Awards

• Winner of Co-Winner, Roberto Reis Book Prize in the First Book category, Brazilian Studies Association.

Overview

Rio de Janeiro's favelas have become well-known sites of gang and police violence. Since the 1970s, dangerous networks between drug traffickers and corrupt state actors have transformed these poor neighborhoods into sites of armed conflict and political repression, limiting residents' ability to speak out against violence or demand their democratic rights. Despite these challenges, nonviolent politics remains an integral element in Cidade de Deus--City of God--one of Rio's most dangerous and famous favelas. In Activism under Fire, Anjuli Fahlberg provides an original account of how conflict activism operates in Cidade de Deus. Drawing on fieldwork, virtual ethnography, and participatory action research, Fahlberg documents how activists strategically navigate local constraints and opportunities--including gendered governing dynamics and racialized practices of solidarity--to create space for non-violent governance amid armed repression. By working within urban, national, and transnational political networks and social movements, local activists bring resources into their neighborhood and protest violence while avoiding dangerous alliances. Activism under Fire demonstrates that non-violent collective action is possible amid extreme poverty and violence, and shows what strategies enable it to survive and effect political change. In so doing, Fahlberg reveals the possibilities for collective action in violent and chaotic democratic states, not only in Latin America, but throughout the world.

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9780197519332

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Reviews

How is social mobilization possible in gang territories? Anjuli Fahlberg's research answers this question, affirming the necessity to differentiate favela activism from traditional social movements. Activism under Fire is a powerful concept to understand the strategy of non-violence adopted by political actors as part of their resistance and adaptation to violent and restrictive contexts. Fahlberg's original participatory field research reveals how favela activists have constructed a sphere of non-violent politics, which operates politically parallel to, and symbolically in opposition to, the sphere of violent politics in the neighborhood. * Sonia Fleury, Senior Researcher, Center for Strategic Studies, Oswaldo Cruz Foundation * This book is a gem. Anjuli Fahlberg writes this 'conduit of stories' with a refreshing self-awareness and respect for her community collaborators, gracefully integrating grassroots ethnography with the academic literature. What she calls 'pragmatic resistance' in the City of God is something I have observed in Rio's favelas over the past three decades as turf wars between drug gangs and their dance with the police and militias have taken lethal violence to new extremes. * Janice Perlman, author of The Myth of Marginality and Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro *

Author Information

Anjuli Fahlberg is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Tufts University. Her research focuses on social movements and urban violence in Latin America and employs a participatory action research approach.

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