Crime control, bordering and the rise of authoritarian neoliberalism in Brazil

In the last decade, Brazil has experienced a proliferation of mass incarceration and criminal organizations, which are delineated by imagined and real borders, spatial and discursive inequalities. Space-bound security concerns diversified and intensified in the media and in state policies. Through an analysis of ethnographic data collected in the northeast of Brazil, this paper discusses the assemblages of bordering that have the outcome of producing spatial, managerial and symbolic borders. In doing so, the paper reveals how neoliberal ideology and a contrived focus upon supposed crime control take precedence over citizens’ human rights and equality before the law, maintaining a legacy of authoritarianism. The paper argues that the political misuse of crime control discourses have created new social borders of acceptability and facilitated the endurance and the return of the authoritarian far-right to mainstream politics.