Rethinking peace and violence from the favelas (original) (raw)
Related papers
2022
This thesis offers a new consideration of peace processes that engage with the needs and challenges of marginalized, racialized populations living through urban violence in the expanding peripheries of the postcolonial world. The research draws on the perspectives of favela community leaders, educators and activists on the challenges to their work in reducing violence in their communities, which were gathered during eight months of qualitative fieldwork in and around the favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2019-2020. Through a critical lens, the thesis considers Rio de Janeiro as a colonial city where historical and continuous state exclusion, criminalization and murder of favela residents feed a violent cycle of drug-related crime and violence in the favelas. It questions the meaning of peace and top-down public security policies like the Police Pacification Program (UPP) and mega-operations in a city where the favela residents have since slavery been considered a violent people to be pacified and controlled. It thus critiques the militarized state security operations in the favelas as one man’s peace, another man’s warzone, noting that these pacification attempts effectively conduct urban warfare against the majority-black favelas to increase a sense of security in the whiter, wealthier areas of Rio de Janeiro. The thesis consequently proposes and discusses favela peace formation as a concept to describe alternative processes in the favelas working to reduce manifest and structural violence: a nonviolent, favela grassroots, locally legitimate peace process, which navigates various blockages and opportunities within and outside the state in its construction of a future with more social justice and less violence. It finds that through community education and engagement; navigation of the judiciary and occupation of certain positions within politics; and constant work to produce knowledge from the favela to change criminalizing narratives, favela peace formation manages to slowly construct an alternative, but limited peace both outside of and within the state. It concludes that due to enormous challenges of state violence, corruption, racism and criminalization of the favelas and their movements, favela peace formation needs support from partners within the Brazilian state, international institutions and/or solidarity movements in order to fulfil their unique potential to construct an alternative, inclusive politics without violence.
Favela Peace Formation in a Violent State: Perspectives from Favelas in Rio de Janeiro
In: Ferreira, M.A. (eds) Peace and Violence in Brazil. Rethinking Peace and Conflict Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham., 2022
This chapter considers peaceful responses to violence by grassroot social actors in the large favela complex Maré in Rio de Janeiro, gathered through eight months fieldwork in the city. Through a critical lens, it considers Brazil as a violent state where the historical and continuous state exclusion, criminalisation and murder of favela residents feed a violent cycle of drug related crime and violence in the favelas. In Maré, local community leaders, activists, and other social actors respond to both violence deriving from exclusion and marginalisation, and state violence from warlike public security operations in their community. This chapter shares their critical perspectives on the state’s marginalisation of vulnerability in Maré and shows how they navigate both direct and structural violence in order to construct their own, alternative peace, through denunciation of state violence, conflict mediation, youth programs, drug rehabilitation, education, knowledge production and more. It proposes and discusses favela peace formation as a concept to describe these alternative processes in the favela that work to reduce manifest and structural violence: a nonviolent, favela grassroot, locally legitimate peace process that navigates various blockages and opportunities within and outside the state in its construction of a future with more social justice and less violence.
Violence in the Favela Communities
A ten-page-long term project for a political science class, which briefly lays under scrutiny the hardships and underground politics of the austere lives in the Brazilian suburbs. (May 2011)
Violence and impunity in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas
Journalism, Power and Investigation, 2019
This article proposes a conceptual framework for community-based tourism in Rio de Janeiro's South Zone favelas that benefits these communities. The article sheds light on how local guides use tourism as a tool to counter the prevailing negative perception of favelas and how these guides seek to rehumanize the favela by providing an alternative cultural narrative that challenges existing stereotypes, making these tours a form of everyday resistance. The article covers the material impact of these tours by highlighting tourists' perceptions before and after visiting a favela and including the opinion of local favela residents about these tours.
Introduction: examining peace and violence in Brazil
Peace and Violence in Brazil, 2022
Ferreira, Marcos Alan. Introduction: examining peace and violence in Brazil. In: Ferreira M.A. (eds) Peace and Violence in Brazil. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79209-1\_1
Rethinking favela governance: Nonviolent politics in Rio de Janeiro's Gang Territories
Politics & Society, 2018
Since the 1980s, when drug gangs became embedded in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, or poor urban neighborhoods, much has been written about the violent regimes that govern these spaces. This article argues that a nonviolent political regime run by activist residents also plays a critical role in favela governance by expanding the provision of services, promoting social development, fighting for their citizenship rights, and inserting favelas into political networks across the city. This claim is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2017 in the City of God, one of Rio’s most dangerous gang-controlled neighborhoods. Paradoxically, in activists’ efforts to improve the neighborhood and fight for their rights, the nonviolent political regime in the City of God not only subverted violent politics but also helped to provide the conditions for its survival. Nevertheless, scholarship must account for nonviolent political actors in order to fully theorize favela governance.
Peace and Violence in Brazil: Reflections on the Roles of State, Organized Crime and Civil Society
2022
Full book in: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-79209-1 This edited volume examines how the multiple manifestations of social violence in Brazil impacts the building of a peaceful society. The chapters reflect on the role of state, organized crime and civil society. They provide a unique analysis of how the Brazilian state deals with criminal violence, but also finds challenges to comply with Sustainable Development Goal 16, to interdict police violence, and to provide an efficient gun policy. The book shows the agency of civil society in a violent society, in which NGOs and communities engage in key peace formation action, including advocacy for human rights and promoting arts. The overall aim of this book is to advance the research agenda regarding the intersections between peace, public security, and violence, under the lens of peace studies. In Brazil, the challenges to peace differ markedly from areas in regular conflict.
Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, 2021
The concentration of urban violence in certain settlements in Latin America and the possibility of expansion have been latent concerns in slum upgrading. This intervention is potentially an urban peace strategy, especially when it is open to local participation and the promotion of capacities for collective action. However, the political economy behind upgrading shows that these are settings of competence for power and resources. Different factors (e.g., heterogene-ity and population size, and project design) account for the bias towards a local elite, which is functional to the interests of public authorities. But, in contexts where power is fluid and challengeable, the informal arrangements between actors involved are more important as mediating social mechanisms of the peacebuilding efforts in the upgrading intervention and their outcomes. This article focuses on the Vila Viva slum-upgrading experience in Aglomerado da Serra, starting in 2005 in Belo Horizonte (Brazil). Social Network Analysis (SNA) models were applied to study the ties linking activists with public and private community initiatives. Interviews and a sociometric survey were used to collect information. The analysed social mechanisms (closure and brokerage types) depicted interaction frameworks with public authorities of two profiles of community activists: traditional and emerging. The first one was functional to the situational crime control approach of Vila Viva, in contrast with territorial rooting defended by emerging activists. The Vila Viva program upgraded the area's connectivity with the city and broadened the market share of the favela´s drug dealers. After which, they assumed situational control to protect external buyers.
"This is Iraq. People are afraid." Resistance and mobilization in the Maré favelas (Rio de Janeiro)
Vibrant. Virtual Brazilian Anthropology, 2014
Violence among criminal groups in dispute over domination of drug trafficking in the favelas and intervention by the state security forces in those areas encourage a climate of fear and oppression that intensifies the segregation that historically afflicts their residents. In Maré, an area of Rio de Janeiro made up of sixteen favelas, some of the most powerful drug trafficking factions operate, and armed conflicts and aggressive behavior by the police are commonplace. This is the backdrop against which the residents of Maré and local organizations have mobilized against the constant violations of their human rights, following an upsurge in the number of conflicts. This article intends to debate the issue of violence in Rio de Janeiro, presenting some of the social struggles that the population of Maré has fought in recent times.
Spaces of informality, such as favelas, barriadas and tugurios are seen by media, municipalities and security institutions as dangerous places. Today municipalities and international agencies use new forms of urban upgrading as tools to address both the traditional structural problems of poverty and also as tools for violence prevention. While a causation between informal spaces and insecurity clearly does not exist, there is an interest in understanding the influence of physical interventions in neighborhood security behavior. This research tests ways in which urban projects alter perceptions of security among favela dwellers over time, in the Rio de Janeiro-Finds that while security conditions are marginally affected, location close to main security perceptions positively. However, individuals in less accessible areas of the favela present less openness to address security questions. It argues that individual proximity to upgraded main roads experience shelter from the effects of retaliation from perverse actors than those that have their accessibility impeded. Other projects such as public spaces or buildings show no significative changes in security perceptions.