‘Post-third-world city' or neoliberal ‘city of exception'? Rio de Janeiro in the Olympic era

This article considers processes of urban development within the context of mega-event preparations in Rio de Janeiro. We begin with a brief overview of these development processes, highlighting their connections to political and economic change in recent years. Proponents of these mega-event-led initiatives argue that Rio is undergoing a period of inclusive growth and integration: a perspective we call here a ‘post-Third-World city' narrative of urban renewal. Critics, however, contend that urban officials are harnessing mega-events (e.g. the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games) to push forward a neoliberal agenda of socially unjust policies benefiting the interests of capital and marginalizing the city's poor and especially its favelas (i.e. the ‘city-of-exception' thesis). In this article we explore the insights of these two perspectives and consider why they have grown popular in recent years. Though we side generally with the city-of-exception thesis, we argue that important geographic and historical particularities must also be accounted for. Without carefully situating analytical perspectives empirically—in particular, cases in which theoretical models are drawn from European and North American contexts—urban researchers risk concealing more than they reveal in analyses of rapidly developing countries like Brazil

Governance without government: Explaining order in a Brazilian favela

This dissertation queries how 'governance' - as a process where social behavior and development is organized, coordinated, and guided - is produced and maintained in spaces where the institutions of 'government' are essentially absent. In Brazil, for example, where more than one-third of the total urban population lives in favelas (urban slums, often lacking basic state resources), researchers continually report that social and political order is maintained in slum communities, even when the official state apparatus has no visible presence whatsoever. The reason for this, suggest some scholars, lies in the fear and violence that is used by drug traffickers to control the spaces where they do business (i.e., favelas). But this answer is incomplete and based almost exclusively upon research from only two Brazilian cities (Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo): drug traffickers do not rule most favelas in Brazil, and socio-political cohesion is rarely, if ever, preserved through constant gang or police surveillance in favelas outside of Rio and São Paulo. Still unknown, therefore, is how and why a majority of favelas, despite the severely diminished presence of a state apparatus (official or otherwise), continue to function like any other Brazilian neighborhood. Through a case study of a favela in a midsized city in northeast Brazil (Fortaleza), and relying upon a mixed-methodological research design (e.g., semi-structured interviews, focus groups, participant observation, archival research), this dissertation helps to explain the paradox of governance in ungoverned spaces

Strategies of conditional cash transfers and the tactics of resistance

This article examines how poor people negotiate obligations placed on them by social welfare initiatives. More specifically, it considers conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs), and the ways beneficiaries harness program conditionalities to make demands on authorities, in some cases even enacting subtle forms of resistance to state governance. Drawing from Michel de Certeau, it argues that while CCT conditionalities function as strategies of state development, they are not always/already under exclusive state control. Marginalized groups like CCT recipients can tactically harness these conditionalities. Through such tactics, poor people make demands on the state and deflect program obligations, but in calculated ways that avoid exposing them to greater vulnerability. Drawing from empirical data collected as part of a case study in rural northeastern Brazil, this article contributes to existent bodies of literature on CCTs, governance, and critical development studies in the 21st century. </jats:p