Perspectives on Violence, Neoliberalism, and Security in 21st Century Megacities

The two excellent books I discuss in this essay offer an apparent paradox. They present significantly overlapping empirical material, yet provide widely divergent—at times, seemingly contradictory—analyses. Yet, considered together, the two studies help us to think through violence and governance in the urban Global South in new ways. Erika Robb Larkins’s meticulously researched and described ethnography of Rio de Janeiro’s vast favela, Rocinha, shows us how, in recent years, violence has been deployed and commoditized by and for many actors in the management of the city’s violence and inequality. Larkins presents a longstanding dynamic of exclusion and exploitation that has taken new commoditized and neoliberal forms in a Rio de Janeiro of internationally marketed “favela tours” (p. 5); megaevents, such as the World Cup and Olympics; and state-led “pacification”, which she describes as “a spatial fix for new iterations of neoliberal capital driven by the Olympics and the promise of Brazilian modernity” (p. 156). Larkins’s tightly focused ethnography describes the neoliberal intensification of extant exclusion. Paul Amar’s innovative study of Rio de Janeiro and Cairo, instead, gives us a wide angle analysis of “new forms of rule” that Amar sees as emerging in certain “hotspots” (p. 16) in the “geopolitical belt that we used to call the semiperiphery” (p. 30). Through an analysis of a tangle of Global South (as well as Global North) actors, discourses, and logics, Amar describes new “human security regimes” (p. 41) which attempt to join the protection of the morality and heritage of the nation with “its economic integration into globalization” (p. 97). In Amar’s analysis, Global North models 659820 TCR0010.1177/1362480616659820Theoretical CriminologyReview essay book-review2016