Professor Anthony Pereira

Anthony W. Pereira is a Visiting Professor in the Brazil Institute at the School of Global Affairs at King’s College London and the Director of the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Centre at Florida International University. From 2010 to 2020 he was the founding director of the Brazil Institute at King’s.

Professor Pereira’s research interests include authoritarianism and democracy, human rights, public security, and international relations and foreign policy. He has a B.A. in Politics from Sussex University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University.

He has held positions at the New School for Social Research, the Fletcher School at Tufts University, Tulane University and the University of East Anglia. Professor Pereira has also been a visiting professor in the Department of Political Science at the Federal University of Pernambuco and at the Institute of International Relations at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. He has been a Fulbright and Fulbright-Hays fellow and received grants from, amongst other funders, FAPESP, the São Paulo research council, the British Academy, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Organization of American States.

Professor Pereira’s PhD dissertation focused on the role of rural trade unions in northeast Brazil in expanding democratic rights in two different periods, the early 1960s before the military coup of 1964 and the late 1970s and 1980s, when Brazil’s authoritarian regime was ending. This research led to the publication of the book The End of the Peasantry: The Rural Labor Movement in Northeast Brazil, 1961-1988 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997).

Professor Pereira’s next major research project was on the treatment of dissidents and opponents by the authoritarian regimes of Brazil (1964-85), Argentina (1976-83), and Chile (1973-90). Professor Pereira argued that Brazil’s more judicial approach to repression resulted in an “authoritarian legalism” that bound judicial and military actors within the military court system and and shaped the treatment of political prisoners. It also created an official transcript that made a rupture with this approach, and the military court system, more difficult after the transition to democracy. This project resulted in the publication of Political Injustice: Authoritarianism and the Rule of Law in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005) which was published in Brazil as Ditadura e Repressão (Paz e Terra, 2010).

His other books include Right-Wing Populism in Latin America and Beyond (Routledge, 2023); Modern Brazil: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2020); (with Jeff Garmany) Understanding Contemporary Brazil (Routledge, 2018); (with Lauro Mattei) The Brazilian Economy Today: Towards a New Socio-Economic Model? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and (with Diane Davis) Irregular Armed Forces and their Role in Politics and State Formation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). His articles have appeared in journals such as Comparative Political Studies, Latin American Research Review, Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, Rising Powers Quarterly, the Bulletin of Latin American Research and the Journal of Latin American Studies. Professor Pereira is also an associate fellow at Canning House and a regular contributor of articles to the Brazilian publication Interesse Nacional. He was President of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA) from 2014 to 2016 and is an occasional commentator on Brazil in the media.

Research

• The rise of right-wing populism and its impact on democracy in Brazil.

• Brazilian contributions to the increasingly multipolar world order.

• Conflicts over rights and citizenship in Brazil in comparative perspective.

 

PhD supervision

See Anthony's research students

Further details

See Anthony's research profile