The puzzle of social accumulation of violence in Brazil : some remarks

The article comments on a new generation of researchers studying the illegal markets in Brazil. In doing so, I summarize the interpretative model of ‘social accumulation of violence’. Initially applied to Rio de Janeiro, several researchers have now expanded it to other Brazilian states as well as to countries with high violence rates, such as Colombia and Mexico. The model is both historical and social. It combines three main factors that have been feeding one another throughout times and expanded across several places: (1) social accumulation of disadvantages; (2) criminal subjection; and (3) expansion of acquisition strategies across networks of informality and illicit markets, for which the offer of political merchandise is decisive. As proposed in previous works, political merchandise means political assets originated from the privatization of segments of the State’s pretension to sovereignty over the monopoly of violence by different agents, who negotiate these assets in exchange for economic assets or other political goods.