Deborah Fromm, “Public Security, Private Interests: On Social Conflict in Contemporary Brazil”, 29.02.2024, 5:00pm-7:00pm CET

Room K008, 1 place Saint-Thomas d’Aquin, 75007 Paris & Zoom*

Compulsory Registration

“Public Security, Private Interests: On Social Conflict in Contemporary Brazil”

Crime, violence and urban militarisation are themes widely explored in the urban studies literature focused on large Latin American cities. With high homicide and violent crime rates, the region features prominently in discussions of public security, accelerated urbanisation and violence. A series of urban ethnographies has explored how violence is connected to the conduct of everyday life, cultural and social representation, and urban territorial governance, processes of city-making and the reproduction of social inequalities. There is little discussion, however, about the financialisation of urban security and the role of private sector actors, especially the insurance sector, in the production of new forms of commodified policing and a contested urban order in the Global South. Based on an ethnography conducted between 2017 and 2022 with actors in the Brazilian insurance industry – brokers, executives, union presidents and other representative political entities, lobbyists, actuaries, insurance employees and owners of small outsourced private security companies – my findings contribute to a better understanding of the deep connections and interdependencies between criminal and formal markets undertaken either by state agents or by financial and corporate agents selling forms of legal-illegal protection. The focus on this legal-illegal boundary thus shifts the question of ‘urban violence’ from poverty and marginality to a more relational way of thinking about the conflicts over the appropriation of urban wealth.

Speaker

Deborah Fromm, Visiting Fellow, London School of Economics and Political Science.

Deborah Fromm is an urban ethnographer working on extreme inequalities, protection services and the frontiers between legal and illegal security markets in the South. She is a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science awarded with the Urban Studies Foundation International Fellowship. She holds a PhD and a MA in Social Anthropology at University of Campinas with visiting periods at Goldsmiths College (University of London) and the Centre for Research and Studies in Social Anthropology (Ciesas, Mexico City)

*The zoom link will be sent to you on the day of the seminar

For more information: citiesarebackintown@sciencespo.fr