Arrested democracy: Urban struggles between transnational criminality and world citizenship

This study of struggles in the urban security sector of Cairo and Rio de Janeiro offers an alternative model for analyzing the origin and impact of rising authoritarian practices and changing constraints on democratization. This dissertation argues that newly emergent police practices, nationalistic cultural security norms, and development projects of the local state have fostered forms of authoritarianism at the urban level. These trends have also triggered the breakdown of substantive democratization in these countries, in particular as experienced by urban popular classes who face expanding violence and criminalization, contracting access to citizenship, and the severing of positive identification with the state and/or nation.; Rather than assessing government pacts or leadership decisions, this study examines the norms, practices, and projects of local-state apparatuses as they engage urban public spaces, transnational processes, and popular communities. I argue that this field of engagement is where democratization is made or unmade. This study's alternative perspective opens up space for tracing commonality between superficially incomparable political societies. This proposed model of state, power, and the nature of "transition" allows for comparative analysis of "military-authoritarian" Egypt and "civilian-democratic" Brazil, whose regime types are distinct at the national-regime level.; This dissertation analyzes clusters of authoritarian norms, projects, and practices that have paradoxical origins in recent urban social changes, as well as in transnational processes. Findings presented here demonstrate that shifting authoritarian practices draw their power by re-articulating the meaning of religion, race, and sexuality in new ways, particularly in relation to definitions of national security, cultural "heritage," and border-crossing criminality, and in the context of militarized struggles against narcotraffic, terrorism, and prohibited migration.; Evidence presented here indicates that sources of authoritarian tendencies cannot be analytically reduced to legacies of the past---not merely the echoes of previous hard-line dictatorships, conservative cultural traditions, nor socio economic inequalities, not merely the results of previous regime decisions and compromises. An examination of the broader apparatuses of the state in Egypt and Brazil reveals multiple fractures, conflicts, and novel power arrangements, locates new sources of "transition" as well as breakdown, and assesses a much broader field of political agency.