Um diálogo entre biopolítica e colonialidade a partir da intervenção militar no Rio de Janeiro

A intervenção federal no Estado do Rio de Janeiro caracterizou-se pela forte presença das Forças Armadas nas favelas, aumento de homicídios e outras violências contra seus moradores. Este trabalho objetiva discutir essa intervenção enquanto inflexão de uma lógica mais ampla de guerra contra as pessoas não-brancas, fundante do Estado Brasileiro, desde os genocídios coloniais. Divide-se em quatro seções. A primeira analisa relatos de moradores da favela, produzidos no Circuito Favelas por Direitos, que mostram concretamente a relação entre exceção e colonialidade. A segunda apresenta a disciplina jurídica da intervenção. A terceira aborda a relação de exceção formadora dos Estados modernos, os quais definem diferencialmente os limites político-jurídicos da vida humana. A quarta apresenta como a exceção, nos países formados pelas invasões coloniais, entrelaça-se a discursos racistas numa matriz colonial de poder, produtora da desumanização e do genocídio de setores inteiros da população. Metodologicamente, baseia-se na análise documental e na revisão bibliográfica. Conclui-se que a ação estatal brasileira é constitutivamente orientada por uma matriz colonial de poder, que define quais vidas serão protegidas e quais serão expostas à morte generalizada. The federal intervention in the State of Rio de Janeiro was characterized by a strong presence of the Armed Forces in the favelas, more homicides and other violence against residents. This paper discusses the intervention as inflection of a broader war logic against non-white people, that founds the Brazilian State, since the colonial genocides. It’s divided into four sections. The first analyzes reports from favela residents, gathered in the Circuito Favela por Direitos, which concretely show the relationship between exception and coloniality. The second presents the legal discipline of the intervention. The third addresses exception, forming relation of modern States, which differentially define human life’s political-legal limits . The fourth presents how the exception, in countries formed by colonial invasions, is intertwined with racist discourses in a colonial matrix of power, which produces dehumanization and genocide for entire population sectors. Methodologically, it is based on documentary analysis and bibliographic review. The conclusion is that a colonial matrix of power constitutively guides the Brazilian state action, which defines the lives that’ll be protected and those that’ll be exposed to generalized death.

In the “Fissures of Infrastructure”

This article offers an account of “toxic infrastructures” as mutually material and discursive arrangements operating in the postwar, postcrash, and settler colonial landscapes of the United States. It specifically responds to Jennifer Scappettone’s multimodal poetic work The Republic of Exit 43, developed after the author’s discovery that the industrial landfill site she grew up alongside in New York had been classified by the US Environmental Protection Agency as requiring federal intervention. Tracing Scappettone’s poetic geographies from the “corporate dump” of Syosset Landfill to the more (in)famous waste site Fresh Kills, the article argues that Scappettone exposes the ways that certain bodies and ecologies are rendered physically and conceptually toxic and implicates readers in the uneven social, embodied, and ecological conditions of composition and response. It suggests that Scappettone’s practices of collage, salvage, and collaborative performance destabilize lyric subjectivity to address a “garbage arcadia” compounding the material accumulations of US consumerism and neoliberal financialization with longer processes of dispossession and displacement. Reading this text with feminist materialisms and Julian Talamantez Brolaski’s queer Indigenous poetry, the article considers how poetics might reckon with the material conditions and residues of uneven wasting and generate situated, critical, and relational approaches to toxic infrastructures.

Emergency Rule without a Sovereign

This chapter is about constitutional defence and emergency politics in the federation. It shows that the government of the Eurozone crisis is a manifestation of federal emergency politics. This explains why the dominant theories of the ‘state of exception’, modelled on the political form of the state, do not apply to the EU. The chapter first develops a theory of federal constitutional defence based on the theory and praxis of the antebellum United States (the doctrine of states’ rights) and the nineteenth-century German Confederation (the theory of federal execution and federal intervention). On this basis, the chapter then analyses both ‘Euro-crisis law’ and the contestation of the emergency government of the Eurozone crisis by EU Member States, importantly the Gauweiler and Weiss cases. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the precariousness of federal emergency politics in general and the balance struck with the ‘Greek crisis’ in particular.

Federal intervention of police under section 14141 – a state-of-the-art literature review

PurposeThe purpose of this state-of-the-art review is to explore the empirical literature on federal intervention of police under 42 USC Section 14141.Design/methodology/approachA five-stage scoping review of the empirical literature related to 14141 was conducted through searches of scholarly databases and gray literature.FindingsThis scoping review revealed 21 empirical studies of 14141 published between 2002 and 2020 in criminal justice, criminology, legal and gray literature. Researchers employed various methodologies and designs to study 14141 reflecting the complexity of evaluating a multistage and multi-outcome federal intervention of police. The success of 14141 to reform police agencies is mixed. The empirical evidence suggests that application of this law is fraught with trade-offs and uncertainties including de-policing, increased crime and organizational difficulties in sustaining reform. Overall, more research would assist in understanding the efficacy of this federal mechanism of police accountability and reform.Originality/valueThis review is the first synthesis of the empirical literature on 14141. In consideration of the current national police crisis, findings help illuminate both what is known about federal intervention and areas for future research.

Washington’s Passive Torpedoing of Statehood

This chapter focuses on recent developments in the language-status front. While the PPD has opted to leave the official languages issue alone, the PNP continuously pushed bilingual education as a step towards statehood. Furthermore, the PNP sought federal intervention in the form of a federal status bill which was patently designed to torpedo the Commonwealth option. Rejecting this proposal, Congress effectively threw the Commonwealth a lifeline. Unimpaired by congressional inaction, the PNP initiated status plebiscites in 2012 and 2017. Both used techniques designed to tip the scales in statehood’s favor. Congress has ignored both of their results. In a passive aggressive manner, the federal government has consistently favored the Commonwealth and has done so not because it particularly adulates it, but because it is the status that provides the US government with the greatest flexibility to control Puerto Rican affairs.