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ABSTRACT
For Brazil’s ‘violence worker’ street-level bureaucrats, violence is woven into everyday practice. But violent influence flows in multiple directions; from the state to society, within the state and its agencies, from violent actors upon state bureaucrats. Real and potential violence defines the bureaucratic regime of truth, alongside the influence of a self-defined organised crime group. Using ethnographic evidence, I show some of the fissures that are wedged open through violence, and demonstrate the ways that violent uncertainty shapes a need for leverage and spheres of trust. This shows the dissonance between bureaucratic form and bureaucratic rationale, where other violence workers – ontological bureaucrats – have become an everyday part of bureaucratic rationale. What matters is not the relationship between the state and bureaucracy, but the relationship between sovereign power and bureaucracy.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Lipsky, Street Level Bureaucrats.
2. Huggins, Haritos-Fatouro, and Zimbardo, Violence Workers.
3. Hansen and Stepputat, “Sovereignty Revisited”; Rodgers, “The State as a Gang”; Pratten and Sen, Global Vigilantes.
4. Davis, “New Imagined Communities.”
5. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 109.
6. Brinks, Judicial Response to Police Violence; Biondi, Sharing this Walk; Biderman, de Lima, and Pinho de Mello, Pax Monopolista; Denyer Willis, The Killing Consensus.
7. Schneider and Schneider, Reversible Destiny, 34.
8. Denyer Willis, The Killing Consensus; “Before the Body Count”; “Antagonistic Authorities”; The Potter’s Field.
9. Denyer Willis, The Killing Consensus.
10. Weber, From Max Weber.
11. Ibid., 196–7.
12. Townley, Reason’s Neglect, 65.
13. Centeno, Blood and Debt; Arias and Goldstein, Violent Democracies; Moncada, Cities, Business, and Politics; Arias, Criminal Enterprises; Barnes, “Criminal Politics.”
14. Arias, Drugs and Democracy; Müller, Public Security in the Negotiated State; Jaffe, “The Hybrid State.”
15. Holland, “Forbearance.”
16. Gouldner, Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy; Skolnik, Justice without Trial; Hull, Government of Paper.
17. Wedeen, “Reflections on Ethnographic Work.”
18. Hetherington, Guerrilla Auditors; Auyero, Patients of the State; Gupta, Red Tape; Hull, Government of Paper and Documents and Bureaucracy; Anand, “Leaky States.”
19. Hoag, “Dereliction at Home Affairs”; Graeber, Utopia of Rules.
20. Chatterjee, “The Impunity Effect.”
21. Sousa Santos, “The Heterogeneous State”; Merry, “Legal Pluralism”; Brunnegger and Faulk, A Sense of Justice.
22. Faundez, “Justice Reforms and Non-State Justice”; Fassin, Enforcing Order and At the Heart of the State.
23. Herzog and Zacka, “Fieldwork in Political Theory.”
24. Roy and Allsayyad, Urban Informality; Roy, “Why India Cannot Plan”; Macfarlane, “Rethinking Informality”; Simone, “Pirate Towns.”
25. Mbembe, “Necropolitics.”
26. Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination.
27. Amengual, “Pathways to Enforcement” and Politicized Enforcement in Argentina.
28. Coslovsky, “Flying under the Radar” and “Beyond Bureaucracy.”
29. Amengual, “Complementary Labor Regulation.”
30. Penglase, “Everyday Emergencies.”
31. Arias, Drugs and Democracy.
32. See note 7 above., 34.
33. Within Brazilian police agencies, there are many hierarchies written through by external conditions and status prerequisites. The delegado is a ‘chief detective’ who oversees a team of workers, each working in their own division of labour. The delegado is a patron. When she or he is moved to another agency or organisational location, the team often moves too. Trust, then, tends to circle around these kinds of work and social forms, where members of the team benefits or lose relative to their leader. Delegados must have a university degree. The same basic conditions are true of the officers in the ‘beat’ cop military police, who follow, though, a military hierarchy and system of discipline.
34. Denyer Willis, “The Salvific Sensorium.”
35. Conteudo, “Calabar.”
36. Fantti, “Policia Cobrava Propina.”
37. The Military Police are Brazil’s ‘beat cops’. They are organised in a military hierarchy and according to the Brazilian constitution are a reserve force of the national military.
38. Smith, “Strange Fruit”; Alves, “Neither Humans nor Rights.”
39. Mendez, O’Donnell, and Pinheiro, The (Un)Rule of Law.
40. 76% of files that noted the race of the victim note a black victim. Data from the Forum Brasileira de Segurança Pública.
41. Sudnow, “Normal Crimes,” 259.
42. I present this vignette also in a recent book, The Killing Consensus: Police, Organised Crime and the Regulation of Life and Death in Urban Brazil.
43. Dal Bo, Dal Bo and Di Tella, “Plata o Plomo.”
44. Tilly, “State-Making as Organized Crime.”
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Graham Denyer Willis
Graham Denyer Willis is a University Lecturer in Development and Latin American Studies in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge.