Abstract: For over four decades, drug-trafficking gangs have monopolized violence and engaged in various forms of governance across hundreds of informal neighborhoods known as favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, over 200 interviews with gang members and residents, 400 archival documents, and 20,000 anonymous hotline denunciations of gang members, Barnes’ new book provides a comprehensive examination of the causes and consequences of these governance arrangements. In it, he documents the variation in gang-resident relationships – from responsive ones in which gangs provide a reliable form of order and stimulate the local economy, to coercive and unresponsive relations in which gangs offer residents few benefits – then identifies the factors that account for this variation. The result is an unprecedented ethnographic study that provides readers a unique, in-depth insight into the evolution of Rio de Janeiro's drug-trafficking gangs from their emergence in the 1970s to the present day.
Bio: Dr. Nicholas Barnes is a Lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews and affiliated faculty at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies and the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence. He received his PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. His recently published book, Inside Criminalized Governance: How and Why Gangs Rule the Streets of Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge University Press), is based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. His research has been published in Comparative Political Studies, Perspectives on Politics, Current Sociology, Latin American Research Review, Civil Wars, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice.
