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Rio de Janeiro's favelas have become well-known sites of gang and police violence. In
Activism under Fire, Anjuli Fahlberg provides an original account of how conflict activism operates in Cidade de Deus, one of Rio's most dangerous and famous favelas. Based on fieldwork, virtual ethnography, and participatory action research, Fahlberg documents how activists strategically navigate local constraints and opportunities--including gendered governing dynamics and racialized practices of solidarity--to create space for non-violent governance amid armed repression.
List of contents
- Introduction: Conflict Activism in Rio de Janeiro's Gang Territories
- 1. Cidade de Deus: A Contested Territory
- 2. Milking the Resource Matrix: Democracy, Development, and Digital Devices
- 3. Violent Clientelism and Gendered Governance
- 4. Political Upcycling: Anti-Violence Protest through Education, Culture, and Racial Solidarity
- 5. Ties that Strengthen, Ties that Bind: Favela Actors in Urban Politics and Transnational Movements
- Conclusion: Seek and Ye Shall Find: Looking for Non- Violence in Conflict Zones
- Appendix: Ethnographic Reflections: Participatory Action Research in Areas of Violence
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Anjuli Fahlberg is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tufts University. Her research focuses on social movements and urban violence in Latin America and employs a participatory action research approach.
Summary
Rio de Janeiro's favelas have become well-known sites of gang and police violence. Since the 1970s, dangerous networks between drug traffickers and corrupt state actors have transformed these poor neighborhoods into sites of armed conflict and political repression, limiting residents' ability to speak out against violence or demand their democratic rights. Despite these challenges, nonviolent politics remains an integral element in Cidade de Deus--City of God--one of Rio's most dangerous and famous favelas.
In Activism under Fire, Anjuli Fahlberg provides an original account of how conflict activism operates in Cidade de Deus. Drawing on fieldwork, virtual ethnography, and participatory action research, Fahlberg documents how activists strategically navigate local constraints and opportunities--including gendered governing dynamics and racialized practices of solidarity--to create space for non-violent governance amid armed repression. By working within urban, national, and transnational political networks and social movements, local activists bring resources into their neighborhood and protest violence while avoiding dangerous alliances.
Activism under Fire demonstrates that non-violent collective action is possible amid extreme poverty and violence, and shows what strategies enable it to survive and effect political change. In so doing, Fahlberg reveals the possibilities for collective action in violent and chaotic democratic states, not only in Latin America, but throughout the world.
Additional text
Moving beyond a narrative of drug gangs and police forces, Fahlberg uses favela residents' own voices in one of Brazil's most famous favelas to illustrate how non-violence movements organize and mobilize... Fahlberg offers a compelling sociological analysis of favela movements that bears new theoretical approaches to movements of non-violence.
