Neofeudal Aspects of Brazil's Public Security

Abstract

Asubtle but perhaps profound shift in the study of Brazilian public security is underway. The dominant scholarly tradition has detailed authoritarian legacies that have shaped public security—e.g., the repertoires of brutal state repression, the state institutions often seen as failing or illegitimate, and the stark spatial segregation of classes. This approach was crucial in calling attention to the institutional holdovers of authoritarianism that (in Brazil and elsewhere) undermine the justice system, weaken citizenship, criminalize the poor, and give rise to repressive styles of policing. More recent studies of public security tend to portray contemporary urban Brazil as increasingly fractured and stratified by privately secured spaces as well as being webbed together at the political level by networks of corruption and criminality. The notion of “authoritarian atavisms” is becoming less useful, while the idea of neofeudal power structures explains more. Here I use neofeudal loosely and generally to refer to various theories that identify growing extra-legal violence, shrinking spaces for public life, the privatization of security, and the absence or illegitimacy of state presence in many areas as alterations in the power relations that determine the Brazilian public security situation. This shift in focus may lead to a better understanding of how public security and power dynamics have developed in the past 25 years in Brazil. Ultimately, it may also lead to an approach that relies less on the notion of authoritarianism to explain the deficiencies and maladies that plague the developing and modernizing world in an era of prevalent democratization, globalization, and fractured state boundaries. Instead, a more powerful explanation may rely more on relationships among transnational corporations, social networks, private enterprises, and criminal organizations in the context of weakening state control.