Rethinking peace and violence from the favelas

ABSTRACT

This article reconsiders peace and security from the perspectives of community leaders, educators and activists in favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2019–2020. Through a critical lens, it argues that the urban violence in Rio de Janeiro resembles a form of new wars where the state is a major producer of insecurity. It questions the meaning of peace and top-down pacification processes in a city where the favelas, since their origin, have been considered dangerous areas needing to be pacified and controlled. The article introduces favela peace formation as a concept to describe alternative processes working to reduce the intersectional forms of violence in these communities: non-violent, locally legitimate peace processes working to slowly construct a positive, sustainable peace. To conclude, it discusses how favela peace formation presents a way of imagining peace as ‘care’ instead of ‘order’ in response to the state’s violent peace as ‘control’.

KEYWORDS:

• Peace
• new wars
• urban violence
• peace formation
• decolonial peace
• favela

Introduction

In 2019, a record of 1814 people were killed in police interventions in Rio de Janeiro and 86% of these victims were black or brown.¹ In 2021 and 2022, Rio experienced three of the four most deadly police operations in history with a record of 28 people killed in the Jacarezinho favela in May 2021.² In 2022, the police were responsible for almost one-third of all violent deaths in Rio.³ Public security operations force schools, health centres and local businesses in the favelas to close as they enter with tanks, high-calibre weapons and helicopters from which they shoot down into the communities.⁴ Through these militarised operations, the state, in order to ensure public security and ‘peace’ of the city, effectively goes to war in targeted favelas. For one research participant, ‘this peace comes with a war that never ends’.⁵ What does ‘peace’ mean, when the supposed providers of security are the ones who bring the violence?

This article problematises what the state’s notions of ‘peace’ and ‘war’ mean from the perspective of targeted favelas and explore ‘favela peace formation’ as an alternative, genuine form of peace surging from these communities. Contextualising Richmond’s concept of peace formation, I seek to better understand it in a context of urban violence as a form of ‘new wars’.⁶ The article is based on fieldwork in favelas controlled by trafico in the south and north zone of Rio in 2019–2020 and does therefore not necessarily describe or represent the reality in other favelas, including those controlled by militias.

Defining urban violence in Rio de Janeiro

In Rio de Janeiro, the drug trafficking groups (trafico) Comando Vermelho, Terceiro Comando, Amigos dos Amigos and various milicias made up of current and retired police, soldiers, firefighters and prison guards, fight over control over the hundreds of favelas in the city.⁷ Traditionally, the trafico seeks territorial control in order to facilitate drug sales while milicias profit on delivery of services, protection rackets and real estate. However, some milicias are now moving into drug trafficking, creating a new form of narcomilicia.⁸ Corrupt public security officials and politicians have been found to form part of the milicias and/or have corrupt arrangements with milicias and the trafico regarding territorial control, drug sales and arm sales.⁹ For favela residents, this means living in a territory under volatile armed control where shootouts erupt when either rival criminal organisations or public security forces enter the territory and where their address and skin colour make them principal targets in the war on drugs.¹⁰

The urban violence between trafico, militias, narcomilicias and the state in Rio de Janeiro is not officially recognised as an armed conflict as state sovereignty is not directly threatened and the conflicting parts do not have apparent clear motivations to overthrow state power.¹¹ Defining the situation as a form of ‘war’ might also be dangerous as it could potentially support the state’s war rhetoric as an excuse for repressive and militarised public security operations in the favelas instead of treating the violence as a social issue. However, I would argue that not defining it as a war ignores the fact that these public security operations already create ‘de facto’ war zones in some favelas. There are, indeed, several ways in which this urban violence might fall in under the category of armed conflict¹² First, the state has declared war on organised crime, thus ‘officially’ going to war where the principal targets seem to be the favelas controlled by the trafico.¹³ Second, the state has on different occasions called in the armed forces to control and assist in public security in Rio de Janeiro.¹⁴ Third, the death toll in Rio has been higher than in some conflict zones.¹⁵ Fourth, the conflict parties use sophisticated weaponry used in armed conflict, and a hyper-militarisation of public security operations in the favelas include the use of armoured police tanks, heavy weaponry and helicopters as shooting platforms, turning the favelas into de facto war zones on their arrival.

As this militarisation of public security targets poor, working-class neighbourhoods, Gledhill has called the war on drugs in Latin America ‘the new war on the poor’.¹⁶ Amparo Alves, writing about police killings in São Paulo, has named it Brazil’s ‘war against the black urban poor’ as it overwhelmingly kills young black boys in the urban margins.¹⁷ The corrupt links between trafico, milicias and some public security officials and politicians reflect ‘new wars’ where the lines between conflicting actors are blurred.¹⁸ Brahler further highlights the complex ways in which certain state actors negatively engage with the favelas as they ‘have a political and/or economic interest in beginning, sustaining and renewing conflict’ in these neighbourhoods.¹⁹ Arias similarly finds that violence in the favelas is not due to a state absence but rather a negative state presence where state actors such as the police often collude with crime, causing a complex network of contradictory state and non-state, criminal and non-criminal actors.²⁰ From this point of view, the urban violence in and around the favelas in Rio resembles a form of ‘new wars’ where there is an increased complexity of conflict, the lines between conflicting actors and their respective political and/or economic motivations are blurred, where conflicting actors may profit from the conflict itself, and the ‘forms of violence do not fit neatly either into “war” nor “peace”, nor into “political” nor “criminal” violence’.²¹

The conceptualisation of new wars also allows for a more sophisticated view on violence as it allows for an increased understanding of the complexity and interlinkages of armed conflict. Rodriguez et al., in their study of violence in Santiago, Chile, show how violence ‘involves a range of interconnected processes’ where structural violence like exclusion and lack of opportunities can be linked to drug trafficking, which may cause insecurity and frustration in the neighbourhood, which again may lead to domestic violence, causing a violence chain.²² Similarly, Scheper-Hughes, in her study of a death squad’s genocidal attacks on Afro-Brazilian street kids in North-East Brazil, points to a violence continuum where intersectional forms of structural and symbolic violence work to naturalise inequality, exclusion and death.²³ She questions ‘the ease with which humans are capable of reducing the socially vulnerable (even those from their own class and position) into expendable non-persons, thus allowing the license – even the duty – to kill’.²⁴ This again links to Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, where the categorisation of certain groups as bare beings and as dangerous others naturalises state killing and a necropolitics of ‘letting die’ in these communities.²⁵ I would thus borrow Long’s description of black and mixed-race experiences of policing in the UK and call this violence in Rio de Janeiro a ‘new’ ‘war in which the enemy is racially defined’.²⁶

As this new war in favelas in Rio is not officially recognised as an armed conflict, there are no official international peace processes present, no official consideration on the part of the state to recognise the organised criminal groups as ‘conflicting partners’, and thus no attempts at official negotiations. Meanwhile, the state’s public security attempts effectively mean war in targeted favelas. Hence, the state, by claiming to be the provider of security becomes a principal producer of insecurity in these communities. The article asks what peace means in this context and explores the possibilities for local favela peace formation.

The local turn and peace formation

The article is rooted in the ‘local turn’ in peace studies, where the perspectives and agency of the ones living through conflict are in focus.²⁷ Here, peace is thought of in an emancipatory form that indicates empathy, rights, needs, welfare, custom, identity and justice where a ‘politics of peace’ includes solidarity and a just social order.²⁸ This means recognising the importance of everyday life and local agency in order to understand the structures and discourses of violence and from there open up new paths to emancipatory, empathetic forms of peace.²⁹ Recent critical peace studies thus work in various ways to include local, everyday experiences of peace and conflict into the wider peacebuilding narratives in the belief that local peace efforts have a better chance of producing more legitimate, positive and sustainable forms of peace.³⁰

A central contribution to this local turn is Richmond’s work on peace formation in conflict-affected societies,³¹ which he defines as:

Relationships and networked processes in which indigenous or local agents of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, or development, acting in customary, religious, cultural, social, or local political or local government settings, find ways of establishing peace processes and sustainable dynamics of peace. Through the contextual to international scalar networks, they slowly build different lifeworlds, meet in peace processes wherein peace formation processes emerge in the local context and influence the nature of the state, society, and international practices of peacebuilding. Participants would have to aspire to pluralism, recognition, respect, relative equality, and nonviolence.³²

This article is an exploratory attempt to bring critical peace studies into contexts of urban violence in favelas controlled by trafico in Rio’s north and south zones. In this limbo between peace and war where public security produces insecurity, it proposes and discusses favela peace formation as a concept to describe alternative processes that work to reduce manifest and structural violence: non-violent, favela grassroot, locally legitimate peace processes that navigate various blockages and opportunities within and outside the state in its construction of alternative futures with more social justice and less violence.³³

Methodology

The article is built on participant observation and semi-structured interviews with majority favela-based research participants in 11 favelas in the south (Zona Sul) and north zone (Zona Norte) of Rio de Janeiro between June 2019 and March 2020. The research participants were chosen based on their professional work to reduce violence in the favelas. They include favela activists, public security experts, community workers, youth groups, teachers, educators, artists, journalists, researchers, tour guides, museum leaders, resident association presidents and drug rehabilitation workers, some with connections to black power groups, groups against state violence and the network of mothers who lost their sons to police murders.³⁴

Using the snowballing method I had a total of 31 interviews with a total of 37 participants, where 15 work in favelas in Zona Sul, 12 in Zona Norte, 7 work in movements or associations that worked across the state, and 3 are academics-based outside the favela involved in the question of public security and human rights in the favelas. In total, 15 of the 37 participants are women and 22 are men. Data were also gathered from events and a course on public security and favela epistemology consisting of seven classes in the favela complexes Complexo da Maré and Complexo do Alemão, whose other members were overwhelmingly favela residents and Afro-Brazilian women. Due to the security of the research participants, all names are anonymised and the location of their favela is generalised to Zona Sul or Zona Norte.

Due to the ethnographic and grounded nature of the research, this article does not include a clear structure of literature review, findings and discussion, but rather allows relevant literature to be woven into the analysis based on the narratives of the research participants. It first discusses how the legacies from slavery and colonialism have constructed a Rio de Janeiro where deep inequality falls along racial, class and geographical lines, and where the favelas are depicted as dangerous, illegal spaces needed to be controlled and pacified. It then relates this background to the state’s own ‘peace processes’ and pacification attempts in the favelas in order to discuss what ‘peace’ meant for the research participants in this context. Next, the article considers how favela peace formers work to reduce violence in their communities, principally through community projects with youth. Finally, it discusses what the study of favela peace formation might add to our understanding of peace and violence in contexts of new wars where the state is a major producer of insecurity and violence.

The racialised production of criminality in the favelas

In Rio de Janeiro, structural inequality and racism from slavery combined with insufficient state development and political representation in the favelas have resulted in a city where race, class and life chances are closely intertwined and attached to geographic locations in the city.³⁵ Centuries of exploitation, social discrimination and racism built a strictly hierarchical Brazilian society with whites dominating the middle and upper classes, and the majority of Brazilians; black, brown and indigenous in the lower working class and favelas.³⁶ Nearly 4 million enslaved Africans landed in Rio de Janeiro as Brazil received the largest number of African slaves in the Western Hemisphere.³⁷ With the abolition of slavery, black people were still restricted from owning land, and many went to the cities in search for employment opportunities. The first favelas surged as shelters to these large masses of poor, majority black workers looking for housing close to employment between 1870 and 1900.³⁸ These included freed slaves, soldiers returning from the field, and others who could not afford to settle in the ‘formal’ parts of the city but rather settled in these communities in the hillslopes and other abandoned areas.³⁹

Already then, the favelas were negatively perceived as a place for vagabundos (vagrants) and criminals, and ‘[a]lmost from the beginning, the state proposed to move against favelas and other popular settlements in downtown Rio’ as they were illegal settlements on public land.⁴⁰ While the favelas also housed white and brown poor, the favelas were

commonly thought of as o lugar dos negros (the place of black people; see Sheriff 2001:18), meaning that all who live there, regardless of skin color, bear the stigma of racial association through their contact with darker-skinned people (the descendants of slaves) and their inescapable contact with black spaces. ‘Even those who were not physically black were black in the minds of the social elites because they lived like black people among black people’⁴¹

The favelas were seen as dangerous, black, unwanted, criminal and unhygienic spaces in the rest of the city,⁴² and there was a ‘persistent fear among the middle and upper-class from a “racial pollution”, that the “branquitude” [whiteness] of their families would be reduced through inter-racial marriage’.⁴³ The prejudice against favelas is thus closely linked to the history of slavery and a corresponding belief in white superiority and civility versus black inferiority, backwardness and danger.⁴⁴

The racist exclusion and prejudice of the favelas are not obsolete structures of the past but ‘exists as a psychological reality of how the making of Brazil began and of how Brazil (unfortunately) continues to be’.⁴⁵ In recent times, the race-based prejudice has morphed from a fear of racial pollution and diseases to one of violence and crime.⁴⁶ The majority of the interviewees in my research identified prejudice and racism as great challenges to the reduction of violence in the favelas as it made the rest of society seemingly unconcerned with the violence and state abuse in their communities, and made it difficult for the favela residents to be included in the rest of society.⁴⁷ Phrases such as: ‘my existence makes society uncomfortable’,⁴⁸ ‘this country is afraid of the black and hate their poor’,⁴⁹ and ‘anything connected to the black body is persecuted’,⁵⁰ show how the fear and criminalisation of the black, favela body is felt and recognised by favela residents. In the favelas, state practices of exclusion, housing removals and deadly public security operations, together with the mainstream criminalising narratives, have painted the favelas as dangerous, lawless areas needing to be controlled.⁵¹ During the interviews the state was almost always mentioned as a challenge to the positive development and wellbeing of the favelas: as a threat to life during police operations, as corrupt, uncaring, oppressive and opportunist in election campaigns.⁵² With this racialised criminalisation and marginalisation of the favelas in mind, the next section considers public security policies in favelas in the north and south of Rio de Janeiro from the perspectives of the research participants.

Pacification and militarisation in the war on drugs

The last decade saw the expansion and collapse of the Police Pacification Units program (UPP) in the favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Inspired by public security reforms in Medellin, Colombia, the UPPs, under the military police department, were inserted in the favelas to reduce homicides and improve relations between police and favela residents.⁵³ Between 2009 and 2011, the military police were portrayed in the main media ‘as an institution that was actually bringing peace to the city of Rio de Janeiro’.⁵⁴ The project was a huge undertaking that combined military, police, social actors and businesses in order to regain control over these territories and populations, through police occupation and through social projects such as PAC and UPP Social.⁵⁵ Due to the timing and selective placement of the UPPs, some of the interviewees meant that they were intended to pacify the most central favelas in Rio in order to portray a safe city to the large number of tourists visiting the city during the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016.⁵⁶ While the government claimed that the UPPs were implemented in high-risk favelas, critics have argued that they rather operate in ‘high-value’ favelas in the touristic south zone, along the major highway between the south zone and the international airport, and around large sports venues.⁵⁷

The UPPs initially showed great promise in terms of large reductions in lethal violence and resistance killings.⁵⁸ However, widespread torture, human rights abuses, corruption and forced disappearances by the UPPs have been documented in several favelas across the city.⁵⁹ In Complexo do Alemão and Complexo da Maré in Zona Norte, the UPP project started with military occupations resulting in severe human rights abuses and an increased militarisation of daily life.⁶⁰ Menezes further argues that although the UPPs successfully reduced open shootouts and crossfire in many of the favelas, their presence caused the favela residents to move from living in the ‘crossfire’ to living in a ‘minefield’ where they were terrified of being assumed by either the trafico or the UPP to be involved with the other side. She therefore argues that before, during and after the UPP, the favela residents continue to live a life ‘under siege’, monitored by the trafico, police or both, and often caught in the conflict between.⁶¹ Other critical scholars point to the fact that the Brazilian state’s sudden pacification attempt to ‘bring peace to the favela’ and ‘include the favela in the city’ through the UPPs were contradictory to the state’s history of violence against the favelas.⁶² This was exemplified in the creation of the UPP within the military police department, which has received very little reforms since the military dictatorship.⁶³ It is not surprising that a superficial attempt to turn them into a community police force failed considering the violent, combative nature of the military police and its history of violence and abuse in the favelas.

The UPP’s crisis at the time of my fieldwork (2019–2020) portrayed a failed project that no longer existed in any larger sense than as a ‘form of theatre’.⁶⁴ At this time, shootouts were returning to some favelas⁶⁵ while the cease in violence and police operations in another was attributed to the UPP and other police forces being paid by the local trafico to stay out.⁶⁶ After the UPP had chased away the local section of Comando Vermelho in one favela in Zona Sul, a more violent section from Zona Norte entered, showing much less respect for the residents.⁶⁷ The UPP had thus broken the ‘harmony that had been’ between the old section and the community and left a vacuum for the more violent trafico to fill.⁶⁸

In 2019–2020, the favelas in Rio de Janeiro faced unprecedented violence and deaths in police operations as the era of police pacification seemed to have been replaced by increasingly violent and militarised public security operations. In opposition to the main media narrative of the trafico as the main drivers of violence in the favelas, I was told that the real challenge to ‘peace’ in the favelas was the heavy state violence during police operations and the lack of educational, social, and employment opportunities for youth in these communities.⁶⁹ Consider the quotes below.

The police come to kill and destroy. (…) The police don’t come to arrest, they come to kill. These days it’s easier to deal with the trafico, the police are very, very violent. When there are operations, we go to the streets; there are residents being violated, tortured, they don’t respect us. We denounce them in the public ministry and in the ombudsman office, but it doesn’t change anything. (Marcos*, Zona Norte)

The biggest challenge is to go to sleep every night wondering when the next police operation will be. There have been so many deaths: children playing, a worker going to work, an old man left his home to go back to work and he was shot by the police in his stairway and died. And they end up being only numbers. There’s also more violence against children, mothers, and women here. You never know who will be the next one. My house was hit by stray bullets two times already. My street used to be calm, but today it’s dangerous. We have to hide in the bathroom in the house when there are operations. This leaves people sick. I and many others are becoming sick, and the ones we attend to as well. People think fireworks are shootouts. And you have to leave here to go to work when there are operations as well [people can’t afford to miss work]. If you don’t live here, you won’t understand how it is. Life cannot stop, but who will be the next one? It’s terrible. (Fernanda*, Zona Norte)

Comparing this period of militarisation and invasion to the pacification period, Rafael* shared: ‘It’s like those days it was social projects in order to control (the favela) and now it’s time kill, only killing’.⁷⁰

Indeed, the fairly short lifespan and eventual failure of the UPP program and the intensification of violent public security operations shortly after have caused many to question whether the UPPs were ever meant to promote a genuine ‘peace’ and inclusion of favela residents. Rather, many criticise it as just another public security attempt to ‘control a dangerous population’.⁷¹ If one considers the heavily militarised invasions in the favelas that served as the first step of the UPP program, including the army’s and the UPP’s warfare and human rights abuses in Complexo da Maré and Complexo do Alemão, and the militarisation of the favela residents’ life in forcing them to balance between the trafico and the UPP, ‘militarization’ seem to be a more accurate and consistent description of these public security policies than ‘pacification’.⁷² Thus, although attempting a rhetoric of ‘peace’, the state’s public security policies in the favelas largely remain within the modus operandi of war, the war on drugs, and attempts to control and dominate a perceived criminal and dangerous population. Here, the colonial depiction of the favela resident as ‘an agent of malevolent powers’ fuels the imagined necessity to meet violence with more violence in a war on drugs instead of investing in social development in these communities.⁷³

The massive violence and human rights abuses were described as a black genocide in some interviews:

[it is] a government that allows for extermination, (with the mindset that) from being in, from the favela, it’s a disposable life. The police officer too, is seen as a disposable life. All the dead are from the favela, poor, and the majority is black. The policeman, his life is also not valued, and he is also black. (Maria*, Zona Sul)

There are a lot of deaths in these operations, and this is nothing new, it’s been a constant over various political regimes, in the dictatorship and after, we’ve seen this genocide of young, blacks in the peripheries, favelas. This is intensified today with this mayor, this president, who stimulate brutality on the ground level (em baixo) through speech, politics, and decisions. (Bernardo*)

The public power should help us, but they want to finish us. (Davi*, Zona Norte)

The police think they can act how they want, principally in the favelas, with black bodies. (Malanquini, July 2019)

Today there’s a politics of extermination. (Grupo Luz*)

Vargas, considering the deadly police operations, the criminalisation and murder of black youth, racist discourses and a criminalisation of black culture, has similarly defined the various forms of violence targeting the black population in Brazil as a black genocide.⁷⁴ In this hyper violent context, Izabel* shared: ‘Today, public security is our greatest need; our security today is zero’.⁷⁵ When the state is the largest threat to security, who then provides security? What is peace in this context?

Whose peace?

As the state’s ‘peace’ in Rio de Janeiro often means more violence and militarisation of everyday life rather than a genuine inclusion in society and positive development in the favelas, individuals, groups and movements within the favelas themselves work to reduce violence in their communities. Fighting for an alternative narrative, many of the research participants just wanted a ‘government that is committed to reducing violence with participation from the favelas themselves’⁷⁶ and that care about the well-being of the favelas.⁷⁷ Several therefore argued that it was not relevant to talk about peace, as what was really needed was social development, education and employment opportunities in the favelas⁷⁸

The Resident Associations and cultural groups always search for money and ask for resources from the government for water systems, schools, kindergartens, etc. But the government doesn’t take care of the development of the community, they just stay in the narrative of war. They use conflict as an excuse not to get involved. But when they want to come up [enter the favela], they come. (Gabriel*, Zona Sul)

Pedro* (Zona Sul) and Jose* (Zona Norte) both philosophised on the various meanings of peace and quoted the famous song by O Rappa: ‘paz sem voz, não é paz, é medo’, peace without voice is not peace, it is fear.⁷⁹ ‘Peace is something that comes from the outside in, a thing for the elite. When you don’t have rights or respect, you don’t have peace’ (Pedro*). This elite peace corresponds with the state’s pacification attempts through the UPPs, where the pause in shootouts did not mean that the favela residents were treated with respect or that their voices were heard. At best, the ceasefire experienced in some favelas under the UPPs thus became peace as silence, fear; an unstable calm or minefield, without genuine favela participation or social justice.⁸⁰ Aline* explained her hesitancy to the current calm in a favela in Zona Sul and the impact of poverty, violence and insecurity on children in her program:

it’s so peaceful here, calmer than in many years, but I’m not sure if it’s peaceful … there’s hardly any conflict: it’s calm, quiet, but you don’t know what happened, why it’s like this. Is the conflict ongoing, or not? You need trust in order to have peace, you need to be able to trust people and here you don’t … (…)

What is peace anyways? I have hope that it will be better. Here, it’s peaceful on the surface, not on the deeper layers. But I’m not sure how this peace on a deeper layer is created … We’re at a balance now. It’s invisible, which makes it hard to plan anything. If conflict suddenly emerges, we can’t carry out our projects. They live in poverty and uncertainty. This affects your brain development, we see it daily in our students on four different levels: lack of focus, memory, association and rationalization. This is very challenging, and all the kids have this. We also have kids who live literally on trash belts in their house, they don’t have that in their house; what peace is. So, peace is not in their environment. (Aline*, Zona Sul)

As Pedro* put it; ‘It’s impossible to talk about peace when there’s a family that doesn’t have enough money to buy food for their child. You can live in the most silent, calm place but not have peace. So, what is peace?’⁸¹ Maria* and Miguel* further attributed the ‘peace’ or ‘peacefulness’ described by Aline* to the trafico bribing the police to stay away⁸² and to the UPP knowing that the trafico was better armed than the local UPP force and thus hesitant to enter.⁸³ The calm without shootouts in the favela in Zona Sul was thus far away from a sustainable peace that would address the underlying poverty and lack of opportunities in the favela.

One favela activist wanted to ‘make my war against this peace’ in his struggle for survival.⁸⁴ As described by another; ‘Everything comes with a promise of peace. This peace comes with a war that never ends’.⁸⁵ For the favelas, ‘the state, instead of producing this peace, he creates the violence’.⁸⁶ By staying in the narrative of the war on drugs as a ‘state of exception’, the state naturalises state violence and murder in the favelas and draws attention away from the structural inequality and racism of the city and its failure or unwillingness to provide genuine social development and public services in these communities.⁸⁷ As Gledhill finds, this ‘securitization has become a means of holding this kind of world together and diminishing the challenges that its injustices create’.⁸⁸

The rejection of peace by some of the research participants is understandably a rejection of the violent state war, camouflaged as ‘peace’ and ‘public security’, and used to dominate and pacify the favelas. It is a rejection of the peace that defends and preserves a system of branquitude, whiteness, in a violent state where white elites sit comfortably in their privilege while the public security forces wage war in the favelas.⁸⁹ This ‘peace’ reflects the powers and nature of the state and remains in this context, like the Brazilian state and its public security forces, intimately linked to their violent history of slavery and military dictatorship where public security and pacification are tools to suppress and dominate the perceived lesser worth, black population and their communities. The struggle to survive, to reduce violence and to construct a better future for the children and grandchildren in the favelas in the presence of this violent state demands alternative ways to address violence and insecurity and rethink public security. As Jose* shared: ‘I must say, I zero believe in the peace discourse, I think it’s meant to leave people calm, when you need revolt/uprising (…) It would need to be our peace, not the peace that is not ours. It would need to be from the grassroot (da base)’.⁹⁰

Favela peace formation; rethinking peace and violence from the favelas

Richmond’s concept of peace formation might be a way in which to rewrite ‘peace’ in the favelas in Rio de Janeiro through the concept of favela peace formation. This is inspired by Jose*’s statement ‘it would need to be our peace, not the peace that is not ours’.⁹¹ During my fieldwork, I interviewed people who worked to reduce violence in the favelas. Naming it themselves a luta (fight, struggle), micro-revolutions, trabalho de formiguinha⁹² and trabalho de base⁹³ the peace formers in the favelas in Rio work on various fronts to: denounce state violence and neglect, end the hyperviolent police operations in the favelas, provide social and educational services for their communities, ensure new opportunities for their children and youth to keep them away from drug gangs, produce and share knowledge challenging the criminalising main narratives in society, combat racism and prejudice, debate, discuss, and teach in the favela and the asfalto, demand change in the government, strengthen favela culture and memory, empower favela residents to demand more from their citizenship, increase participation in politics, push for security sector reform and much more in order to construct a more just and less violent future.⁹⁴

Although the research participants did not necessarily identify themselves as peacebuilders, they perform peacebuilding tasks like mediation, reporting of human rights violations, reconciliation, reintegration of former gang members, and work against prejudice. Grossi et al. finds that social workers are indeed ‘peace builders by nature, because of their ongoing commitment with overcoming oppressive realities and their constant pursuit of social justice’.⁹⁵ Positioning myself within the local turn and critical perspective in peace studies where a positive peace includes social justice, I thus refer to the social workers and human rights activists in the favelas as favela peace formers. While the aims, actors and methods of favela peace formers are incredibly diversified and answer to nearly all aspects of life, this section limits itself to looking at the work with youth and how this contributes to new modes of thinking about peace and violence in the context of state violence in ‘new wars’.

In Rio de Janeiro, children and youth form the axis of both organised crime and favela peace formation. Mostly young boys join the trafico in the favelas and fight and die in shootouts, but youth are also some of the main drivers of social change. Many of the research participants therefore identified work with children and youth as central to favela peace formation and believed that most of the youths who join the drug gangs do so due to a lack of other opportunities, as they grow up in a community that is criminalised and partially abandoned by the social state and public services, with poor education in the public schools and few recreational and employment opportunities.⁹⁶

By providing children and youth with education, socio-emotional learning, sports, arts, music, professional courses, and safe spaces to read, play and learn, favela peace formers aim to empower them to find their own paths away from crime.

Our main objective is that the child doesn’t enter the trafico. Lots of children here see the traficante as a hero, so we’re trying to make them think differently, to understand that the world is big and that there are other paths; to awaken their curiosity through graffiti, theatre, culture, music … these are our weapons (…) If I had twenty jobs to offer, I could manage to get twenty of the children on the corner away from the trafico, twenty children I can get the weapons out of their hands, twenty children who won’t be another son killed, twenty children taken away from confrontations and shootouts with the police. (Miguel*, Zona Sul)

The work with youth can be seen to have an impact on three different levels: 1. It provides opportunities and services in a form of self-help in a community partially abandoned by the (social) state; 2. by doing so, it keeps more youth away from crime and helps gang members who want to leave crime, thus reducing the number of youths involved in the conflict; and 3. it empowers more youth to become teachers for the new generations of youth in the community, policy-shapers through their roles in academia, politics, and media, and active citizens aware of their rights.

By providing social work and other opportunities to keep children and youth out of the trafico, the research participants also turn the state’s narrative of war against these ‘dangerous criminals’ on its head and focus on the humanity, individuality and agency of each child. Instead of being seen as dangerous, violent perpetrators, these children and youth are seen as individuals who need love, attention, security, other opportunities and to be given the chance to dream and to follow their dreams.⁹⁷ This work with youth is therefore not only conflict reducing and empowering for the youth and the community, but it also challenges the criminalising narratives in society.

Rethinking peace from the favelas

This article is not meant to romanticise the trafico nor underestimate the violence and insecurity they bring to the favelas, but rather shift the focus on how to deal with violence. Instead of meeting violence with violence, favela peace formers focus on vulnerable children and youth and help them choose non-violence.⁹⁸ By recognising the intergenerational and intersectional nature of violence and the state’s violent public security policies’ role in reproducing this violence, favela peace formation treats violence with care instead of more violence in order to break the chain of violence as interconnected processes.⁹⁹ While the state stay in a violence continuum where the police killings of young black men, inequality and exclusion are naturalised through racist and criminalising discourses, favela peace formers slowly work to ‘designify’ this violence over time.¹⁰⁰ This challenge to the violence continuum opens up a space for reconsideration of public security, where favela peace formers search for and construct non-violent social and political alternatives.¹⁰¹

Linking this to peace, this study shows the importance of embracing pluralist, caring and inclusive options for violence reduction and sustainable development instead of the more traditional, colonial peace as order and control.¹⁰² Peace, then, becomes inclusion and care instead of order and pacification. The focus on providing love to criminalised favela youth with empathy and acceptance of difference, is a clear way in which favela peace formation challenges the violence of hegemonic narratives and provides decolonial forms of peace that focuses on care, empathy, and tolerance.¹⁰³ As Davi* described: ‘Love needs to surpass everything. The philosophy is that love needs to be in front, first, in everything you do’.¹⁰⁴ Favela peace formation thus offers a unique opportunity to rethink and construct an inclusive, decolonial peace, embracing plurality and complexity which responds to the complexity and intersectionality of violence.¹⁰⁵ Rather than attempting to impose a violent order on life, favela peace formation adapts to the shifting needs of the communities, continues to construct and expand networks of solidarity, empathy, and subaltern claims to justice locally and globally, while simultaneously constructing new modes of sociability and ways of rethinking public security and peace.

Conclusion

This study of favela peace formation has exposed the violence of peace as order and control in the attempted state domination over and murder of criminalised and racialised favela residents. In the muddled context of urban violence in Rio de Janeiro, with public security operations effectively turning the favelas into warzones, the state is a central actor in a form of new wars where the enemy is racially defined. In this conceptual limbo between ‘war’ and ‘peace’ where the state is a principal producer of insecurity and violence in the targeted favelas, where no external, genuine top-down peace process is present, it becomes increasingly important to recognise the grassroot work of favela peace formation. The article has showed how favela peace formers, by recognising the intersectionality of violence in their communities, work in integrated ways and embrace creative and inclusive processes to end violence with a focus on care and love. Working slowly, favela peace formers work to influence five youths who can again influence five more, slowly empowering more residents to use their voice and demand human rights, citizenship and justice from their government, while still navigating the state on behalf of the residents. It is a trabalho de formiguinha, slow but consistent, collaborative, steady, long term.

Interviews

Table

Name* (Pseudonym)	Date of interview	Location of work	Position of research participant
Maria	September-2019	Zona Sul (South Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Leader and tour-guide at a community-based non- governmental organisation
Miguel	September-2019	Zona Sul (South Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Leader at a community-based youth project (futsal, barber courses, and more)
Davi	January-2020	Zona Norte (North Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Founder and leader of a community-based NGO focusing on children and youth, especially on helping them leave crime
Ana	March-2020	Not from favela, works across several favelas	Founder and executive director of a Rio de Janeiro- based NGO focusing on sustainable community development and human rights in the favelas
Fransisca	August-2019	Zona Sul (South Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Independent community English teacher and tour-guide at a community-based non-governmental organisation
Pedro	August-2019	Zona Sul (South Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Community leader and founder of long-standing community-organisation focusing on children and youth and the rights and dignity of favela residents
Gabriel	August-2019	Zona Sul (South Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Leader and tour-guide at a community-based non- governmental organisation
Grupo Ar	September-2019	Zona Sul (South Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	A new, education and culture-focused youth collective
Antônia	August-2019	Zona Sul (South Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Leader of a civil and philantropic organisation focusing on integral education, basci health care and social assistance to the more challenged families in the favela
Adriana	September-2019	Zona Sul (South Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Founder and leader of a small community-group helping residents write their stories and get published
Bernardo	February-2020	Not from or based in a favela	Anthropologist, political scientist and public security expert
Lucas	August-2019	Works across several favelas	Founder and leader of a network-based project for the cultural and social empowerment of favela youth in favelas across Rio de Janeiro
Matheus	July-2019	Not from or based in a favela	Public security expert at Rio-based think tank
Rafael	September-2019	Zona Norte (North Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Executive coordinator of an organisation for racial justice and against state violence
Joāo	January-2020	Zona Norte (North Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Journalist at an independent, collaborative community media channel
Juliana	October-2019	Zona Sul (South Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Leader and tour-guide at a community-based non- governmental organisation
Antonio	January-2020	Zona Norte (North Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	President of a favela Resident Association
Marcia	September-2019	Zona Norte (North Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Executive director of a community-based organisation focusing on youth through sports and culture
Fernanda	January-2020	Zona Norte (North Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Coordinator at globally-networked organisation working with youth in communities affected by inequality and violence
Carlos	July-2019	Not from or based in a favela	Professor in sociology and urban studies
Patrícia	February-2020	Zona Norte (North Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Coordinator of public security area in community-based civil society institution
Paulo	July-2019	Zona Sul (South Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Independent graffiti artist
Emmanuella	March-2020	Zona Norte (North Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Executive coordinator at community-based civil society organisation focused on knowledge-production
Jose	February-2020	Zona Norte (North Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Co-founder and reporter at an independent communications collective formed by favela youth activists
Grupo Luz	November-2019	Works across several favelas	An long-standing umbrella organisation connected to the Catholic church working primarliy against forced removals
Luiz	August-2019	Zona Sul (South Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Youth from the favela, engaged in and known at several of the local community projects
Luíza	November-2019	Zona Sul (South Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Leader and tour-guide at a community-based non- governmental organisation
Marcos	January-2020	Zona Norte (North Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	President of a favela Resident Association
Felipe	August-2019	Works across several favelas	Project coordinator at non-profit organisation created by European companies in Rio de Janeiro, focusing on providing opportunitites to favela youth
Aline	September-2019	Zona Sul (South Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Founder and leader of NGO focusing on education for children and youth
Izabel	January-2020	Zona Norte (North Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Co-director of a community-based civil society institution
Douglas	September-2019	Zona Norte (North Zone of Rio de Janeiro)	Artistic coordinator at an NGO working with youth and culture in several spots in Rio de Janeiro

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ingri Bøe Buer

Ingri Bøe Buer has a Ph.D. from the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on local peace processes in the favelas and brings race and class into peace studies to discuss the meanings of peace in contexts of state violence and drug crime.

Notes

¹ Black and brown people constitute 51.7% of the population in Rio. Ramos Silvia, (coord.). A cor da violência policial: a bala não erra o alvo. Relatório de pesquisa (Rio de Janeiro: Rede de Observatórios da Segurança/CESeC, dezembro de, 2020), 6–7 ISP-RJ

² G1 Rio, ‘Em 14 meses, Rio registra 3 das 4 operações mais letais da história, com mais de 70 mortos’, Globo, Rio de Janeiro, (July 27, 2022).

³ Ramos Silvia et al., Pele alvo: a cor que a polícia apaga (Rio de Janeiro: Rede de Observatórios da Segurança/CESeC, 2022), 8; and Dennis Pacheco and David Marques, ‘A heterogeneidade territorial da letalidade policial no Brasil’, in 17º Anuário Brasileiro de Segurança Pública (São Paulo: Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, 2023), 62–67, https://forumseguranca.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/anuario-2023.pdf.p.63.

⁴ Redes da Maré, ‘Bulletin’.

⁵ A favela activist in Public Security and Favela Epistemology (PSFE) 2019.

⁶ Oliver P. Richmond, Peace Formation and Political Order in Conflict Affected Societies (Oxford University Press, 2016); Oliver P. Richmond, ‘Peace and the Formation of Political Order’, International Peacekeeping 26, no. 1 (2019); Mary Kaldor, ‘In Defence of New Wars’, Stability: International Journal of Security and Development 2, no. 1 (2013): 1–16, 17; Moser and C. McIlwaine, ‘New Frontiers in Twenty-First Century Urban Conflict and Violence’, Environment and Urbanization 26, no. 2 (2014): 331–44; and Edward Newman, ‘The “New Wars” Debate: A Historical Perspective is Needed’, Journal of Peace Research 35, no. 2 (2004): 173–89, 17

⁷ V. B. Brahler, ‘Inequality of Security: Exploring Violent Pluralism and Territory in Six Neighbourhoods in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’ (PhD thesis, University College London, 2014); Bruno Paes Manso, A república das milícias: dos esquadrões da morte à era Bolsonaro (Todavia, 2020); and A. Zaluar and I.S. Conceição, ‘Favelas sob o controle das milícias no Rio de Janeiro’, São Paulo em Perspectiva 21, no. 2 (2007): 89–101.

⁸ Leslie Leitão et al., ‘Traficantes usam pandemia para criar “Complexo de Israel” unindo cinco favelas na Zona Norte do Rio’, in G1 Globo (July 24, 2020).

⁹ Enrique Desmond Arias, Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro: Trafficking, Social Networks, and Public Security (University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and Manso, A república das milícias.

¹⁰ Luke Dowdney, Children of the Drug Trade: A Case Study of Children in Organised Armed Violence in Rio de Janeiro. 7Letras (2003): 200; P. V. Menezes (2018). ‘“Vivendo entre dois deuses”: a fenomenologia do habitar em favelas “pacificadas’”, in Militarização no Rio de Janeiro: Da Pacificação à Intervenção, ed. M. Leite, et al., (Rio de Janeiro: Mórula, 2018), 70–91.

¹¹ See Dowdney, Children of the Drug Trade, 200 for a definition of the urban violence in Rio de Janeiro as ‘organized armed violence’ and Marcos Alan Ferreira, Peace and Violence in Brazil (Springer International Publishing, 2022).

¹² Najla Palma, ‘Is Rio de Janeiro Preparing for War? Combating Organized Crime Versus Non-International Armed Conflict’, International Review of the Red Cross (2023): 1–33.

¹³ Fernanda Calgaro and Garcia Gustavo, ‘Governo declara “guerra” ao crime organizado, diz Bolsonaro em mensagem ao Congresso’, G1 Globo, (February 4, 2019).

¹⁴ Article 142 of the 1988 constitution allows the military to intervene in internal affairs in four different missions: ‘the preservation of public order, the guarantee of elections, the security of mega-events and the protection of national borders, sea and air space’ (Brahler, ‘Inequality of Security’, 133); Palma, Is Rio de Janeiro preparing for war? 1–33.

¹⁵ See note 12 above.

¹⁶ J. Gledhill, The New War on the Poor: The Production of Insecurity in Latin America (London: Zed Books, 2015).

¹⁷ Alves J.A., ‘From Necropolis to Blackpolis: Necropolitical Governance and Black Spatial Praxis in São Paulo, Brazil’, Antipode 46, no. 2 (2014): 323–39.

¹⁸ Kaldor, ‘In Defence of New Wars’, 1–16.

¹⁹ Verena Barbara Brähler, ‘Inequality of Security: Exploring Violent Pluralism and Territory in Six Neighbourhoods in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’ (Diss., UCL (University College London), 2014), 19.

²⁰ Arias, Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro; E.D. Arias, Criminal Enterprises and Governance in Latin America and the Caribbean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 24–5; and Manso, A república das milícias.

²¹ World Bank 2011, in Kaldor, ‘In Defence of New Wars’, 1–16; Moser and McIlwaine, ‘New Frontiers in Twenty-First Century Urban Conflict and Violence’, 331–44; and Newman, ‘The “New Wars” Debate’, 173–89.

²² Alfredo Rodriguez et al., ‘Visible and Invisible Violence and Inequality in Neoliberal Santiago’, Environment and Urbanization 26, no. 2 (2014): 359–72; Moser and McIlwaine, ‘New Frontiers in Twenty-First Century Urban Conflict and Violence’, 331–44; and J. Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research’, Journal of Peace Research 6, no. 3 (1969): 167–91.

²³ Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, On Intersectionality: Essential Writings (The New Press, 2017).

²⁴ Nancy Scheper-Hughes, ‘Dangerous and Endangered Youth: Social Structures and Determinants of Violence’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1036 (2004): 13–46, 14.

²⁵ Achille Mbembé, ‘Necropolitics’, trans. Meintjes Libby, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40; and Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Corcoran Steven (Duke University Press, 2019).

²⁶ Lisa J. Long, Perpetual Suspects: A Critical Race Theory of Black and Mixed-Race Experiences of Policing (Springer, 2018), 34.

²⁷ S. Kappler, Local Agency and Peacebuilding: EU and International Engagement in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus and South Africa (Springer, 2014); R. Mac Ginty, ‘Everyday peace: Bottom-up and Local Agency in Conflict-Affected Societies’, Security Dialogue 45, no. 6 (2014): 548–64; and R. Mac Ginty and O. P. Richmond, ‘The Local Turn in Peace Building: A Critical Agenda for Peace’, Third World Quarterly 34, no. 5 (2013): 763–83.

²⁸ O. P. Richmond, Peace in International Relations, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2020).

²⁹ H. Miall, O. Ramsbotham, and T. Woodhouse, Contemporary Conflict Resolution (Polity, 2011).

³⁰ J. P. Lederach, Building Peace—Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1997); and John Paul Lederach, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

³¹ Oliver P. Richmond, Peace Formation and Political Order in Conflict Affected Societies (Oxford University Press, 2016).

³² Ibid., 34.

³³ I. B. Buer, ‘Favela Peace Formation in a Violent State: Perspectives from Favelas in Rio de Janeiro’, in Peace and Violence in Brazil, ed. M. A. Ferreira (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022), 147–171; I. B. Buer, ‘This peace comes with a war that never ends: Favela peace formation amid violent public security processes in Rio de Janeiro’ (Doctoral dissertation, University of Manchester, 2022).

³⁴ Juliana Farias, ‘Governo de mortes: uma etnografia da gestão de populações de favelas no Rio de Janeiro’, (PhD thesis, Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ, 2014); Mães de Maio, do Luto à Luta (São Paulo: mimeo, n.d.); and Luciane O. Rocha, ‘Black Mothers Experience of Violence in Rio’, Cultural Dynamics 24, no. 1 (2012): 59–73 for more on state violence against mothers.

³⁵ Abdias Do Nascimento, ‘Quilombismo: An Afro-Brazilian Political Alternative’, Journal of Black Studies 11, no. 2 (1980): 141–78; J. Vargas, ‘Genocide in the African Diaspora: United States, Brazil, and the Need for a Holistic Research and Political Method’, Cultural Dynamics 17 (2005): 267; J.H.C. Vargas, Never Meant to Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010); and E.S. Silva, Testemunhos da maré (Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano, 2012).

³⁶ Fluminense Casa, Mapa da Desigualdade: Região Metropolitana do Rio de Janeiro (2020), https://casafluminense.org.br/mapa-da-desigualdade/ (accessed February 23, 2022); and Felicity Clarke, ‘Mapas Mostram a Segregação Racial no Rio de Janeiro’, Rio on Watch (Novenmber 17, 2015).

³⁷ J. Roth-Gordon, Race and the Brazilian Body: Blackness, Whiteness, and Everyday Language in Rio de Janeiro (University of California Press, 2017), 7.

³⁸ Andrelino Campos, Do quilombo à favela: a produção do ‘espaço criminalizado’ no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil, 2005).

³⁹ Ibid.

⁴⁰ Arias, Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro, 22–3; Campos, Do quilombo à favela, 72–4; Gledhill, The New War on the Poor; and L. do Prado Valladares, A invenção da favela: do mito de origem a favela. com. editora FGV (2016).

⁴¹ Roth-Gordon, Race and the Brazilian Body, 23–4.

⁴² Campos, Do quilombo à favela; Roth-Gordon Race and the Brazilian Body; and Valladares, A invenção da favela.

⁴³ Sherriff 2001 in J. F. Mayer, ‘Violência e trabalho: o caso das empregadas domesticas no Brasil’ in A violência na America latina e no Caribe, eds T. Hilgers and J. L. Barbosa (Rio de Janeiro, Observatorio de Favelas, 2017), 123–47, 117.

⁴⁴ Campos, Do quilombo à favela; and Roth-Gordon, Race and the Brazilian Body.

⁴⁵ Roth-Gordon, Race and the Brazilian Body, 8.

⁴⁶ Roth-Gordon, Race and the Brazilian Body.

⁴⁷ Interviews with Maria*; Fransisca*; Pedro*; Gabriel*; Juliana*; Paulo*; Luíza*; Aline*, Zona Sul; Davi*,; Rafael*, João*; Antonio*; Marcia*; Fernanda*; Patrícia*; Emmanuella*; Jose*; Douglas*, Zona Norte; Ana*; Bernardo*; Lucas*; Carlos*; Felipe*; Grupo Luz*.

⁴⁸ Jota Marques, ‘Operações policiais no Rio: mais frequentes, mais letais, mais assustadoras’. Event by Observatório da Segurança RJ, University Candido Mendes (July 9, 2019).

⁴⁹ Monica Francisco, ‘O protagonismo da mulher negra e da mulher indígena na favela e periferia: racismos e desafios’, Coordinated by Sarah S. Telles and Gianne Neves. At conference: ‘Co-creation in the city: rights and culture of favelas and peripheries’ (June 28, 2019).

⁵⁰ Gizele Martins, ‘O Extermínio da Juventude Negra’, Curso de Extensão Mídia, Violência e Direitos Humanos, by Núcleo de Estudos de Políticas Públicas em Direitos Humanos (NEPP-DH), UFRJ, (August 26, 2019).

⁵¹ Roth-Gordon, Race and the Brazilian Body; Scheper-Hughes, ‘Dangerous and Endangered Youth’, 13–46; and S. Villenave, ‘The Racialisation of Security Apparatus in Brazil’ (PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2019).

⁵² Pedro*; Grupo Ar*; Paulo*; Fransisca*; Antônia*; Luiz*; Aline*, Zona Sul; Rafael*; João*; Marcia*; Fernanda*; Patrícia*; Emmanuella*; Jose*; Marcos*; Izabel*; Douglas*; Antonio*, Zona Norte; Ana*; Bernardo*; Lucas*; Grupo Luz*.

⁵³ M. B. Carvalho, ‘“Bem-aventurados os pacificadores”: práticas de militarização e disciplinarização dos corpos no programa de pacificação de favelas do Rio de Janeiro’. in Leite et al., (2018); and Menezes, ‘Vivendo entre dois deuses’.

⁵⁴ Carvalho, ‘Bem-aventurados os pacificadores’, 96.

⁵⁵ Carvalho, ‘Bem-aventurados os pacificadores’; PSFE 2019.

⁵⁶ Bernardo*; Fransisca*; Gabriel*, Maria*, Zona Sul; Douglas*, Zona Norte. See also Leite et al., 2018; Gledhill, The New War on the Poor; K. Hoelscher and P. M. Norheim-Martinsen ‘Urban Violence and the Militarisation of Security: Brazilian “Peacekeeping” in Rio de Janeiro and Port-au-Prince’, Small Wars & Insurgencies 25, no. 5–6 (2014): 957–75; C. Livingstone, ‘Armed Peace: Militarization of Rio de Janeiro’s Favelas for the World Cup’, Anthropology Today 30, no. 4 (2014): 19–23; and S. Oosterbaan and J. van Wijk, ‘Pacifying and Integrating the favelas of Rio de Janeiro: An Evaluation of the Impact of the UPP Program on favela Residents’, International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice 39, no. 3 (2015): 179–98.

⁵⁷ Oosterbaan and Wijk, ‘Pacifying and Integrating the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro’, 179–98; Hoelscher and Norheim-Martinsen, ‘Urban Violence and the Militarisation of Security’, 957–75; and Livingstone, ‘Armed Peace’, 19–23.

⁵⁸ Police killings masked as acts of self-defence, see Oosterbaan and Van Wijk, ‘Pacifying and Integrating the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro’, 179–98.

⁵⁹ J. Carneiro, (2013a) ‘Amarildo: The Disappearance that has Rocked Rio’, in BBC News, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-24143780 (accessed September 18, 2013); Oosterbaan and van Wijk, ‘Pacifying and Integrating the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro’, 179–98; and A. C. Torres and A. Werneck, ‘Excomandante da UPP do São Carlos é preso por envolvimento com o tráfico’, O Globo (February 16, 2012).

⁶⁰ 2010–2012 in Complexo do Alemão and 2014–2015 in Complexo da Maré. G. Martins, MILITARIZAÇÃO E CENSURA: a luta por liberdade de expressão na Favela da Maré (Nùcleu Piratininga de Comunicação (NPC), 2019).

⁶¹ Menezes, ‘Vivendo entre dois deuses’.

⁶² Carvalho, ‘Bem-aventurados os pacificadores’.

⁶³ Bernardo* explained that the UPP was ‘never compatible with the military police, which is an organisation that acts with a military approach who sees the other as the enemy that should be eliminated’.

⁶⁴ Grupo Ar*, Zona Sul.

⁶⁵ Pedro* and Paulo*, Zona Sul.

⁶⁶ Maria*, Miguel* and Aline*, Zona Sul.

⁶⁷ Luiz* and Paulo*, Zona Sul.

⁶⁸ Paulo*, Zona Sul.

⁶⁹ Maria*, Pedro*, Miguel*, Luíza*, Aline*, Zona Sul; Davi*, Antonio*, Marcia*, Fernanda*, Patrícia*, Jose*, Marcos*, Douglas*, Zona Norte.

⁷⁰ Rafael*, Zona Norte.

⁷¹ Gledhill, The New War on the Poor; Leite et al., 2018; and PSFE 2019.

⁷² Martins, ‘O Extermínio da Juventude Negra’.

⁷³ F. Fanon, (1963), The Wretched of the Earth, English translation by R. Philcox (2004) (New York: Grove press, 6).

⁷⁴ Vargas, ‘Genocide in the African Diaspora’; Vargas, Never Meant to Survive; and Anne-Marie Veillette, ‘Racialized Popular Feminism: A decolonial analysis of women’s struggle with police violence in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas’, Latin American Perspectives 48, no. 4 (2021): 87–104.

⁷⁵ Izabel*, Zona Norte.

⁷⁶ Bernardo*.

⁷⁷ Antonio*, Marcos* (Zona Norte).

⁷⁸ Pedro*, Gabriel*, Zona Sul, Bernardo*.:

⁷⁹ ‘Paz sem voz não é paz, é medo’ O Rappa (1999) ‘Minha Alma (A Paz Que Eu Não Quero)’, Album: Lado B Lado A

⁸⁰ Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research’; Menezes, ‘Vivendo entre dois deuses’.

⁸¹ Pedro*, Zona Sul.

⁸² Maria*, Zona Sul.

⁸³ Miguel*, Zona Sul.

⁸⁴ PSFE 2019.

⁸⁵ Ibid.

⁸⁶ Grupo Luz*.

⁸⁷ Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’; Mbembe, Necropolitics, trans. Corcoran Steven2019; Silva, Testemunhos da maré; and Villenave, ‘The Racialisation of Security Apparatus in Brazil’.

⁸⁸ Gledhill, The New War on the Poor, 200.

⁸⁹ Jose*; J. Pearce, Perverse State Formation and Securitised Democracy in Latin America. Democratization 17, no. 2 (2010): 286–306.

⁹⁰ Jose*, Zona Norte.

⁹¹ Jose*.

⁹² Literally ‘ant-work’, meaning slow, but steady collaborative work.

⁹³ Grassroot work.

⁹⁴ Author 2022a Author 2022b; A. N. Fahlberg, ‘Rethinking Favela Governance: Non-Violent Politics in Rio de Janeiro’s Gang Territories’, Politics & Society 46, no. 4 (2018): 485–512; and Veillette, ‘Racialized Popular Feminism’.

⁹⁵ Grossi et al., ‘Social Work Principles and the Interface with the Culture of Peace’.

⁹⁶ Izabel*, Antonio*, Daví*, Fernanda*, Marcos* (Zona Norte), Maria*, Miguel*, Aline* (Zona Sul). Dowdney, 2003; Luke Dowdney, Neither War nor Peace: International Comparisons of Children and Youth in Organised Armed Violence 7Letras (2006): 334.

⁹⁷ Miguel*, Pedro*, Grupo Ar*, Antônia*, Aline* (Zona Sul), Daví*, Marcia* Antonio*, João*, Marcos*, Izabel*, Douglas* (Zona Norte).

⁹⁸ J. Pearce, Politics Without Violence?: Towards a Post-Weberian Enlightenment (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); and Scheper-Hughes, ‘Dangerous and Endangered Youth’, 13–46.

⁹⁹ Rodriguez et al., ‘Visible and Invisible Violence and Inequality in Neoliberal Santiago’, 359–72; Pearce, Politics Without Violence?; and Scheper-Hughes, ‘Dangerous and Endangered Youth’, 13–46.

¹⁰⁰ Pearce, Politics Without Violence? 296.

¹⁰¹ Ibid.

¹⁰² Ibid., 316.

¹⁰³ See Alan and Keller (2006) in O. P. Richmond, eace in International Relations, 2nd ed., (London and New York, Routledge, 2020), 269 for more on ‘care’.

¹⁰⁴ Davi*, Zona Norte.

¹⁰⁵ Lederach, The Moral Imagination; Pearce, Politics Without Violence?; Richmond, International Relations; Robbie Shilliam, Decolonizing Politics: An introduction (John Wiley & Sons, 2020); and Vargas, Never meant to survive.