Power and Horizontality in South-South Development Cooperation: The Case of Brazil and Mozambique

The growing importance of new actors in the global political landscape is envisaged as a phenomenon that has led to shifts in international power relations. This is reflected in development cooperation. Countries like China, Brazil, India and South Africa have enhanced their cooperation programs and present their development cooperation as South-South Development cooperation (SSDC) which takes place between countries of the ‘Global South’. Both practitioners and scholars ascribe a notion of solidarity and horizontality to South-South cooperation that allegedly distinguishes it from the relationship patterns commonly associated with North-South relations. However, power constellations between the emerging powers and most of their cooperation partners are often asymmetrical. This book asks whether the claim that South-South cooperation is conducted in a horizontal manner holds in practice in spite of these asymmetries. It revises the concept of South-South cooperation and identifies the central characteristics that are claimed to distinguish the Southern modality from Northern cooperation. It then investigates the relationship between Brazil and Mozambique during the period 2003-2014 to shed some light on the question whether South-South cooperation is different from ‘traditional’ development cooperation regarding the relations between cooperation partners.