ENADE Relações Internacionais common mistakes
ENADE Relações Internacionais · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
On Formação Geral discursive items, the candidate opens with a paraphrase of the prompt and then fills the lines with general commentary about society, never quoting or interpreting the text, table or graph supplied with the question.
Candidates carry over the vestibular 'redação' habit of writing about the theme in the abstract, and under time pressure the support text is read once and treated as decoration rather than as the object to be analysed.
What to do instead
Read the support text twice before writing. In the first paragraph name the source and its central claim or trend; build the body on two specific data points or arguments extracted from it; use the last paragraph to answer the exact command of the prompt, not to summarise the theme.
The candidate reads a graph or table by the visual height of the bars instead of by axis labels, units, base year and source - for example treating a percentage-share series as absolute totals, or comparing nominal figures across a period of high inflation.
The figure is skimmed only after the alternatives have been read, so the candidate searches the chart for a number that matches an option instead of first characterising the series as a whole.
What to do instead
Before looking at the alternatives, note in the margin what is on each axis, the unit, the period and the base. State the trend aloud in one sentence ('share fell until 2015, then recovered'), and only then test each alternative against that sentence.
Ethics, citizenship, environment and diversity items are answered with exhortations ('it is everyone's duty to be ethical', 'we must preserve nature') rather than by naming the concept, right, duty or public policy at stake.
Formação Geral content is assumed to be 'common sense' and is left out of the study plan, so the candidate has no vocabulary beyond everyday moralising when a conceptual answer is required.
What to do instead
Build a one-page glossary of the exam's recurring concepts (cidadania, direitos humanos, sustentabilidade, ética aplicada, diversidade), each with a short definition and one Brazilian example, and cite at least one of them by name in every such answer.
The candidate leaves objective items blank and spends a disproportionate share of the sitting on the first discursive answer, reaching the final questions with almost no time left.
No full timed simulation was ever run, so there is no personal time budget and no experience of how long a well-structured discursive answer actually takes to write by hand.
What to do instead
Run at least two complete simulations under exam conditions. Fix a per-item time budget, set a hard stop for each discursive answer, and never leave an objective item unanswered - there is no penalty for a wrong answer, so an informed guess beats a blank.
Authors are classified by label alone: Keohane is filed as a realist, Waltz's structural realism and Morgenthau's classical realism are treated as the same argument, and Wendt's claim that anarchy is what states make of it is read as a liberal thesis.
Theory is memorised from summaries as a list of names and '-isms', so the criteria that actually separate the schools - what is assumed fixed, what is treated as variable, which level of analysis is privileged - are never learned.
What to do instead
For each author build a card with four fields: core assumption about state behaviour, defining concept, level of analysis, principal critique received. Practise stating what each author denies, not only what he affirms, and place the author against one rival on the same question.
A Brazilian foreign-policy doctrine is attached to the wrong government or decade - 'responsible pragmatism' attributed to the 2000s, the Independent Foreign Policy placed in the 1990s, or autonomy through participation confused with autonomy through diversification.
Doctrines are memorised as slogans without anchors, and the successive formulations of autonomy in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s blur into one another because they share vocabulary.
What to do instead
Keep a one-page timeline with four columns: president, years, doctrine name, one concrete episode (Itaipu, recognition of African independence, the IBSA coalition, a WTO dispute). Reconstruct the doctrine from the episode rather than the reverse.
Regional-integration institutions and their instruments are mixed up: the Protocol of Olivos with the Protocol of Brasília, ALALC with ALADI, the Andean Community with UNASUL, or Mercosur's common external tariff with a completed customs union.
Integration is studied as a chronology of summits and acronyms, so similarly named instruments are absorbed in a block without their date, function or decision rule.
What to do instead
Build a table with columns institution, founding treaty, date, decision rule, dispute body, members. Add a final column, 'what it is not' - for example, Mercosur has no EU-style commission with exclusive power of initiative - because exams test the negative cases.
International law is described as uniformly binding or uniformly soft, without distinguishing sources (treaty, custom, general principles), and the candidate asserts flatly that a ratified human-rights treaty automatically prevails over ordinary domestic statute.
Public international law and constitutional law are revised in separate blocks, so article 5 of the 1988 Constitution and the Supreme Court's case law on treaty hierarchy are never connected to the doctrine of sources.
What to do instead
Draw the chain from source to ratification, internalisation by decree and position in the hierarchy, marking the leading Supreme Court decisions at each step. Practise framing answers as 'it depends on the source and on the incorporation route', then specify which.
Peacekeeping, peace enforcement and collective security are used interchangeably, and Security Council mechanics are misstated - the scope of the veto, when Chapter VII is invoked, and who authorises a mission.
United Nations material is absorbed from news coverage, which collapses institutional distinctions into a single narrative of 'the UN sends blue helmets', leaving no grasp of the Charter as a legal structure.
What to do instead
Learn the Charter as a structure: Chapter VI consent-based tools, Chapter VII coercive tools, the procedural and substantive dimensions of the veto, and the authorising chain for each type of mission. Attach one real mission to each concept, with its mandate and legal basis.
Specific discursive answers narrate the case without the theory the prompt names, or invert trade concepts - presenting the most-favoured-nation clause as the ban on discrimination between national and foreign goods, or describing import-substitution industrialisation as export-led growth.
The candidate recognises a familiar topic in the prompt and starts writing immediately, skipping the command verb ('analyse in the light of', 'compare', 'evaluate the limits of'), and the trade vocabulary was learned as a list of acronyms.
What to do instead
Underline the command verb and the named theory before writing. Open with a one-sentence definition of that concept, apply it to two concrete features of the case, and close with one sentence on the theory's limitation - this also earns the analytical marks the rubric rewards.