Date: April 24, 2026 (Friday)
Time: 12pm – 1pm
Venue: Room 901, 9/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong
This paper explores the role of national development banks within the dynamics of global capitalism, focusing on the case of the Brazilian National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES). Moving beyond the view of these institutions as mere corrections for ‘underdevelopment’, I argue that BNDES reflects the specific historical trajectory of the Brazilian state and its legal forms. By analyzing the bank’s history since 1952 through the lens of critical legal theory and materialist state theory, the paper examines how legal frameworks have mediated social and economic contradictions in Brazil, and in particular, how the institutionalization of social rights and subsequent financialization have integrated Brazil into global economic circuits, often masking underlying structural tensions related to class and race.
Odara Gonzaga de Andrade is a PhD Candidate in Human Rights and member of the DHCTEM Research Group (Human Rights, Centrality of Labor and Marxism) at the University of São Paulo (USP), and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law. Her doctoral research examines the contradictions of social development in “peripheral” capitalism through a case study of Brazil’s National Development Bank (BNDES). She holds a Master’s degree in Social and Labor Rights from USP and was a Research Fellow at FGV Law SP’s Center on Global Law and Development. Her research interests include critical legal theory, international law, and law and development from a “Third World” perspective.
Chair: Shane Chalmers, Assistant Professor & Deputy Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law
To register, please go to https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=106195.
For inquiries, please contact Ms. Grace Chan at / 3917 4727.