that is designing comparative research on how rising autocrats in Brazil, India and South Africa use law to amass power and what can be done to stop their moves