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Abstract
Brazilian film Mate-Me Por Favor (Kill Me Please) centres on the lives of four rebellious teenage girls against the backdrop of a series of brutal murders in the wealthy suburb where they live. I argue that the neighbourhood of Barra da Tijuca in the west of Rio de Janeiro provides both the necessary socio-spatial conditions for the drama, as well as a rich symbolic canvas for exploring key themes like innocence, transgression and violence. Barra emerged in the 1970s as a 'solution' to Rio's urban crisis, providing a large, unexploited space for the middle classes to insulate themselves from the growing disorder and violence of the inner city. Designed using rational modernist principles, it grew into a landscape of gated condominiums and shopping malls connected by car-strewn expressways. The area thus embodies a tension between innocence and desire that is shared by Mate-Me Por Favor's four protagonists. In recent years, meanwhile, the hosting of the Olympic Games and other mega-events has brought a massive wave of speculative development to the area, producing new liminal spaces and intensified flows of people that have jeopardized residents' sense of control. The film suggests that Barra's alienated youth are determined to venture beyond the walls that were designed to protect them, thus exposing them to new, unknown threats.

AbstractBetween 2014 and 2018, a period marked by major political and economic upheaval, Brazilian politics shifted sharply to the Right. Presenting qualitative research conducted over 2016–17, this article examines this process from the perspectives of residents of a peripheral São Paulo neighbourhood. Analysis is presented of three broad groups of respondents, each of which mobilised a distinct narrative framework for interpreting the crisis. Based on this, I argue that the rightward turn in urban peripheries embodies not a significant ideological shift, but rather long-term transformations of place and the largely contingent ways these articulate with electoral politics.

In 2018, far right candidate Jair Bolsonaro came to power in Brazil by building a socially and geographically heterogeneous electoral coalition. A crucial and largely overlooked part of this coalition were the inhabitants of low-income peripheries in large cities in the Southeast of the country. Throughout the 2000s, these voters tended to vote for the left-leaning Workers' Party in presidential elections, but over the 2010s they shifted electorally to the right. This article maps these shifts and analyses them in relation to major urban, social and institutional transformations. We first present longitudinal electoral data at the scale of electoral zones for the metropolitan areas of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. We then present case studies of two peripheral districts, analysing these in relation to a range of key socio-economic and institutional variables. We argue that the peripheries of both metropolises have been subject to common transformations that influenced electoral behaviour, but that there are important differences between peripheral areas that help to explain the varying strength and durability of the rightward turn at the local scale. In dialogue with the theme of this special issue, we argue that that this kind of sensitive socio-spatial analysis helps to situate and add nuance to theories of 'revanchist populism'.

Based on research with current and former housing activists in São Paulo, this article identifies the concept of "politics of worthiness" as central to the moral justification and technical legitimation of social movements. Attributions of worthiness have long upheld the relationship between institutionalized grassroots organizations and the state but are equally present in everyday life and social distinctions among Brazil's popular classes. By examining contrasting constructions of worthiness among both present-day housing movements and residents of areas that are the product of past mobilizations, the article contends that collective experiences of mobilization in dialogue with myriad external influences produce diverse and often ambivalent political subjectivities. The politics of worthiness sheds light on how these actors organize themselves, experience participation, and square universalist demands with the contingent solidarities and changing social, institutional, and political realities that they inhabit.

The peripheries have been the object of a privileged study of urban sociology and anthropology in Brazil since the consolidation of these disciplines in the 1970s (Frúgoli Jr., 2005). Themes as varied as poverty, work, housing, religion, violence - and various forms of social mobilization - characterized the peripheries, simultaneously, as: a) a physical-geographical space in opposition to urban centers; b) an arena of sociability and cultural expression; and c) a cradle of political projects for the emancipation of less favored populations. Less problematized by Brazilian urban literature, the notion of subjectivity has only recently emerged to capture the individual experience of social, political, economic, historical and geographical processes that cross the formation of peripheral spaces. This dossier presents the results of recent research that take as a challenge to think the relationship between peripheries and subjectivity, or, as we call it here in the plural, peripheral subjectivities .

AbstractThis article considers processes of urban development within the context of mega‐event preparations in Rio de Janeiro. We begin with a brief overview of these development processes, highlighting their connections to political and economic change in recent years. Proponents of these mega‐event‐led initiatives argue that Rio is undergoing a period of inclusive growth and integration: a perspective we call here a 'post‐Third‐World city' narrative of urban renewal. Critics, however, contend that urban officials are harnessing mega‐events (e.g. the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games) to push forward a neoliberal agenda of socially unjust policies benefiting the interests of capital and marginalizing the city's poor and especially its favelas (i.e. the 'city‐of‐exception' thesis). In this article we explore the insights of these two perspectives and consider why they have grown popular in recent years. Though we side generally with the city‐of‐exception thesis, we argue that important geographic and historical particularities must also be accounted for. Without carefully situating analytical perspectives empirically—in particular, cases in which theoretical models are drawn from European and North American contexts—urban researchers risk concealing more than they reveal in analyses of rapidly developing countries like Brazil.

This article considers processes of urban development within the context of mega-event preparations in Rio de Janeiro. We begin with a brief overview of these development processes, highlighting their connections to political and economic change in recent years. Proponents of these mega-event-led initiatives argue that Rio is undergoing a period of inclusive growth and integration: a perspective we call here a 'post-Third-World city' narrative of urban renewal. Critics, however, contend that urban officials are harnessing mega-events (e.g. the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games) to push forward a neoliberal agenda of socially unjust policies benefiting the interests of capital and marginalizing the city's poor and especially its favelas (i.e. the 'city-of-exception' thesis). In this article we explore the insights of these two perspectives and consider why they have grown popular in recent years. Though we side generally with the city-of-exception thesis, we argue that important geographic and historical particularities must also be accounted for. Without carefully situating analytical perspectives empirically-in particular, cases in which theoretical models are drawn from European and North American contexts-urban researchers risk concealing more than they reveal in analyses of rapidly developing countries like Brazil.

This introduction to the special issue on 'the technopolitics of security' outlines key concepts and engages debates pertaining to the relationship between techno-materiality, security governance and struggles over sovereignty. 'Technopolitics' refers to the strategic practice of designing and using technologies to enact political goals, producing hybrid forms of power that combine cultural, institutional and technological dimensions. These technopolitical practices give rise to new forms of agency, producing effects unintended by their designers that may alter logics of political contestation and allow technologies to be reappropriated for different political purposes. To illustrate the distributed forms of agency and contingent encounters that the technopolitics approach evokes, the article develops three key aspects of technopolitics in its relationship to security governance: (1) an understanding of agency as distributed between human and non-human actors, but also asymmetric in that human intentionality plays an assembling role that is frequently overrun by the unintended effects; (2) the temporal horizons of imagination and action over which technopolitical interventions unfold, identifying the importance of logics of anticipation and eventization; and (3) the relationship between technopolitics and sovereignty, arguing that it encourages a decentred and materialized understanding of how claims to sovereignty are made and contested.

ABSTRACTThis article contributes to debates about the everyday negotiation of difference, inequality and conflict in cities by developing the notion of 'coexisting normative regimes'. Normative regimes are plausible parameters of action that are sedimented in subjectivities and reproduced in everyday routines. We argue that in many Brazilian favelas and other marginalised urban spaces, distinct and unassimilable normative regimes coexist in space, each providing distinct frameworks and guidelines for dealing with everyday situations. Based on extensive ethnographic research conducted in a favela in the city of Belo Horizonte, the article identifies the everyday ways in which normative regimes operate, how they link to broader urban inequalities, and the ways in which individuals and groups navigate between them and the various threats they pose.