Necropolitics Beyond the Exception: Parapolicing, Milícia Urbanism, and the Assassination of Marielle Franco in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

Engaging with the assassination of black city councillor Marielle Franco, the paper discusses how “milícia urbanism”, a formation of power and capital accumulation driven by parapolice networks, intensifies the necropolitical governance of Rio de Janeiro. Specifically, this necropolitics is characterised by liaisons among armed, political, institutional and economic actors that enable acts of violence with impunity, aggravating the conditions of violence for subaltern populations. Dialoguing with the Black Studies debate on necropolitics and works on violent democracies, the paper situates milícia urbanism within a postcolonial genealogy of parapolicing. Ever since the colonial plantation, it is argued, parapolicing has been integral to a power technology that avoids sovereign accountability while serving white capital interests. Whereas previous accounts of necropolitics have centred on the sovereign exception, this genealogy furthers an understanding of necropolitics “beyond the exception”. The paper concludes that Marielle Franco’s black‐feminist politics has been vital to contestations of this necropolitics.

Conservative turn, milícias, and elections

“…Das gilt insbesondere für die zunehmende Unterdrückung freier Zusammenkünfte und Vereinigungen, repräsentativer Anwohner_ innenvertretungen und anderer Formen kollektiven Handelns, aber auch für die Behinderung der Wahlkampagnen progressiver Kandidat_ innen in milizkontrollierten Gebieten. Außerdem befördern die von Leandro Benmergui und Rafael Soares Gonçalves (2019) als urbanismo miliciano bezeichneten Formen der Schaffung und Aneignung urbanen Raums durch milícias in einigen Stadtvierteln Rio de Janeiros eine nekropolitische Art des Regierens, die der Gewalt gegen die ärmsten Bevölkerungsgruppen Vorschub leistet (Hutta 2022). Was den Umgang des Staates mit einkommensschwachen Vierteln betrifft -vor allem mit jenen, die von Drogenorganisationen dominiert werden -so ist eine Zunahme von staatlicher Gewalt und Militarisierung zu beobachten (Polizei-und Militäroperationen, Sicherheitsvorkehrungen usw.).…”

Popular Economies In, Against, and Through the Platform

“…The contrast between the two modes of informality also reveals a fundamental political pillar in urban neoliberalism, which is the police state (Hutta 2022; Swanson 2007). Access to the “free market” in cities involves legal prerequisites that cannot be easily overcome; labour supply must be directed to “proper” entrances into the economy; and the control, organisation, ordering and domination of urban space is a fundamental political tool in the workings of this institutional pillar of the market—and of capital accumulation.…”

“Captains of the Sands”: Urban Illicit Ecologies and Sandscapes in Rio de Janeiro

“…Militia groups have been reported to be strongly invested in illegal sand extraction, a much necessitated and lucrative building material, whose inadequate use has been inarguably culprit to the Muzema building collapses (Monteiro and Nascimento 2023). Analysing militia-authored urbanism in Rio de Janeiro not only allows one to speak of a new scheme of illicit practices tied-up with urban development (Benmergui and Gonc ßalves 2019), but also about the state's involvement in illicit actors' disposal over the civil construction sector and related extractive industries that substantiate "state violence" in urban Brazil (Alves 2015), ultimately perpetuating racialised and gendered violence whose underlying genealogies of control and vigilantism are deeply rooted in Brazil's history (Hutta 2022;Souza Alves 2003).…”