Unequal Incorporation and Disruption ꟷ The Negotiation of Citizenship in Rio de Janeiro

In the current article, I seek to understand the negotiation of citizenship in the context of the pacification program as implemented by the state in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, drawing on local and global conceptions of citizenship, peace and security, and occupying the slums with the aim of “bringing” “citizenship”, “rights” and “peace” in order to break perceived causal relations between poverty, informality, violence and crime, including by police teaching classes on music, sports and “peace”, organising recreational activities and social assistance, thus employing rights as instruments for an unequal inclusion based on a preconceived order as necessary for peace and citizenship. This incorporation is enacted in rituals that draw on both liberal notions of citizenship as universal and defined by rights in conjunction with an unequal distribution of such rights, and their enactment as a distribution of functions, which is mediated by notions of intimacy, hierarchy and home, as theorised by Roberto DaMatta and Angela Gomes. This is most clear in the work with the group that is also associated with both vulnerability and threats to order and security, namely children and youth, taking the form of classes on music, sports and job-skills, as well as arranging Christmas parties where police officers dress as Santa Claus, and Quinceaneras (known in Brazil as baile dos debutantes) where police officers lead local adolescent girls in dances, taking over a role traditionally filled by fathers, thus representing male control over female (black) sexuality, thus, incorporating residents in a subaltern position defined by age, gender, socio-economic situation, and perceived status as both victim and potential threat to “peace”. In contrast to this state-centred citizenship, I look at forms of resistance, specifically the #CadeAmarildo campaign starting in the wake of the forced disappearance of the resident of the pacified Rocinha favela, Amarildo de Souza, a poor, Afro-Brazilian stonemason. Drawing on Engin Isin’s concept of acts of citizenship, the idea of urban insurgent citizenship as developed by James Holston, and Rancière’s concept of the political as a rupture in the normal, I argue that this campaign presents a disruption in the perceived normality of unequal state-centred citizenship, thus re-politicizing citizenship as an object of dispute and constituting new political subjectivities. This takes the form of jumping scales by claiming alternative belongings that question the state and nation as sources of citizenship by referring to both local and global solidarities, as when referring to the city and the slums, as opposed to the state and nation, as sources of belonging, intimacy and political subjectivity, the latter forged in part in the fight for rights and against state violence and inaction, e.g. through auto-construction, and when referring to historical and global injustices, such as slavery as bases for resistance against state violence. In doing so, this counter-discourse appropriates the subaltern position associated with informality, victimhood and blackness, thus questioning the passivity of the category of victim and the perceived normality of the distribution of positions constructed and enacted in the official discourse and pacification rituals.