Inaugural Lecture: Professor Anthony Pereira

Registration from 18.00 for a prompt start at 18.30
Followed by a drinks reception for all.

The Brazilian state in the 21st century is a national developmental state, coordinating the commanding heights of the economy in the service of domestic industry and export promotion. It is also a constitutional state, with a formal commitment to equality of citizenship and the rule of law (as well as a robust set of accountability institutions, evident in the recent anti-corruption investigations). And it is a social democratic state that guarantees a minimum income to the most disadvantaged in society.

In many ways the Brazilian state is a “tropical leviathan”, the most powerful in Latin America, with impressive capacity and sophisticated institutions in many areas (for example, it collects roughly 35 percent of GDP in tax revenue). At the same time, the state does not establish its order or provide security throughout the territory and co-exists with non-state armed actors in urban slums, remote rural areas, and prisons.

This lecture asks what explains this peculiar combination of characteristics, and in particular, the persistence of relatively high levels of violence in Brazil despite rising state capacity in the developmental, constitutional, and social spheres. It reviews the literature on state formation in search of answers to this question and suggests that the relationships between police forces in the states and those at the national centre are a key element in understanding the issue.

 

Anthony Pereira is Professor of Brazilian Studies and Director of the King’s Brazil Institute, within the School of Global Affairs, Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy.

Antony Pereira’s current work concerns citizenship, human rights, public security, and state coercion in Brazil. This includes a study of the performance of a relatively new human rights institution, the police ombudsman, in two different states in Brazil, as well as an analysis of some recent efforts to reform the police.