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“Captains of the Sands”: Urban Illicit Ecologies and Sandscapes in Rio de Janeiro

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Abstract

Urban Political Ecology (UPE) has explored human–soil relations, emphasising the political dimensions of environmental degradation in and through urbanisation. However, UPE lacks critical reflection on governance collusions with illicit actors. Bridging this gap, my paper combines UPE with literature on criminal urban governance, focusing on how urban sand shapes illicit urbanisation. To address UPE's oversight of criminal governance, I explore Rio de Janeiro's militias expanding their illegal portfolio through terrain modification, linking illicit activities to territorial control. Integrating criminal governance with UPE, I argue for the concept of Urban Illicit Ecologies (UIE). Urban sandscapes become multi‐sited, illicit geographies revealing imbrications of formal state and criminal actors, political dimensions, and inequalities in resource extraction and environmental processes. By understanding urban illicit ecology, we gain insights into the contested claims of political authority and territorial control between militias and the state.

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... [5] Siehe Grubbauer (2018) und Müller (2024) zu Sandmetabolismen in Mexiko und Brasilien. ...
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The Seropédica-Itaguaí Sand Mining district supplies about 70% of sand for civil construction of Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Region. The sand extraction process is fact by the remove of the surface sedimentary layers; make water table fills the produced hole. The sand extraction activities cause the oxidation of reduced sediments (ancient coast lines lithologies - mangrove environment), providing low pH values (reaching values < 4) and high SO4 contents (reaching more than 90 mg L-1). The relatively high acidity of these waters, similar to ore pit lakes environment and associated acid mine drainage, contributes to accelerated weathering rate, especially the silicates minerals, which produces high concentrations of Al (> 10 mg.L-1).
Book
Reassembling the Social is a fundamental challenge from one of the world’s leading social theorists to how we understand society and the ‘social ‘. Bruno Latour’s contention is that the word ‘social’, as used by Social Scientists, has become laden with assumptions to the point where it has become misnomer. When the adjective is applied to a phenomenon, it is used to indicate a stablilized state of affairs, a bundle of ties that in due course may be used to account for another phenomenon. But Latour also finds the word used as if it described a type of material, in a comparable way to an adjective such as ‘wooden’ or ‘steely ‘. Rather than simply indicating what is already assembled together, it is now used in a way that makes assumptions about the nature of what is assembled. It has become a word that designates two distinct things: a process of assembling; and a type of material, distinct from others. Latour shows why ‘the social’ cannot be thought of as a kind of material or domain, and disputes attempts to provide a ‘social explanations’ of other states of affairs. While these attempts have been productive (and probably necessary) in the past, the very success of the social sciences mean that they are largely no longer so. At the present stage it is no longer possible to inspect the precise constituents entering the social domain. Latour returns to the original meaning of ‘the social’ to redefine the notion, and allow it to trace connections again. It will then be possible to resume the traditional goal of the social sciences, but using more refined tools. Drawing on his extensive work examining the ‘assemblages’ of nature, Latour finds it necessary to scrutinize thoroughly the exact content of what is assembled under the umbrella of Society. This approach, a ‘sociology of associations’, has become known as Actor-Network-Theory, and this book is an essential introduction both for those seeking to understand Actor-Network Theory, or the ideas of one of its most influential proponents.
Article
Access to land and to adequate housing—a constitutionally granted right in Brazil—is currently under attack by non-state armed actors, the so-called militias, in Rio de Janeiro. In their attempts to widen territorial control, “militias” weaponize urban development. To understand such form of militarization, I argue that we need to add a geographical perspective to literatures on criminal governance: Terrain and its political materiality is the basis and not only the outcome of spatial claims to power. To sustain this contribution, I turn to local scales and add insights from ethnographic studies on how paramilitary groups affect the lives of residents. I trace the paramilitary influence along their terrain-shaping and urban development activities. The empirical basis of my argument is drawn from the northern periphery of Rio de Janeiro, looking at how “militias”—emerging as armed developers out of a past as Death Squads—expand their influence by investing in urban development. In this paper, “militia” is conceived as a floating signifier. As such, the meaning of militia is contested, as it encompasses a wide range of practices including civil construction, laying infrastructure, and landscaping. This way, the term “militia” becomes a cornerstone of a militarized urban development discourse and practice. “Militia,” as the encompassing center of a narrative cluster, bolsters bellicose forms of governing urban expansion, thereby further militarizing the everyday life of a large part of the marginalized urban society.
Article
In 1966, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara arrived in south-east Bolivia assuming that the region’s forested mountains and the poverty of the peasantry constituted ‘favourable terrain’ to start a revolution. Instead, he encountered a hostile terrain that led to the defeat of his guerrilla force and to his death. In this article, I offer a spatial and affective analysis of Guevara’s conceptualizations of ‘favourable’ and ‘unfavourable’ terrain, of his gendered experience of a ‘hostile terrain’ in Bolivia, and of how these ideas and his emphasis on revolutionary determination were subsequently debated and reformulated by guerrilla fighters and radical movements in Latin America. Drawing from an analysis of the interface between terrain, place and territory in rebellions, I show how the dichotomy between favourable and unfavourable terrain misses that spatially attuned insurrections can potentially weaponize any type of terrain, but also that they always confront a ‘hostile terrain’, understood as the social and territorial conditions that hinder their spatial proliferation. This means conceptualizing revolutions as spatial and affective processes through which determined multitudes overcome this hostility by attuning to place, empowering their strategies through engagements with different types of terrain, and expanding rebel territories. I conclude by discussing why these questions are relevant today to radical politics amid the climate crisis.
Article
This article analyzes the practice and implications of criminal governance through the effective exercise of a system of parallel justice. It is examined the case of the Brazilian gang Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), which since 1993 has evolved its scope moving from a powerful prison gang to a complex organization directed to drug trafficking, also having solid governance capacities in deprived urban areas. To examine PCC's judicial function of governance, our methodology is grounded in data triangulation, combining the analysis of documents from the Public Prosecutor's Office of São Paulo state (Brazil), interviews, and literature review. The research confirms empirically earlier conceptual developments on judicial criminal governance by showing a sophisticated parallel justice system by PCC that is operational in three ways. First, PCC manages a trial and punishment system in spaces under their control. Also the gang conducts mechanisms of dispute resolutions for the civilians under their control. Lastly, judicial governance support debt collection and contract enforcement activities. Furthermore, the article innovates by detailing that PCC's judicial function has different purposes depending on the group's hegemony in a given social space, impacting the conditions of peace or violence in these places.
Article
In this brief response to Stuart Elden’s thought-provoking essay ‘Terrain, Politics, History’, I question whether place, one of the most ubiquitous concepts worked with by geographers, might have a place itself in studies of territory and provide another way of attending to the neglect of the materiality of territory. In raising this point, I further ask if attention should also be shifted more broadly to the terrains of social and cultural geographies. Here an extensive body of work has investigated more-than-human materialist approaches to making sense of the world and examined the agencies and role of landscape. Both lenses, I argue, could offer a great deal to theorisations of territory and its materiality, which are perhaps overlooked, within territory’s position as a concept of the subdiscipline of political geography. In sum, I posit that geography has already dealt quite significantly with the materiality of the Earth in other strands of the discipline, and this work may offer much in dialogue with efforts to materialise our thinking of territory.
Article
The Peace Accords signed between the Colombian government and Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia argues that one of the central causes of the armed conflict has been the historic state absence or abandonment of the peripheral territories most affected by its violence. It proposes expanding the state to these regions, and posits that certain material conditions – such as the construction of infrastructure – would have a pacifying effect and promote better governance, while others – like the presence of illicit crops – would undermine these goals. These presumptions fail to recognize the multiple and variegated experiences of state formation that have unfolded in the territories. We argue that in these regions, there has been no gradual and linear progression from state absence to state presence, nor has the presence of the state been historically equated with peace. We analyze the process of state-building in the frontier municipality of Cartagena de Chairá between 1978 and 2016, by observing the relations activated and enabled by two material conditions: coca and roads. Combining ethnographic fieldwork, historical revision, interviews and cartography, we show the complex ways through which coca and roads 1) generate the conditions for the emergence of social and political orders 2) are the medium through which they are formed 3) are the product and instantiation of shifts in these orders and processes. This brief material history records the relationship between actors who participate in the complex and non-linear process of state-building in frontiers marked by the armed conflict. Ultimately, we stress that material conditions do impact state-formation, but the peacebuilding efforts must not understand this as a mechanical relationship and must rather inquire about the nature of the articulation and power structures realized through these material conditions, as well as the kind of state they build. In doing so, these materialities can contribute towards constructing a just and enduring peace.
Article
Drawing inspiration from popular efforts to connect a wide array of political struggles, this symposium examines the ways that racial‐colonial politics unfold through nature and environmental practices linking past, present, and future across the United States and Canada. By way of introduction, we ask: What does it mean to do political ecologies of race in Canada and the United States? For us the response cannot be additive—merely grafting attention to racial/colonial politics onto established scholarly conventions. Instead, we aim for a deeper analysis that challenges and enlivens the field of political ecology. This introduction highlights what is at stake, and identifies the ways that the contributors' research pushes the field. Ultimately, we argue that political ecologies of race can help reinvigorate intellectual projects and build liveable futures by recognising and supporting the connections between ongoing struggles. We hope this symposium contributes to the task.
Article
Most research on urban planning, policy and development only considers legal practices and actors, and treats illegal ones as insignificant anomalies, unable to structurally affect the governance of urban space. However, this approach is inadequate for explaining urban governance in contexts (e.g. several countries in the Global South, the former Soviet bloc and Southern Europe) where illegal practices such as corruption and organized crime infiltration are widespread in many public and economic sectors. This paper addresses the role of illegal actors and practices in urban governance in the Italian context, using urban regime theory as the theoretical frame of reference. The research centres on the analysis of two case studies in the city of Rome (the In-between world investigation of a criminal network that had infiltrated the local administration and shaped several urban policies , and the investigation of episodes of corruption related to the project for the new A.S. Roma soccer stadium). It shows the existence of two shades of 'grey urban governance': firstly, the presence of a dark urban regime, centred on a criminal organisation and parallel to the 'regular' one; secondly, the use of corruption as a customary practice with which real estate entrepreneurs influence municipal decisions. Overall, this research contributes to moving away from a rhetoric of 'gentlemanly' urban capitalism and politics, and suggests the need to revise several aspects of urban regime theory-as well as other approaches to urban governance dynamics in general-in order to incorporate the role of illegal actors and practices.
Article
This article is based on the 2019 Dialogues in Human Geography plenary lecture at the Royal Geographical Society. It has four parts. The first discusses my work on territory in relation to recent work by geographers and others on the vertical, the volumetric, the voluminous, and the milieu as ways of thinking space in three-dimensions, of a fluid and dynamic earth. Second, it proposes using the concept of terrain to analyse the political materiality of territory. Third, it adds some cautions to this, through thinking about the history of the concept of terrain in geographical thought, which has tended to associate it with either physical or military geography. Finally, it suggests that this work is a way geographers might begin to respond to the challenge recently made by Bruno Latour, where he suggests that ‘belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge’. Responding to Latour continues this thinking about the relations between territory, Earth, land, and ground, and their limits.
Article
This article makes the case for developing granular geographies as an intervention into materialist geography. It does so by exploring sand extraction, which has so far been little explored within human geography, and how the granular dynamics of force chains, friction, and phase transitions make the discrete geographies of sand’s commodification porous to one another. By framing sand’s materiality through granular relations, I examine the ubiquity of sand in contemporary urbanization and its transformation into a resource. This is illustrated through a focus on Singapore’s excessive appetite for importing sand to fuel construction and its extensive land reclamation project, mapping sand’s trajectory as a resource from cheap nature to sovereign territory.
Article
In informal urban areas throughout the developing world, and even in some US and UK neighborhoods, tens if not hundreds of millions of people live under some form of criminal governance. For them, states’ claims of a monopoly on the use of force ring hollow; for many issues, a local criminal organization is the relevant authority. Yet the state is far from absent: residents may pay taxes, vote, and even inform on gangs as punishment for abusive behavior. Criminal governance flourishes in pockets of low state presence, but ones that states can generally enter at will, if not always without violence. It thus differs from state, corporate, and rebel governance because it is embedded within larger domains of state power. I develop a conceptual framework centered around the who, what, and how of criminal governance, organizing extant research and proposing a novel dimension: charismatic versus rational-bureaucratic forms of criminal authority. I then delineate the logics that may drive criminal organizations to provide governance for non-members, establishing building blocks for future theory-building and -testing. Finally, I explore how criminal governance intersects with the state, refining the concept of crime–state “symbiosis” and distinguishing it from neighboring concepts in organized-crime and drug-violence scholarship.
Article
Brazil's Movimento de Trabalhadores Sem Teto (MTST, Homeless Workers' Movement) has grown dramatically in recent years. This growth was partly provided for by the use of a large government housing programme, Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV, My House My Life), which allowed the MTST to construct housing for its members and swell its ranks with thousands of new members. Yet some have argued that the MCMV programme used by the MTST may compromise the autonomy of civil society organisations. This article, by contrast, argues that while the MCMV programme encouraged bureaucratic practices, it also helped to promote the cultural politics of the MTST.
Article
The region of Araucania, since its incorporation into the Republic of Chile, has been subject to significant territorial transformations. The Chilean state, supported by economic elites, the political class and intellectuals have all contributed to the discursive positioning of, and the creation of artefacts in, this regional space. These devices for mobilising power have enabled an appropriation of nature – through natural resource exploitation ‐ and an appropriation of land rights through property titles. The occupation of Araucania from the end of the nineteenth century was achieved principally through the artefacts of larger settlement consolidation, the railway network and the building of roads. These were designed and imposed from Santiago through political and administrative channels based on an internal colonialism logic. Conflicts with indigenous Mapuche in Wallmapu (the Mapudungun name for their territory) arose as a consequence of asymmetries of power and this appropriation of space, including expulsion from their land, deforestation, increasing poverty due to restricted access to traditional resources, and epistemic violence through specific constructions of development and the subalterning of indigenous ‘others’. This historical political ecology not only reveals the expanding frontiers of extractivism and processes of accumulation in favour of national political and economic elites, but more importantly shows how the construction of cultural landscapes became devices for exercising power and justifying appropriation in pursuit of modernity, progress and development. These landscapes of power evolved over time as different demands were placed on this territory: first as a wheat bowl, second as forestry plantation. A Landscapes of Power framework is offered in order to work through these constructions of landscape, building on phenomenological and dwelling perspectives in order to focus on the role of cultural hegemony and power relations.
Article
States, rebels, and mafias all provide governance beyond their core membership; increasingly, so do prison gangs. US gangs leverage control over prison life to govern street-level drug markets. Brazil’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) gang goes further, orchestrating paralyzing attacks on urban targets, while imposing a social order throughout slums that sharply reduces homicides. We analyze hundreds of seized PCC documents detailing its drug business and internal disciplinary system. Descriptively, we find vast, consignment-based trafficking operations whose profits fund collective benefits for members’ families; elaborate bureaucratic procedures and recordkeeping; and overwhelmingly nonviolent punishments for debt-nonpayment and misconduct. These features, we argue, reflect a deliberate strategy of creating rational-bureaucratic legitimacy in criminal governance. The PCC’s collectivist norms, fair procedures, and meticulous “criminal criminal records” facilitate community stigmatization of infractors, giving mild sanctions punitive heft and inducing widespread voluntary compliance without excessive coercion. This has aided the PCC’s rapid expansion across Brazil.
Article
Political ecology has often defined itself against Eurocentric conceptions of the world. Nevertheless, recent contributions have questioned the ongoing reproduction of an Anglo-American mainstream against ‘other political ecologies’. Decentring Anglo-American political ecology has therefore forced a greater recognition of traditions that have developed under the same banner, albeit in different linguistic or national contexts. In addition, thinking more about the situatedness of knowledge claims has forced a deeper questioning of the Eurocentric and colonial production of political ecological research. In this report I begin by reviewing a range of political ecological traditions before going on to look at decolonial moves within the field. I conclude by considering how political ecologists might reframe their practice as one of relational comparison.