The City. Police. Decentralized Violence.
São Paulo, Brazil.
I am a PhD Candidate in Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, Visiting Researcher at the Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública and Senior Researcher at Instituto Igarapé. I am currently completing my dissertation project, a multi-year study focussing on homicide detectives' investigations of both homicides and police killings of civilians, and the connectedness of these forms of violence to governance of urban space in São Paulo, Brazil. More broadly, I am interested in questions of sovereignty, state-society relations, urban space and cities with decentralized violence owing to the lack of a state monopoly on violence. I have been studying São Paulo since 2005 and have been deeply engaged with Brazil since arriving as an exchange student in the 1990s.
My research has been funded by the Open Society Foundations and the Social Science Research Council, the Social Science Research Council of Canada, Foreign Affairs Canada, the Center for International Studies at MIT, MISTI-Brazil and the Carroll L. Wilson Fellowship, among others. Prior to my doctoral studies I worked with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the Cape Verde Human Rights Commission and the Canadian Centre for the Study of Resource Conflict (CCSRC), which I co-founded in 2005. While at MIT, I have been affiliated with the Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies, the Program on Human Rights and Justice and a USAID-funded research project on Urban Resilience in Violent Cities.
My work on urban violence, police and the struggle for public security in cities lacking a monopoly on violence has been published in academic journals and as a New York Times Sunday Review Op-Ed, on Open Security, with UOL (Brazil) and in other outlets. I have also been quoted widely and referenced as a emergent voice on the nature of policing, violence, and non-state armed groups in vital cities of the Global South. My research with the CCSRC on the Canadian extractive sector and its operations in the South has also been published in or quoted by Canadian Members of Parliament, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the CBC and other major media outlets. I have a B.A. from the University of Toronto and an M.A. from Royal Roads University in Victoria, Canada. I currently live in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro with my wife and daughter. Please see my CV for more details.
My research has been funded by the Open Society Foundations and the Social Science Research Council, the Social Science Research Council of Canada, Foreign Affairs Canada, the Center for International Studies at MIT, MISTI-Brazil and the Carroll L. Wilson Fellowship, among others. Prior to my doctoral studies I worked with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the Cape Verde Human Rights Commission and the Canadian Centre for the Study of Resource Conflict (CCSRC), which I co-founded in 2005. While at MIT, I have been affiliated with the Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies, the Program on Human Rights and Justice and a USAID-funded research project on Urban Resilience in Violent Cities.
My work on urban violence, police and the struggle for public security in cities lacking a monopoly on violence has been published in academic journals and as a New York Times Sunday Review Op-Ed, on Open Security, with UOL (Brazil) and in other outlets. I have also been quoted widely and referenced as a emergent voice on the nature of policing, violence, and non-state armed groups in vital cities of the Global South. My research with the CCSRC on the Canadian extractive sector and its operations in the South has also been published in or quoted by Canadian Members of Parliament, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the CBC and other major media outlets. I have a B.A. from the University of Toronto and an M.A. from Royal Roads University in Victoria, Canada. I currently live in the suburbs of Rio de Janeiro with my wife and daughter. Please see my CV for more details.
