A World of Warfare

This chapter examines the shadow of policing and the different forms of resource extraction that are made possible through the war on drugs in Rio's favelas. It shows how warfare produces zones for predatory accumulation and opportunities for a militarized entrepreneurialism that cuts across group divides, blurring distinctions between private and public; legal and illegal. By looking at the police's production of the favelas as territories governed through a state of exception, it raises the question of whether part of the far-right's appeal lies in his promise to reaffirm a colonial dynamic through deregulation; a frontier capitalism organized around old and new practices of predation.