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Based on more than two decades of ethnographic engagement with the urban margins of Brazil, this book offers unique and detailed insights into the "politics of the periphery". Providing a long-term analysis of the residents of the periphery of the city of Recife and their interactions with state representatives and institutions, it contributes to a better understanding of the politics of marginalized populations around the world. Politics of the Periphery takes theorizing beyond state-oriented and Eurocentric approaches and offers scope to understand politics and the state from the urban margins, from the places where an ever-increasing part of the world's population lives. Critiquing approaches that see politics of marginalized populations as an expression of deficient citizenship, as informal politics, or as protest against the authorities, Martijn Koster shows how the politics of the periphery combines resistance with compliance as well as indifference, intertwining formal procedures and meetings with informal negotiations and exchanges.
This book weaves together political anthropology, urban studies, and development studies as it focuses on two central settings of resident-state relationships: government programs and electoral politics. In these settings, it shows how residents deal with urban development, citizen participation, police action, elections, and forms of clientelism. It highlights how their politics revolves around distrust, trust, betrayal and hope as they struggle to secure their place in the city.
"This book takes readers to Brazil with detailed accounts of everyday politics, character descriptions that only a rich ethnography can provide, and the complexities and nuances needed to explore topics such as clientelism, corruption, democratic advancements, and citizenship. This is a road trip to Brazil in time and space, a must-read!" —Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, King's College London
"For decades, slums and urban peripheries have been spaces where social scientists and many others projected many qualities – suffering, resistance, recalcitrance, deep alterities, cosmologies, and more. In Koster's remarkable book, the urban periphery appear not as a space of romance or projection but as a complicated life world full of resourceful and canny individuals who organize, hope, strategize, connive and much else in order to protect themselves and expand their own world. Drawing on decades of field work and deep friendships in the peripheries of Recife, Brazil, Koster gives us a deeply human and nuanced portrait of people who insist on their own dignity, voice and place in Brazilian society."—Thomas Blom Hansen, Stanford University