This book is guided by a dual perspective and objective. It is on one hand, a view from outside Brazil that seeks to understand how Brazilian society is responding to the processes of global integration. At the same time, there is also an internal perspective of observation that documents the plurality of ways that social actors and analysts interpret the transformations underway. The common thread of the various perspectives of analysis involved is not their focus on Brazil, but more properly the interest in the relations between Brazil and the world, based on the context of the Americas. This is not a book about Brazil, but of a set of reflections, oriented by the case of a specific country, about the way that local, regional and global processes and contexts have been interweaving in various fields.