Globalism as a conspiracy without center: the formative role of Hardt and Negri’s Empire in the Brazilian far-right’s globalist discourse

This article examines the impact of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire on the conspiratorial thought of Olavo de Carvalho, Ernesto Araújo, and Filipe Martins. These three figures exerted a significant influence on the Bolsonaro administration’s foreign policy, serving as ideological mentor, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Presidential Advisor for International Affairs, respectively. Drawing on their speeches and publications, we reconstruct the group’s engagement with Hardt and Negri’s work and trace the resulting evolution of their thought. We demonstrate that Carvalho’s engagement with Empire marks the inception of the term ‘globalism’ as it is currently employed by the Brazilian far-right. Furthermore, we illustrate how these ideas have fused with older anti-communist national security frameworks from the military era, highlighting their role in Bolsonaro’s 2022 coup attempt. We conclude that this formative role led these figures to conceptualize globalism in an ambiguous manner, less as a traditional conspiracy involving centralized processes and planned outcomes, and more as a decentralized, deterritorialized phenomenon operating through diffuse pathways. Ultimately, this theoretical appropriation provided these figures with a vocabulary that mimicked contemporary academic discourse, allowing them to frame their conspiracy theories in terms more akin to those used to describe complex social processes.