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The aim is to examine the changes and the continuities of Japan’s foreign policy from 2012 to 2022. The main argument indicates that the reforms implemented since 2012 have had the purpose to legitimize Japan’s pacifist guidelines and practices, and Japan has gradually abandoned self-imposed restrictions regarding the reinterpretation of the Article 9 of its Constitution, the change of arms export rules, and the revision of the initiatives of official development assistance in a more pragmatic and incremental than an ideological and radical way. Many of these reforms build on longer-term pragmatic trends to the Japanese response to changes of the state’s security and economic environment.

This article aims to examine the role of domestic stability and economic growth in China’s foreign policy under Xi Jinping’s administration, from March 2013 to July 2022. I argue that one of the most relevant goals of China’s foreign policy is to preserve domestic stability and economic growth, which are necessary for the survival of one-party rule. China may be best seen as a responsible reformer that tries to facilitate for permanent regional and global cooperation, but at the same time brings alternatives to the liberal international order. The main foreign policy strategy is to capitalize on Chinese economic power to strengthen China’s political and military influence in regional and global affairs.

The aim of the article is to propose alternative and critical analytical perspectives to study creative economy and its correlated issues, such as creative city and creative class. A neo-marxist perspective indicates that creative economy reinforced the gap among innovators, investors, and those who work for them. According to a post-structural perspective, the formulas for the development of creative economy or creative city are homogenizing and contribute to the marginalization of differences. A postcolonial perspective indicates that marginalized societies in the capitalist system were conceived as blank spaces in which socioeconomic governance recommendations applied for creative sectors in North Atlantic societies could be replicated. Feminist approaches and queer theory highlight hierarchies related to gender, sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity in creative industries, despite the supposedly inclusive notions of creative economy and creative class.

The main purpose is to examine the possible role of artificial intelligence (AI) in the uncertain context of the 2020 municipal elections in Brazil. The central argument indicates that, regardless of when the elections are held, the COVID-19 pandemic opened spaces for candidates to build their political platforms on the initiatives to combat the disease, but also the opportunity for the dissemination of fake news and profiles regarding the spread of the new coronavirus and social distancing and quarantine measures with political purposes. The electoral discourse has increasingly used technologies and data such as voters’ concerns, preferences, and oppositions, collected on social networks through AI. New data-based technologies can give rise to an unreal, induced, forged public opinion, in the same way that they can bring greater possibilities of discernment to the voter. The situation requires a more robust regulation for AI, but there are still many unregulated aspects and obstacles for the implementation of an effective regulation of online activities in Brazil, such as the poor adaptation of the legal space to highly volatile phenomena.

The aims are to identify and examine the inconsistencies and incongruities of the definitions of “creative economy”, “creative city” and “creative class” in their application to the study and the formulation of public policies in the Global South. The central argument points out that 1) the idea of “creative economy” seemed to conceive peripheral societies would be flat tables on which pre-given economic governance strategies for creative sectors could be replicated; 2) the concept of a “creative city” by the mainstream does not deal with the specific political-economic obstacles in the Global South, so it seems more feasible to define “creative city” from a culturally specific understanding of what creativity is and recognize the motivations for creating a creative city can come from different actors according to local circumstances; 3) the mobilization of creativity in the exercise of the profession is a weak criterion for defining the “creative class”, which motivates difficulties regarding the self-identification of individuals as members of it. They reproduce hierarchical regimes that exclude differences.