The thesis consequently proposes and discusses favela peace formation as a concept to describe alternative processes in the favelas working to reduce manifest and structural violence: a nonviolent, favela grassroots, locally legitimate peace process, which navigates various blockages and opportunities within and outside the state in its construction of a future with more social justice and less violence.
It thus critiques the militarized state security operations in the favelas as one man's peace, another man's warzone, noting that these pacification attempts effectively conduct urban warfare against the majority-black favelas to increase a sense of security in the whiter, wealthier areas of Rio de Janeiro. It questions the meaning of peace and top-down public security policies like the Police Pacification Program (UPP) and mega-operations in a city where the favela residents have since slavery been considered a violent people to be pacified and controlled.
Through a critical lens, the thesis considers Rio de Janeiro as a colonial city where historical and continuous state exclusion, criminalization and murder of favela residents feed a violent cycle of drug-related crime and violence in the favelas. The research draws on the perspectives of favela community leaders, educators and activists on the challenges to their work in reducing violence in their communities, which were gathered during eight months of qualitative fieldwork in and around the favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2019-2020. This thesis offers a new consideration of peace processes that engage with the needs and challenges of marginalized, racialized populations living through urban violence in the expanding peripheries of the postcolonial world. It reveals the immense complexity and deep historical roots of the conflict, which indicate the importance of seeking a deeper understanding of each conflict context before 5 Discussed by Jose*, February 2020, Zona Norte, as the main challenge for the wellbeing of the favelas proposing its solutions. Like the collection, this chapter has shown how various forms of violence and exclusion towards the favelas are naturalized and legitimized through a racist dehumanization of favela residents, turning them into bare beings and disposable lives(Agamben 1998 Scheper-Hughes 2004b).
Its findings reflect those of other critical anthropological and sociological work on the margins and the state, such as Bourgois and Scheper-Hughes' collections of studies of "a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of 'small wars and invisible genocides'" (2004:19), whose "veryday violence encompasses the implicit, legitimate, and routinized forms of violence inherent in particular social, economic, and political formations" (2004:21).
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