The BRICS Strategy and Technology Review (BSTR) is an academic journal dedicated to the critical examination of the relationships between strategy, technology, sovereignty, defense, data governance, and contemporary geopolitical transformations, with priority given to perspectives from BRICS countries and the Global South. The journal engages with and reflects on both institutional agendas (such as summits, parliamentary forums, working groups, joint declarations, and other cooperation mechanisms) and the dynamics of civil society, scientific communities, social movements, and non-state actors within the BRICS+ countries. It addresses public policies, regulatory frameworks, multilateral initiatives, and state strategies related to technology and sovereignty, valuing theoretical, empirical, and methodological approaches that contribute to the production of situated, critical knowledge committed to intellectual and technological autonomy in multipolar contexts.
About the Journal
Current Issue
This inaugural issue of the BRICS Strategy and Technology Review (BSTR) marks the formal launch of the journal as a space for critical, situated debate on technology, sovereignty, strategy, and power from the standpoint of the BRICS+ countries and the Global South. Conceived as the intellectual continuation of the I Seminário em Estratégia, Tecnologia e Soberania (I Seminar in Strategy, Data and Sovereignty), held at the University of Brasília in 2024, the volume gathers reflections that were shaped in dialogue with public officials, researchers, and strategic thinkers engaged in Brazil’s national debates on data governance, digital transformation, and defense policy
Entirely published in Portuguese, this first issue affirms Brazilian Portuguese as a language of theory, strategy, and geopolitical thought, addressing both domestic and international audiences without mediation. The texts explore how technological infrastructures, data regimes, cybernetic systems, and digital platforms reconfigure classical notions of sovereignty, security, and state capacity under conditions of asymmetrical multipolarity. Across the volume, technology appears neither as a neutral tool nor as an abstract force, but as a concrete site of dispute — legal, political, economic, and cognitive.
The issue brings together analyses of digital sovereignty and data governance, cybernetics and complex systems in security and defense, contemporary warfare through Clausewitzian and Sun Tzu–inspired lenses, science and technology as strategic assets in the Global South, China’s legal strategies in response to extraterritorial digital regulation, and the social impacts of digital and data colonialism. While diverse in approach, the contributions share a common concern with autonomy, institutional capacity, and the conditions under which states and societies can act strategically in a world structured by technological dependence.
As a whole, this volume positions the BSTR as both a record of an ongoing collective debate and an intervention in it — grounded in Brazilian academic production, attentive to BRICS+ dynamics, and oriented toward the construction of intellectual and technological sovereignty in the twenty-first century.
