The right to public security

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn 2013 activists in a Rio de Janeiro favela—an epicenter of the city's notorious police violence—called on the Brazilian state to fulfill their “right to public security.” They were anticipating a new policing program, known as “pacification,” in which the state would expand its efforts to “clean up” poor, racially stigmatized neighborhoods dominated by drug‐trafficking groups. The activists’ claim was at once a cry and a demand: a cry against discriminatory policing, state terror, and an unjustly divided city, and a demand for equality, peace, and the state provision of safety in their streets. This case shows that a critical anthropology of security can maintain a tension between security‐as‐violence and security‐as‐rights. In doing so, scholars can broaden the understanding of state security beyond repression and attend to how it instantiates various modes of sovereign power. [security, policing, rights, activism, pacification, UPP, traffickers, favela, Brazil]