Cidadania de exceção: biopolítica, varejo de drogas e neoliberalismo autoritário

Abstract

This thesis develops the concept of citizenship of exception, investigating—through criminal case files that classify the conduct of drug traffickers—the role of the war on drugs as a tactic for shaping social difference and inequality. Taking Brazil’s First Republic as a starting point for early reflections on the State and citizenship, the processes of criminalization and urban emergency converge to justify the constitutive exception of social rights. State racism, necropolitics, and the ethical emptying of the "other" are, in this sense, constants in the Brazilian democratic experience, currently culminating in the dismantling of political spaces for collective construction. In this way, the thesis problematizes the reliance on citizenship through consumer reinforcement as a critical point of the precarization of existence.