The bandit” as a ghost

neoliberalism, conservatism, and racism in the depths of State violence and accountability

Abstract

The objective of this article is to analyze the bandit as a ghostly logic of classification and its reverberations in the practices and discourses of actors within the justice system and the State. To do so, I highlight three ethnographic micro-scenes: (1) the 2016 speech by former president Jair Bolsonaro, in which he defended that “criminals” should be killed; (2) the statement by Guilherme Derrite, current Secretary of Public Security of the State of São Paulo, claiming that critics of the Verão and Escudo police operations had relatives involved in crime; and (3) a document from the Military Police Internal Affairs Office concerning an investigation of police violence that was dismissed because the complaint had been filed by an “adolescent offender.” From these scenes, I aim to contextualize the “bandit” as a sociological problem and, through a bibliographic review, explore the neoliberal, conservative, and racist moralities that ground this classificatory logic. To weave this discussion, I mobilize the notion of politics as a form of war. I propose that one of the main reverberations of the classificatory logic of the “bandit” manifests in the orientation of police control mechanisms toward validating police narratives that legitimize violence. Finally, by examining how the “bandit” logic has been mobilized by state agents, I seek to show how, in Brazil, the justification of crime control legitimizes genocidal processes within a democratic administrative-bureaucratic framework. I conclude by proposing a theoretical-methodological hypothesis: to understand the “bandit” as a dispositive—a power-knowledge apparatus—in light of Foucault’s approach.