Name: Inside Criminalized Governance: How and Why Gangs Rule the Streets of Rio
Start: 2026-03-04T11:00:00+00:00
End: 2026-03-04T12:30:00+00:00
Location: SOAS University, Main Building (Library), LL E36

Inside Criminalized Governance: How and Why Gangs Rule the Streets of Rio

A book talk with author, Professor Nicholas Barnes, Columbia University
About this Event

About the Event:

For over four decades, drug-trafficking gangs have monopolized violence and engaged in various forms of governance across hundreds of Rio de Janeiro's favelas (informal neighborhoods). Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, over 200 interviews with gang members and residents, 400 archival documents, and 20,000 anonymous hotline denunciations of gang members, Nicholas Barnes' (University of St. Andrews) Inside Criminalized Governance: How and Why Gangs Rule the Streets of Rio de Janeiro provides a comprehensive examination of the causes and consequences of these governance arrangements. The book documents the variation in gang–resident relationships – from responsive ones in which gangs provide a reliable form of order and stimulate the local economy to coercive and unresponsive relations in which gangs offer residents few benefits – and then identifies the factors that account for this variation. The result is an unprecedented ethnographic study that provides readers a unique, in-depth insight into the evolution of Rio de Janeiro’s drug-trafficking gangs, from their emergence in the 1970s to the present day.

About the Speaker:

Nicholas Barnes is currently a visiting scholar at Columbia University's Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS) and a Senior Lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews. He is the current recipient of several awards and research grants, including a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship, and a Royal Society of Edinburgh Personal Research Fellowship. Dr Barnes received his PhD in Political Science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. His recently published book, Inside Criminalized Governance: How and Why Gangs Rule the Streets of Rio de Janeiro (Cambridge University Press), is based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. His research has also been published in Comparative Political Studies, Perspectives on Politics, Current Sociology, Latin American Research Review, Civil Wars, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice.