Youths in the Brazilian democratic State

necropolitics in the urban outskirts?

Abstract

This article aims to address juvenile mortality in Brazil as a way of exercising discipline, biopower, and necropolitics. The theoretical-methodological contributions of critical qualitative research are used, with secondary data collection from the Department of Public Security and Social Defense (Secretaria de Segurança Pública e Defesa Social [SSPDS]) of the State of Ceará, scientific research, as well as information provided by journalistic outlets. The analytical contributions of Michel Foucault and Achille Mbembe are adopted for the making of theoretical inferences. When discussing the scarcity of specific public policy for youths, the text discusses the intensity and spatial concentration of murders of young people and adolescents and the new territorial dynamics deployed under the command of criminal factions. It is concluded that the expansion of the profitable network of drug and weapons trafficking has enhanced processes of militarization of everyday life in urban outskirts, both due to the social practices of criminal groups and the public security policy in vogue, primarily directed towards overt repression of crime that amplifies violence in urban areas. Both the politics of criminal organizations and State policy, regardless of their specificities and dimensions, express technologies of power and the search for exercising sovereignty as identified with necropolitics.