BRAZIL

Using a focus on the ways that Covid-19 has impacted everyday life in urban Latin America, this article examines the shifting activities of organized criminal groups in the context of a global pandemic. Using grounded ethnographic fieldwork drawn from Brazil, it asks whether a health crisis with direct life and death consequences has empowered illicit actors, and by so doing changed longstanding relationships between illicit actors and citizens on one hand, and/or illicit actors and local authorities on the other. Its larger aim is to understand whether and how the global pandemic has impacted governance by producing new scalar and sovereignty tensions between state and non-state actors at the scale of the city, and with what implications for the legitimacy of national authorities and democratic governance more generally.

This article constructs an understanding of the Brazilian middle classes using economic, sociological, and cultural factors. It argues that the so-called “new middle class” is actually an expanded vulnerable class and that the middle classes are simultaneously conscious and in denial of injustice toward the lower classes. The argument is based on an accidental biographical ethnography: re-interpretation of a field journal and the use of one person to understand broader trends. The resulting textual product juxtaposes biographical passages with theoretical analysis, deviating from traditional article structures to share the voice of the biographical participant while also critically examining the implications of this voice.

Global activism led to the emergence of new international standards concerning state obligations to consult Indigenous peoples and, under certain circumstances, obtain their free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) when extractive projects impact their rights and traditional territories. However, a growing literature shows that the implementation of Indigenous peoples’ participatory rights remains uneven and inconsistent at best. This paper focuses on Indigenous peoples’ agency in operationalising their rights. We do so by focusing on an increasingly common yet overlooked Indigenous strategy: the development of community-based consultation and consent protocols. What role do unilateral Indigenous protocols play in shaping how participatory norms are implemented? How can protocols contribute to shaping Indigenous peoples’ relations with state and industry actors? We present the result of a systematic comparative analysis of thirty-five consultation and consent protocols adopted by Indigenous nations and communities in Canada and Brazil between 2005 and 2020. While they vary in their structure and content, protocols in both countries converge in their use of both programmatic and performative languages to recast participatory processes as spaces to assert Indigenous peoples’ status and legitimacy as self-determining polities. In doing so, protocols re-politicise and re-appropriate participatory processes and put forward an alternative interpretation of their participatory rights that challenges how state authorities and industry actors tend to operationalise consultation and FPIC standards.

The World Politics of Social Investment: Political Dynamics of Reform is the second of two volumes of the World Politics of Social Investment (WOPSI) project, which systematically maps and explains different welfare reform strategies in democratic countries around the world. This volume traces the development of social investment reforms across the regions of Nordic, Continental, and Southern Europe, as well as Central and Eastern Europe, North and Latin America, and North East Asia. The chapters in this volume study the impact of different structural drivers for social investment (e.g., demographic, poverty, demand for skill, or lack of an available workforce), the salience of social investment in the public debates, and the different political coalitions that led to or prevented the adoption of social investment strategies. The chapters are written by leading social policy scholars from different world regions. They all apply a joint theoretical framework (developed in the first of the two volumes) to explain the politics of social investment in a range of contexts and policy fields. Jointly with the first volume, the WOPSI project offers the first worldwide analysis of social investment reforms around the globe.

Brief review and comment on

In this article, we argue that the degree of political stability is a critical element in the evolution of media systems. In our view, it is the causal mechanism allowing for the political parallelism of media systems. We argue that political stability has three main effects on media systems: it consolidates the operating principles and mechanisms of the public sphere; it gives clear and self-assumed political identities to media actors; and it allows for the establishment of predictable, long-term professional relationships within the media system as well as between journalists and their sources. To test this hypothesis, we compare Bahia and the Federal District, two Brazilian subnational units that differ essentially by the degree of political stability they experienced between 2003 and 2018.

Inspired by the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, this article proposes political phenomenology as an ethnographic method to analyze a community of landless workers in southern Brazil. More specifically, it mobilizes Merleau Ponty s concepts of institution, experience, expression, sign and style to describe the political experience of the landless. This analytical framework is applied in the field to illuminate the processes of political subjectivity and community formation as they developed in a group of individuals associated with the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) as they occupied land for survival.

This article analyses the repertoire of individual strategies utilised by domestic workers to resist routinised workplace violence in the cities of São Paulo and Ilhéus, Brazil. Findings suggest that domestic workers favour two strategies of resistance: exit (quitting work without prior notice) and voice (negotiating workplace conditions). The latter strategy is divided into two subtypes: voice-pleading (appealing to decency) and voice-confrontation (warning and rights-claiming). Voice strategies appear more effective than exit in ameliorating patterns of chronic workplace violence, particularly when they incorporate labour rights claims and when emotional ties exist between workers and employers.

This Special Issue results from two panels organised for the 2018 Congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) in Barcelona: ‘Informal and Precarious Labour After the Pink Tide: New Challenges and Emerging Responses’ and ‘Exploring the Repertoire of Everyday Forms of Resistance to Routinised Violence in Informal Workplaces’.

This article aims to document the phenomenon of Indigenous consultation protocols in Brazil by comparing two cases, the Juruna and the Munduruku protocols. This paper also intends to trace the emergence and uses of these protocols by the actors in place, in order to emphasize not only their legal but also political scope. The following comparison brings to light that, even though there are widespread advances and challenges regarding the Indigenous consultation protocols in Brazil and being the protocols theoretically similar, in fact, there is a significant variation in the trajectories of emergence and implementation of those protocols. In conclusion, the proposed comparison shows that a contextual and situated analysis that focuses on the strategies and practices of the actors may be more fruitful in order to understand, in practice, how the mechanisms of appropriation of the norm of FPIC and its implementation operate.

Antifeminisms are a counter-movement of action and thought that are opposed to feminisms [1]. They aim to distort concepts and theories, to delegitimize feminist movements and their demands and seek to block progress towards the full autonomy and freedom of the women [2]. If in the European and North American academic context, specifically the Quebec one, discussions on anti-feminisms are already common, the analysis of this phenomenon in Latin America has been neglected in favour of other concepts. However, it seems to us that the concept of anti-feminism can bring new avenues of reflection to this region. Based on our experience as researchers in Brazil and Colombia, we therefore decide to focus on the analysis of discourses about the supposed

Espace public, recomposition des gauches et syndicalisme. Éléments de comparaison Argentine - Brésil. Les espaces publics, la démocratie et les gauches en Amérique latine, 2019

Certain segments of the Brazilian Women s Movement (BWM) developed important strategic partnerships with the state under the PT federal government. This article demonstrates how these partnerships had both inclusionary and exclusionary effects on gender centric policy outcomes. Using a mix method approach which includes extensive in-depth interviews with BMW activists and archival data from governmental sources, the Brazilian experience illustrates that entering the state headed by a women ally president facilitates funnelling some of the women’s movement’s demands into the state. However, hierarchies within the movement itself, the congressional strength of the head of executive and the activism of some of its socially conservative legislative allies can severely temper that effect.

In 2018, the world knew about the story of Marielle Franco, the Brazilian city councillor brutally murdered in Rio de Janeiro. On March 14, the car in which Marielle was travelling received 14 shots, killing the councillor (with four bullets in the head) and Anderson Gomes, who was driving the car. Investigations to date indicate that the projectiles with which Marielle and Anderson were shot were purchased by the Brazilian Federal Police.

Because of its early positive assessments, participatory budgeting (PB) has been and continues to be praised by several policymakers, and the Brazilian model has become an institutional blueprint around the world. No one questions the way the model has evolved in Brazilian municipalities with a long tradition of PB, but it was institutionalized there through practice and not through state legislation. It is thus highly permeable to political will and evolving ideas.

Since the early 2000s, public security has been a recurrent issue for the city of Rio de Janeiro. However, within the context of mega-events in the city, Rio further accelerated its public security policy reform process. In 2008, the State of Rio de Janeiro’s Governor, Sergio Filho Cabral, decided to establish a «pacification» policy in the city.

Freedom of expression and access to diverse sources of information are seen as critical elements of democracy, although their concretization on the ground is subject to strong interference. Recent regime change in Maranhão, one of Brazil’s poorest states, has led to the emergence of new media and some expansion of the public sphere.

A adoção da Constituição democrática de 1988 foi marcada pela vontade de romper com o período autoritário e de incluir a participação ampla dos cidadãos brasileiros nos processos decisórios locais, estaduais e nacionais. Após 30 anos a linguagem da inclusão dos cidadãos e da Constituição cidadã foi retomada pelos políticos de todos os níveis de governos para marcar a ambição democrática e inclusive de suas ambições particulares.

This article explores the debate in the public arena of electoral corruption in Brazil, from a pragmatic sociology perspective, to map and unfold its main disputes.

Discussion on feminist philosopher Judith Butler s trip to Brazil in a conservative context

This study aims to understand how civil society organizations (CSOs) perform and influence public arenas.

This article proposes a new theoretical approach for the study of social innovation processes promoted by civil society actors in the public sphere, based on French pragmatic sociology.

In recent decades, the Brazilian Movement Against Electoral Corruption (MCCE) has been promoting social innovation in the public sphere, which led to mobilization towards the creation of two popular initiatives in Brazil

Dando ênfase à especificidade de megaeventos, em contraste com outros projetos e polos de desenvolvimento, este trabalho analisa impactos da Copa do Mundo de Futebol de 2014, na Região Metropolitana do Recife, Pernambuco.

O artigo deste domingo da seção

Amidst the political and institutional maturing of Brazilian democracy, one of the ways in which society takes part in public administration affairs is through involvement in social observatories.

This article discusses the potentialities and limitations of social observatories that focus on citizenship audit in promoting social control and accountability, starting with the experience of the Itajaí Social Observatory