I study the politics of inequality, and how violence is used to maintain and contest a disorderly status quo. I'm especially motivated to identify and question forms of entrapment and escape from power and capitalism, particularly in cities of the Global South. I interrogate these questions primarily from Brazil.
I've written two books, The Killing Consensus: Police, Organized Crime and the Regulation of Life and Death in Urban Brazil (2015), and Keep the Bones Alive: Missing People and the Search for Life in Brazil (2022), both published by the University of California Press.
I'm working on two projects. The first is The Prison Consensus (with Pedro Loureiro, Bruna Angotti and Luis Fernando Toledo), that examines the uneven but exponential expansion of the Brazilian prison system. This project is funded by the Leverhulme Trust, with a stream of research also supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.
The second is a project of a longer and more unruly arc. This concerns how 'crime' is used as a method to reproduce capitalist accumulation and uneven life chances across moments. From the transition from feudalism to capitalism around Adam Smith's days in urbanising Dalkeith, Scotland, through industrialisation, via organised crime, globalisation, and into the training of large language models against illegal content and the imagination of it, this work is primarily concerned with what responses to real and imagined crime are made to produce, and how this shapes and constrains all life for the worse.
I think, write and collaborate across disciplines, and my work is published in flagship journals in political science, anthropology and geography, including the American Political Science Review, American Ethnologist, and the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.
I regularly write for leading interdisciplinary venues such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, Socio-Economic Review, Economy and Society and World Development, among other venues.
I am a Brazilianist. Most of my thinking and writing is rooted in thirty years of living, research and concern with the troubled vibrancy of uneven life chances in this country's, past, present, and future within the uneven global order.
In 2021 I was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for an outstanding early career and future promise.
Institutionally, I am Director of the Cambridge Centre of Development Studies, and, Professor of Global Politics and Society in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. I am a Fellow at Queens' College, Cambridge.
Write to me if you would like a complete CV.
If you are seeking an expert witness for an asylum case because of police or organised crime violence in Brazil, I welcome hearing from you.
At left, a fieldwork photo (2025): Brazilian prisoners build a prison, pre-fabricated itself in a prison.
I've written two books, The Killing Consensus: Police, Organized Crime and the Regulation of Life and Death in Urban Brazil (2015), and Keep the Bones Alive: Missing People and the Search for Life in Brazil (2022), both published by the University of California Press.
I'm working on two projects. The first is The Prison Consensus (with Pedro Loureiro, Bruna Angotti and Luis Fernando Toledo), that examines the uneven but exponential expansion of the Brazilian prison system. This project is funded by the Leverhulme Trust, with a stream of research also supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.
The second is a project of a longer and more unruly arc. This concerns how 'crime' is used as a method to reproduce capitalist accumulation and uneven life chances across moments. From the transition from feudalism to capitalism around Adam Smith's days in urbanising Dalkeith, Scotland, through industrialisation, via organised crime, globalisation, and into the training of large language models against illegal content and the imagination of it, this work is primarily concerned with what responses to real and imagined crime are made to produce, and how this shapes and constrains all life for the worse.
I think, write and collaborate across disciplines, and my work is published in flagship journals in political science, anthropology and geography, including the American Political Science Review, American Ethnologist, and the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.
I regularly write for leading interdisciplinary venues such as Comparative Studies in Society and History, Socio-Economic Review, Economy and Society and World Development, among other venues.
I am a Brazilianist. Most of my thinking and writing is rooted in thirty years of living, research and concern with the troubled vibrancy of uneven life chances in this country's, past, present, and future within the uneven global order.
In 2021 I was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for an outstanding early career and future promise.
Institutionally, I am Director of the Cambridge Centre of Development Studies, and, Professor of Global Politics and Society in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. I am a Fellow at Queens' College, Cambridge.
Write to me if you would like a complete CV.
If you are seeking an expert witness for an asylum case because of police or organised crime violence in Brazil, I welcome hearing from you.
At left, a fieldwork photo (2025): Brazilian prisoners build a prison, pre-fabricated itself in a prison.
