My Tufts colleague Anjuli N. Fahlberg, a sociologist, has done extraordinary work in Rio de Janeiro’s City of God. Despite a staggering level of violence in that neighborhood, the residents have created a wide array of impressive initiatives that offer social services, education, and culture and promote social justice. Local activists are networked with peers in other communities they have been effective at the national level in Brazil.

Anjuli helps rebut the claim that “civic engagement” is only for privileged people. She also reveals interesting patterns that may generalize to other places. For example:

CBO [community-based organization] leaders had to monitor their activities and tactics closely so as not to conflict with the political and economic interests of the drug trade. They did this in several ways. For one, they decidedly avoided local politics, which meant avoiding any contact with political or community leaders known to be working for the drug trade and declining favors from local political candidates. … Since Solange and other CBOs refused to engage in violent governance, they found power in its opposite: moral governance. Moral governance emphasized transparency, fairness, equality, justice, and the use of resources for their stated activities. Notably, nearly all CBO leaders were women and thus offered a visual, embodied distinction from violent politics, which were controlled almost entirely by men.

This is from Anjuli N. Fahlberg, “Rethinking Favela Governance: Nonviolent Politics in Rio de Janeiro’s Gang Territories,” Politics & Society, September 11, 2018. Read the whole thing. You can also watch Anjuli’s talk at last year’s Frontiers of Democracy conference, here: