Introduction: Exceptionalism and necropolitical security dynamics in Olympic Rio de Janeiro

For more than a decade, urban development in Rio de Janeiro was driven by the urgency of preparations for mega-events such as the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics. During these years, Brazilian authorities used the mega-events to create a state of exception that legitimized a broad range of state security interventions across the city. While Brazilian authorities presented the events as an opportunity to create a modern, dynamic, and socially inclusive city, this special section argues that the security interventions implemented in Rio during the years of Olympic exceptionalism intensified racialized and gendered inequalities and reproduced historical patterns of necropolitical governance that has sought to render black life in Brazil impossible.publishedVersio

Racialized governance : the production and destruction of secure spaces in Olympic Rio de Janeiro

Based on ethnographic fi eldwork, this article explores the eviction of residents from Vila Autódromo, a neighborhood that was decimated as Rio de Janeiro prepared to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. Inspired by Achille Mbembe’s notion of “necropolitics” and Mindy Fullilove’s concept of “root shock,” we argue that forced evictions in Rio constitute a form of racialized governance. Th e authorities exclude favela residents from the citizenry security interventions are intended to protect and conceptualize them instead as security risks. Th is exclusion refl ects the spatial expression of racial hierarchies in the city and produces a public security governance that in the case of Vila Autódromo terrorized residents and destroyed life conditions in their community. Racialized governance therefore exacerbates insecurity for large parts of the population

Introduction: Exceptionalism and necropolitical security dynamics in Olympic Rio de Janeiro

For more than a decade, urban development in Rio de Janeiro was driven by the urgency of preparations for mega-events such as the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics. During these years, Brazilian authorities used the mega-events to create a state of exception that legitimized a broad range of state security interventions across the city. While Brazilian authorities presented the events as an opportunity to create a modern, dynamic, and socially inclusive city, this special section argues that the security interventions implemented in Rio during the years of Olympic exceptionalism intensified racialized and gendered inequalities and reproduced historical patterns of necropolitical governance that has sought to render black life in Brazil impossible

The Social Life of Economic Inequalities in Contemporary Latin America: Decades of Change

This edited volume examines how economic processes have worked upon social lives and social realities in Latin America during the past decades. Through tracing the effects of the neoliberal epoch into the era of the so-called pink tide, the book seeks to understand to what extent the turn to the left at the start of the millennium managed to challenge historically constituted configurations of inequality. A central argument in the book is that in spite of economic reforms and social advances on a range of arenas, the fundamental tenants of socio-economic inequalities have not been challenged substantially. As several countries are now experiencing a return to right-wing politics, this collection helps us better understand why inequalities are so entrenched in the Latin American continent, but also the complex and creative ways that it is continuously contested. The book directs itself to students, scholars and anyone interested in Latin America, economic anthropology, political anthropology, left-wing politics, poverty and socio-economic inequalities