The right to public security Policing and activism in a Rio de Janeiro favela

In 2013 activists in a Rio de Janeiro favela-an epicenter of the city's notorious police violence-called on the Brazilian state to fulfill their "right to public security." They were anticipating a new policing program, known as "pacification," in which the state would expand its efforts to "clean up" poor, racially stigmatized neighborhoods dominated by drug-trafficking groups. The activists' claim was at once a cry and a demand: a cry against discriminatory policing, state terror, and an unjustly divided city, and a demand for equality, peace, and the state provision of safety in their streets. This case shows that a critical anthropology of security can maintain a tension between security-as-violence and security-as-rights. In doing so, scholars can broaden the understanding of state security beyond repression and attend to how it instantiates various modes of sovereign power. [security, policing, rights, activism, pacification, UPP, traffickers, favela, Brazil]