Demétrio Magnoli


Demétrio Martinelli Magnoli is a Brazilian sociologist, PhD in human geography, writer and columnist. In 2012, he was named by the Época magazine as one of the "New Right's shrill voices."

Academic life

Magnoli has a BA in social sciences and Journalism from the University of São Paulo, an institution from which he also earned a doctorate in Human Geography. He was professor of Political Geography and Urban Geography at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo.
Since 1993, he is the editorial director of the newsletter Mundo: Geografia e Política Internacional.

Works

Magnoli published his first book, O que é Geopolítica?, in 1986. In 1997 he was a finalist of the Jabuti Prize, competing with the book O Corpo da Pátria: imaginação geográfica e política externa no Brasil, 1808–1912.
He was a columnist for the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo, and since then has written for O Estado de S. Paulo and O Globo, besides contributing to the magazine Época and make comments about international politics for the Jornal das Dez at Globo News.

Controversies

Magnoli has actively positioned himself against affirmative action measures and racial quotas. In his 2009 book, Uma Gota de Sangue, the central thesis is that "affirmative actions and the Black Movement result from an ideological scam", which "works against the principle of equality before the law." His point of view that in Brazil "the racial boundary doesn't exist in the minds of the people" and that by the nineteenth century the History of Brazil was told as a "mixture of races", was challenged even in vehicles of which he actively participates, as Folha de S.Paulo.
Magnoli, who was an extreme-left militant when he was a university student in the 1980s, criticized in 2011 USP students who protested violently against interventions of São Paulo's military police in the campus, to suppress marijuana use. At the time, he even objected the choice of the university president by direct vote, saying it only made sense "in the 1960s and 1970s", when "there was a need to preserve the educational institution as an area of freedom of expression."

Selected publications