State of exception: the legal form of neoliberalism (original) (raw)

The geopolitics of the Brazilian coup d'état and its consequences

Transcience , 2018

Besides the judicial achievements going after the corrupt schemes which were bleeding the balance sheet of Brazilian state-owned companies, scholarly litera- ture has still not been able to assess the multiple allegedly unintentional implications correlated to the political association between judicial ranks and corporate media out- lets behind the witch-hunt against corruption in Brazil. In order to understand the 2016 coup d’ ́etat in Brazil, two distinct approaches are necessary. On the one hand, the coup is fundamentally connected with a long-term process of epistemological and normative public battles among professional networks who are in charge of the politi- cal legitimation of judicial and macroeconomic field of state power. I am going to call these struggles palace wars. On the other hand, it’s related to a specific role played by United States’ geopolitics. By employing a Clausewitzian concept of center of gravity and its deployment in a new pattern of non-conventional warfare, including a cyber- war, it will be sustained that “Bridge to the Future” is one of the main mechanisms pushed by the hybrid warfare under which Brazilian democracy has been subjected to in recent years.

The republic in crisis and future possibilities

This text gives a brief reconstruction of the process of impeachment of Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff, which was a 'coup' effected through parliament, and situates it at the end of three periods of politics in the Brazilian republic: the first, broader, and democratizing; the second, the age of the PT (Workers' Party) as the force with the hegemony on the left; and the third, shorter, the cycle of its governments. Together, these phases constitute a crisis of the republic, although not a rupture of the country's institutional structure, nor a 'State of Exception'. The paper puts forward three main issues: the developmentalist project implemented by the governments of the PT, in alliance with Brazil's construction companies; the role of the judiciary, and in particular of 'Oper-ation Carwash'; and the conflict-beset relationship between the new evangelical churches and the LGBT social movements. The essay concludes with an assessment of the defeat and isolation of the left at this moment, and also suggests that democracy, in particular, could be the kernel of a renewed project of the left.

Who has the right to remain in place? Informality, citizenship and belonging in Belo Horizonte, Brazil

Who has the right to remain in place? Informality, citizenship and belonging in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 2017

The thesis looks at three conflicts related to the 2014 World Cup preparation in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. In each of the cases, affected groups – informal workers, informal residents and middle-class citizens – engage with the state to claim rights over space. It examines how the entanglements between social class and legal/institutional developments engendered through “peripheral urbanisation” shape the capacities of those groups to affect formal/informal boundaries and have their demands legitimated. This research draws on the findings from a fieldwork in Belo Horizonte, which lasted eight months in total between 2014 and 2016 and involved archival research, participant observation and semi-structured interviews with relevant actors. Three cases are considered, which include: the Mineirão stadium redevelopment that displaced a group of informal workers while creating a conflict in a middle-class neighbourhood; the demolition of an informal settlement to make way for a transport infrastructure project; the construction of a hotel in a middle-class area against the will of local residents. The thesis presents three key findings. Firstly, the urban space production is affected by citizens’ capacity to engage with the state. While the state-society boundaries are blurry, citizens are unevenly empowered to have their demands validated and avoid displacement, i.e. the loss of place. Secondly, while informal residents have their rights partially recognised thanks to the “insurgent citizenship” struggles of the past, informal workers are not entitled to compensation because of the disassociation of work informality debates from spatial considerations. Finally, middle-class politics matter, as middle-class residents are better equipped to validate their claims and protect their place in the city. The research contributes to recent postcolonial debates on urban space production and informality. I show that both informal working and housing practices are interconnected through the place-making strategies of the urban poor as well as of the urban middle-class, all of which generate important implications for the reproduction of socio-spatial segregation and thinking of the Brazilian urban future.

Policies- management and the right to higher education new modes of regulation and trends in construction.pdf

ABSTRACT. The present text problematizes and seeks to analyze the tendencies in construction in the Brazilian higher education, as well as the changes and new regulations that have been taking place after a period of clear expansion, considering the policies and actions projected for this field, in the conjuncture of crisis in the recent years. It synthesizes an exploratory study and its construction is based on bibliographical research and documentary analysis of convergent questions for the understanding of the theme, but also on the consultation of existing statistics, therefore, adopting a perspective of analysis that combines quantitative and qualitative aspects. It concludes by pointing out challenges and alternatives in the field of social and political movements. Keywords: economic-political crisis, higher education policies, right to higher education, regulation of higher education.

Brazil: The Failure of the PT and the Rise of the ‘New Right’

The 2015 protests were very different from the previous wave of demonstrations in mid-2013. The latter were ignited by radical left workers and students contesting a public transport fare increase, although the movement was soon captured by an odd amalgam of the middle class, anarchist ‘black blocks’ and the far right. The 2015 protests were far more cohesive and better organized. Their demands, moreover, unambiguously aligned with the political right, and primarily included the country’s upper middle class and the bourgeoisie. The 2015 demonstrations erupted in the political vacuum created by the paralysis of Dilma’s administration because of its own failings and Brazil’s worsening economy. Those difficulties were compounded by aggressive media reporting of the Lava Jato corruption scandal. That scandal focused on a network of firms channelling vast sums to assorted individuals and political parties through the state-owned oil company Petrobras. Yet, at a deeper level, the economic and political crises in Brazil are due to the achievements and limitations of the administrations led by Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2006 and 2007-2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011-2014 and 2015-present). They led a partial economic and social break with neoliberalism that delivered significant gains in employment and distribution, but also entrenched poor economic performance and left Brazil vulnerable to the continuing global downturn. In the political domain, the PT transformed the social policies of the Brazilian state, while simultaneously accepting a fragile hold on power as a condition of power itself.

A (IN)DISCERNIBILIDADE ENTRE DEMOCRACIA E ESTADO DE EXCEÇÃO NO BRASIL CONTEMPORÂNEO: UMA LEITURA A PARTIR DE GIORGIO AGAMBEN

Revista do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Direito da UFC, 2018

A democracia brasileira se construiu tendo em vista uma tradição autoritária, que não desaparece com a simples mudança de status jurídico-político. O presente artigo objetiva, em face deste contexto, analisar os espaços de exceção que parasitam o cenário político-jurídico nacional, nos quais a indiscernibilidade entre democracia e autoritarismo transforma-se em regra. A problematização proposta parte da ideia de que um sistema político-jurídico democrático pode ser facilmente utilizado para a realização de propósitos autoritários. Daí a hipótese levantada: a necessidade de confrontar toda a tradição mediante a suspensão dos juízos dados e herdados, de modo a evitar qualquer possibilidade de “encobrimento” da exceção sob as fórmulas fáceis do politicamente correto e do “democrático”. A primeira seção do texto possui um cariz conceitual que se destina à fixação do marco teórico proposto para a análise, na qual será apresentado e discutido o conceito de estado de exceção na obra de Giorgio Agamben; a segunda visa a contextualizar a teoria agambeniana acerca da exceção permanente a partir do contexto brasileiro pós-impeachment da Presidenta Dilma Rousseff. A pesquisa foi perspectivada a partir do método fenomenológico.

The Brazilian Presidential Elections and 'The Rules of the Game'

Counterpunch, 2018

This article is an introduction to and translation of "A regra do jogo" ("The Rules of the Game"), an essay by the Brazilian psychoanalyst and social theorist Christian Ingo Lenz Dunker. “The Rules of the Game” focuses on the ideological and affective dimensions of two central events in the lead up to Brazil’s October 2018 elections: the parliamentary coup against Dilma Rousseff in 2016, which ended almost a decade and a half of the center-left Workers’ Party (PT) at the head of national government; and the punitive imprisonment of ex-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in April 2018, an act that eventually ended his presidential campaign as the PT’s prefered candidate and the frontrunner in polls. Dunker returns to Lula’s frequent use of soccer as allegory for politics to show how these events have altered both the “regulative rules” and the “constitutive rules” of the democratic game. In the first case, similar censurable practices of corruption received a very different treatment under the center-right government of Michel Temer, Dilma’s former vice-president and coalition partner, than they did under Dilma, when they were used to justify her impeachment. This contradiction has heightened the perception that the regulative rules were now being selectively applied against one side. In the second case, the imprisonment of Lula not only coincided with a more widespread rhetoric of hatred and the humiliation of the losing side. It also intensified patterns of social resentment and political violence, altering the constitutive rules that have defined democratic politics since the post-dictatorship Constitution of 1988. For Dunker, what ultimately emerged victorious with Lula’s legal defeat was “an archaic conception of power based on the strength of the person, the possession of means, and the instrumentalization of the State.” Although written before the recent dramatic rise and then election of the far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, Dunker’s essay presents a diagnostic of the social, political, and affective terrain in which an authoritarian neoliberalism with neofascist tendencies could find the conditions to grow.

Public Law and the Puzzle of Democratic Decay in Brazil

Democratic decay, which may be loosely defined as the incremental degradation of the structures and substance of liberal constitutional democracy, has gathered pace in recent years. Decay in the democratic systems of states worldwide, such as Hungary, Poland, Venezuela, and South Africa, forms a sub-set of what Larry Diamond calls a global ‘democratic recession’. Public law is at the heart of this decay. Partly this is because various contemporary regimes have ‘weaponised’ public law to hollow out democratic rule, through increasingly sophisticated use of constitutional law to remove institutional constraints on political power. Partly it is because public law is also inevitably seen as an essential tool in the pushback against democratic decay, given that law has assumed an ever greater role in governance since the 1970s. Focusing on the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in August 2016 and its aftermath, this paper uses the Brazilian context as a way to explore three interrelated questions: (i) how might we define democratic decay?; (ii) can we say that Brazil is suffering democratic decay, and why?; and (iii) how does the Brazilian impeachment crisis add to, or complicate, our understanding of democratic decay, and the role of public law in such decay?