Hide and rule : Accumulation by disappearance and necro-periurbanisation in Brazil

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Hutta, Jan Simon:
Hide and rule : Accumulation by disappearance and necro-periurbanisation in Brazil.
In: Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Bd. 51 (2026) Heft 1 . - e70022.
ISSN 1475-5661
DOI der Verlagsversion: https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.70022

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Abstract

This paper examines how peri-urban spaces are governed through practices of concealment and obfuscation, thus undermining and displacing techniques of making things legible. Focusing on the Baixada Fluminense region north of Rio de Janeiro, it connects clandestine practices of ‘grilagem’, or state-sponsored land fraud, to the obfuscation of violence as part of territorial strategies. Methodologically, the article combines a genealogical approach to analysing obfuscation as a multi-pronged technology of power with empirical research on the violent control of peri-urban neighbourhoods. In Rio de Janeiro's hinterland, it is argued, the obfuscation of land entitlements has long been linked to the invisibilisation of violence and atrocities, facilitated by racialised conditions of willed ignorance and opacity. At a conceptual level, the paper contributes to nascent works in urban geography and anthropology that are committed to developing context-sensitive approaches to necropolitics in peri-urban and fringe spaces of the Global South. Moreover, it draws on work on uneven spatial development, control grabbing and forced disappearance to develop the notion of ‘accumulation by disappearance’. Such an approach complicates assumptions around modern power being built on ‘state projects of legibility’ (James Scott) and violent spectacles, while also extending engagements with racialised opacity by drawing attention to cunning techniques of obfuscation that traverse the governance of people and spaces. What emerges is a context-sensitive approach to interrogating powerful, yet contested processes of ‘necro-periurbanisation’.