Policing citizenship Norms, forms and affects of urban security in Recife, Brazil

This thesis analyses how norms pertaining to citizenship and authority are shared, negotiated and performed in the everyday spaces, practices and encounters that make up urban security in the capital of Pernambuco, in the Northeast of Brazil. It seeks to address two overarching questions: How are norms of citizenship and authority (re)produced through everyday urban security practices? How do these practices affect the production and maintenance of sociospatial difference and inequality in Recife? In answering these questions, the dissertation draws on Jacques Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible” to think through how citizenship and authority norms are sensibly staged. In other words, it focuses on how notions of “good” and “bad” are performed in relation to citizens, policing actors, and “policing citizens” through the sensible forms of urban security and the affective responses they (aim to) elicit. As argued throughout, the consensus staged by the aesthetics of urban security works to reproduce and normalize social and spatial differentiation – chiefly along the lines of class and race – in the everyday. Differently positioned subjects are assigned shares in the making of this aesthetic and affective order, which produces difference, as well as commonality. Though it may feel self-evident and all-encompassing, the sensorial-political ordering of urban security also contains tensions, revealed in the very ordinary processes and relations enrolled in its maintenance.