Violence, bureaucracy and intreccio in Brazil

For Brazil’s ‘violence worker’ street level bureaucrats, violence is woven into everyday practice. But violent influence flows in multiple directions; from the state to society, within the state and its agencies, from violent actors upon state bureaucrats. Real and potential violence defines the bureaucratic regime of truth, alongside the influence of a self-defined organised crime group. Using ethnographic evidence, I show some of the fissures that are wedged open through violence, and demonstrate the ways that violent uncertainty shapes a need for leverage and spheres of trust. This shows the dissonance between bureaucratic form and bureaucratic rationale. What matters is not the relationship between the state and bureaucracy, but the relationship between sovereign power and bureaucracy.Social Science Research Counci

City of clones: Facsimiles and governance in Sao Paulo, Brazil

São Paulo is a megacity defined by formal and informal patterns of urbanization. Informally urbanized spaces are not absent of state intent, despite appearances. Grassroots-led social and spatial practices for survival, agency and self-governance contribute to the reproduction of urban political order in surprisingly unoriginal and routinely recognizable ways. This article argues that these unexceptional informal practices can be understood as ‘facsimiles’ of their formal institutional originals. Using the example of cloned cars the article shows that the facsimile and the original are the same in form and function. Facsimiles do not exist outside of political authority, but are a byproduct and a component of it. They are indistinguishable in their bureaucratic deployment, recognition and acceptance as part of social and spatial order. This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Sage via https://doi.org/10.1177/001139211665729

Eating pizza in prison: Failing family men, civil punishment, and the policing of whiteness in São Paulo

Police work is obviously a question of pursuing subjects. In postslave societies, one figure dominates; police are always after the young Black man. Meanwhile, another distinctive subject of policing exists. In São Paulo, Brazil, police detectives are also worried about the failing White father. He represents a crucial kind of problem: he weakens whiteness by subjecting White children to the indignities that Black children face. His punishment is not incarceration, however. Instead, his punishment is a question of civility and reparation, of being “pedagogical.” Attention to police officers’ decision-making about these two subjects of everyday policing shows how the long-standing fallacy of the idealized White family is produced by extracting from the Black family. It reveals the logic of differentiated punishment—civil and reparative punishment for White men, life in prison or death for Black men and boys—as a mechanism in the constant remediation of whiteness as property and accumulation.Social Science Research Council and Open Society Foundation

Mundane disappearance: The politics of letting disappear in Brazil

Every year between 20 and 25,000 people ‘go missing’ in São Paulo state in Brazil. But in Brazilian law disappearance is just a fato atípico; an ‘atypical occurrence’. There is no causal relationship between act and violence to be legally found. Nor, it seems, is there a pursuit to know. In a region well recognised for political disappearance, I ask for a deeper and historicised consideration of how disappearance has worked politically, and why it might be acutely important at the current juncture where mass graves have a kind of axiomatic enigma. Doing so allows for a thorough disaggregation of how conditions of passive government and a lack of pursuit – letting disappear – shape the terrain of both extreme suffering and contemporary political ordering

Eating pizza in prison

ABSTRACT: Police work is obviously a question of pursuing subjects. In postslave societies, one figure dominates; police are always after the young Black man. Meanwhile, another distinctive subject of policing exists. In São Paulo, Brazil, police detectives are also worried about the failing White father. He represents a crucial kind of problem: he weakens whiteness by subjecting White children to the indignities that Black children face. His punishment is not incarceration, however. Instead, his punishment is a question of civility and reparation, of being “pedagogical.” Attention to police officers’ decision‐making about these two subjects of everyday policing shows how the long‐standing fallacy of the idealized White family is produced by extracting from the Black family. It reveals the logic of differentiated punishment—civil and reparative punishment for White men, life in prison or death for Black men and boys—as a mechanism in the constant remediation of whiteness as property and accumulation. [whiteness, policing, punishment, men, family, child support, race, São Paulo, Brazil

Legitimacy in Criminal Governance: Managing a Drug Empire from Behind Bars

States, rebels, and mafias all provide governance beyond their core membership; increasingly, so do prison gangs. U.S. gangs leverage control over prison life to govern street-level drug markets. Brazil’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) gang goes further, orchestrating paralyzing attacks on urban targets, while imposing a social order throughout slums that sharply reduces homicides. We analyze hundreds of seized PCC documents detailing its drug business and internal disciplinary system. Descriptively, we find: vast, consignment-based trafficking operations whose profits fund collective benefits for members’ families; elaborate bureaucratic procedures and recordkeeping; and overwhelmingly nonviolent punishments for debt-nonpayment and misconduct. These features, we argue, reflect a deliberate strategy of creating rational-bureaucratic legitimacy in criminal governance. The PCC’s collectivist norms, fair procedures, and meticulous “criminal criminal records” facilitate community stigmatization of infractors, giving mild sanctions punitive heft and inducing widespread voluntary compliance without excessive coercion. This has aided the PCC’s rapid expansion across Brazil.We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Social Science Research Council/Open Society Foundations, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, the Center for International Social Science Research and the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflict at the University of Chicago, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Benjamin Lessing received additional support from award W911-NF-1710044 from the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Army Research Office/Army Research Laboratory under the Minerva Research Initiative. The views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to any of these agencies or foundations

Graham Denyer Willis , Finn Stepputat , and Gaëlle Clavandier Special issue introductionBurial and the politics of dead bodies in times of COVID-19 (part 2)

International audienc

Burial and the politics of dead bodies in times of COVID-19. Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume 7: Issue 2

International audienc

Burial and the politics of dead bodies in times of COVID-19. Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume 7: Issue 2

International audienc