Overview
- Based on extensive interviews with drug traffickers, users, and law enforcement
- Explores the middle class drug market in Recife, Brazil
- Examines market characteristics, consumption patterns, and policing strategies that contribute to violence
- Challenges the class-blind “systemic violence” thesis that currently dominates analyses of drug violence
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About this book
This book challenges the quasi-consensus that Latin American countries dominate global homicide rankings mainly due to the illegal nature of drug production and trafficking. Building on US scholarship that looks at the role of social exclusion and discriminatory policing in drug violence, the authors of this volume show that the association between illegality and violence cannot be divorced from the inequality that prevails in those countries. This book looks in detail at the functioning of drug markets in Recife, the largest metropolitan area in Brazil’s North-East and, over the last 25 years, the heart of the country’s most violent metropolitan area. Building on extensive interviews and field work, the authors map out the city’s drug markets and explore the reasons why some of those markets are violent, and others are not. The analysis focuses on the micromechanics of each market, looking at consumption patterns and at the workings of retail sales and distribution. Such a systematic micro-level comparative analysis of the workings of Latin American drug markets is simply not available elsewhere in current literature. These findings point to significant gaps in current understandings of the link between illegal markets and violence, and they illuminate the need to factor in the way in which those markets are nested in exclusionary social contexts.
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Keywords
Table of contents (5 chapters)
Authors and Affiliations
About the authors
Jean Daudelin is Associate Professor of International Affairs at Carleton University, in Ottawa, Canada.
José Luiz Ratton is Professor and Director of the Crime, Violence and Public Safety Lab, at the Federal University of Pernambuco, in Recife, Brazil.
José Luiz Ratton is Professor and Director of the Crime, Violence and Public Safety Lab, at the Federal University of Pernambuco, in Recife, Brazil.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Illegal Markets, Violence, and Inequality
Book Subtitle: Evidence from a Brazilian Metropolis
Authors: Jean Daudelin, José Luiz Ratton
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76249-4
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Economics and Finance, Economics and Finance (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-76248-7Published: 03 April 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-76249-4Published: 21 March 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 90
Number of Illustrations: 4 b/w illustrations
Topics: Latin American and Caribbean Economics, Trafficking, Latin American Politics, Urban Economics, Law and Economics, Development Economics