Inside Criminalized Governance: How and Why Gangs Rule the Streets of Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics) - Softcover

Barnes, Nicholas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1009069942 ISBN 13: 9781009069946

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2025

Synopsis

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, this book provides a comprehensive examination of the causes and consequences of these governance arrangements. The book documents the variation in gang-resident relationships – from responsive relations in which gangs provide a reliable form of order and stimulate the local economy, to coercive and unresponsive relations in which gangs offers 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.

About this title

About the Author

Nicholas Barnes is a Lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews. This book is based on more than three years of ethnographic fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro, 18 months of which the author spent living in Complexo da Maré, the city's largest group of informal neighborhoods. This project has benefitted from numerous grants, including from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education through the Fulbright-Hays program, the Social Sciences Research Council, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation. The dissertation on which this book is based received the Best Fieldwork award (2017) from the American Political Science Association and the Best Dissertation award (2018) from the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1009069942
• ISBN 13: 9781009069946
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 392