Public Insecurity: exception as routine, exceptionality as the norm in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Abstract

This article is an essay on the production of public insecurity, the yield that it brings as part of a regime of fear, and its effects of normalization of the practices of exception in the rule of law. The article focuses on the ethnographic work with the youth from the slums, together with state and local police from the State of Rio de Janeiro, as well as on a survey of documentary and journalistic sources on the internet, from 2017 to 2020. The reflections are guided by the discussion of the production of insecurity as a project of power. The logic of "protection" takes the place of security. The results point to the manufacture of diffuse and immediate threats as a resource for the imposition of a political economy of control and social regulation. The health crisis has aggravated the security crisis, keeping people on alert, with a feeling of urgency, living the immediate. Collective insecurity is not necessarily an unwanted outcome. It has been an expected and effective result, a strategic means through which to produce and sustain a project of exclusive and unequal power, for the few.