Politics of the Periphery

“Koster forces us to decenter the state in our understanding of Brazilian politics, centering the analytic frame on the residents of Brazil’s urban peripheries. Refusing reductive cliches of ‘resistance,’ he highlights numerous, conflicting expressions of agency and perspective that shape everyday governance in contemporary Brazil. The book is empirically gritty, a pleasure to read, and conceptually engaging from start to finish.” —Aaron Ansell, Virginia Tech

“This book takes readers to Brazil with detailed accounts of everyday politics, character descriptions that only a rich ethnography can provide, and the complexities and nuances needed to explore topics such as clientelism, corruption, democratic advancements, and citizenship. This is a road trip to Brazil in time and space, a must-read!” —Andreza Aruska de Souza Santos, King’s College London

“For decades, slums and urban peripheries have been spaces where social scientists and many others projected many qualities – suffering, resistance, recalcitrance, deep alterities, cosmologies, and more. In Koster’s remarkable book, the urban periphery appears not as a space of romance or projection but as a complicated life world full of resourceful and canny individuals who organize, hope, strategize, connive and much else in order to protect themselves and expand their own world. Drawing on decades of field work and deep friendships in the peripheries of Recife, Brazil, Koster gives us a deeply human and nuanced portrait of people who insist on their own dignity, voice and place in Brazilian society.” —Thomas Blom Hansen, Stanford University

Martijn Koster is Associate Professor in the Sociology of Development and Change Group at Wageningen University, the Netherlands.

This item is eligible for free returns within 30 days of delivery. See our returns policy for further details.