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Struggles against eviction are key moments in the (re)production of informal housing in Brazilian cities, as they contest the uprooting and displacement of generally low-income families. While recent research has focused on displacement due to the World Cup and Olympic Games mega-events, this paper explores struggles against eviction that are less high profile, underscoring the distributed nature of evictions in processes of urban change. Drawing on long term fieldwork, this paper examines three cases of struggles against eviction in different cities in the southeast of Brazil. This comparison highlights the everyday contestations that take place across varied geo-political terrain; the morphological constraints and opportunities for collective action of building as opposed to land occupations; the punitive and cooperative state logics with which threatened communities must engage; and drawing on recent attempts in geography to combine theorisations of territory, place, network and scale, contributes to understanding the polymorphy of spatial struggles in contemporary Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main innovations in the interaction between social movements and the state in Latin America since the democratisation processes is the use of courts as venues for social change and the intervention of social actors in constitutional politics. Drawing from the empirical study of the process of strategic litigation for abortion rights in Brazil, this paper aims to show what type of changes can take place when social actors set out to pursue a legal strategy on a highly controversial matter, and in a transitional context, where courts are in the midst of a redefinition of their institutional role in the political system, and movements have not yet been central actors in judicialisation processes. The study highlights how feminist organisations adapted their framing of the abortion issue and developed new alliances with legal actors in order to pursue a rights strategy and to interact with the constitutional court. It also points out how, when dealing with the abortion controversy, the Brazilian constitutional court (Supremo Tribunal Federal) expanded the legal opportunity for the participation of civil society actors and, in its 2012 decision that liberalised the abortion law, acknowledged the legal arguments advanced by social actors in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic growth of nations such as Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa starred a new order into the global power balance. For Brazil, winning the rights to host sport mega events gave the country recognition and symbolic power in the international arena. The ensuing expectation is to increase these achievements while staging the events and to sustain the profits to a remarkable level of ‘soft power’. Using the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic election as a starting point, this paper aims to reveal how sport has been used as a strategy of foreign policy to improve the country's soft power. After reviewing some key features of the Brazilian political and economic context, and the foreign policy agenda in the 2000s and the 2016 election, it is shown that sport mega events support and reflect the intention of many Brazilian political officials intention to increase the status of Brazil in the international sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the social sciences, informality is regularly discussed as a territory: 'the informal city'. However, during the Covid-19 pandemic, precarious informal workers gained attention as people were targeted for cash transfer policies to increase adherence to and diminish the negative impact of social distancing policies. Focusing on informal workers highlighted new discussions about informality. In this Introduction, I discuss theories of informal practices in Brazil prior and during the pandemic, when this special issue 'The prism of Brazil: informal practices in politics and society' was conceived. This issue combines theory and ethnography to locate informality in time and space. I situate two shifts in the discussion of informality: (1) Prior to 2020, researchers started discussing informality as a practice across different scales of power, moving away from binary conceptions. (2) Informality was discussed as mutual dependency, where autonomy in housebuilding or income generation was framed as possible existence, not freedom. To counter effects of the pandemic in Brazil, targeting and locating people in 'informal' labour became important for conditional cash transfer, though still simplifying complex realities. In turn, disturbed social interactions highly affected co-dependency. In grappling with new scholarship focused on Brazil, I discuss the heterogeneity and dynamics of informality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the Brazilian social movement of mothers whose children were killed by State's security agents between 2003 and 2017. Its purpose is to understand how these women define their claims for justice, as they struggle to see those responsible for the assassination of their children properly judged. Our hypothesis is that their activism politicizes motherhood and makes it a public matter. To investigate that, we conducted in-depth interviews with twelve activists on the mothers' movements against police violence. The interviews were conducted between June and August of 2017, in two metropolitan areas in the Southeast of Brazil, the city of Rio de Janeiro (RJ) and Santos (SP). They confirmed the politicization of motherhood, redefining care as resistance and a matter of justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between informal processes of urbanisation and order-making at Brazil's urban margins. It draws on research conducted in contrasting neighbourhoods in the peripheries of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, analysing the influence of different kinds of criminal organisation on these areas. It is argued that the unpredictable processes surrounding peripheral urbanisation – the irregular occupation or subdivision of land, the growth of diverse markets, physical consolidation and, in some cases, eventual formalisation – provide a dynamic backdrop against which local order and disorder are produced. To theorise these interrelated processes, I mobilise the concept of 'pacification'. This is usually used to refer to violent state interventions against socially and racially marginalised populations that are followed by measures designed to create more lasting stability. However, I argue that, while it may ultimately have such effects, pacification should be understood as a provisional outcome of ongoing negotiations between state and criminal actors rather than as a coherent, top-down project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Environmental impact assessment (EIA) procedures aim prospectively to collect evidence about the environmental impacts of economic projects and to avoid or compensate for the costs incurred. This article asks whether such procedures have been effective in Latin America after many regional countries returned to some version of the developmental state after 2000. It does so by surveying the procedural effectiveness of Latin American regulations comparatively before turning to a deeper study of the Brazilian case. In Brazil, which has some of the strongest EIA procedures in the region, it finds that stakeholders make very different assessments of its effectiveness, not least because they define the standard differently. Economic actors in and out of the state criticise Brazilian EIA as ineffective from a transactive standpoint, which questions the time and cost associated with environmental licencing. Environmental and community activists see EIA as ineffective in achieving the substantive sustainability ends they value. Neither appreciates the procedural improvements offered by licencing professionals. The article concludes that EIA invites a broader set of stakeholders than did classic developmental states, but cannot on its own adjudicate among the resulting multiple visions of how to carry out development strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few studies have examined the relations between urban marginalised youth and the public security system in the northeast of Brazil. This article addresses this gap in the literature through an examination of youth perceptions of a security programme aimed at reducing violence. It also analyses the effects of this security programme by interrogating the hegemonic discourses of state-actors in the region, namely, agents of the criminal justice system. The analysis draws on ethnographic data collected between 2012 and 2016 in Recife, the capital city of the state of Pernambuco in the northeast of Brazil. This approach permits an examination of the nature of new security interventions, and a comparison between two distinct narratives about this new securitisation agenda. One overarching narrative focuses on young people’s vulnerabilities, the other on claims of successful securitisation. An analysis of these narratives widens understandings of the effects and risks of security interventions, contributing to a debate about their impact on young people’s lives and society at large. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]