The book offers an interdisciplinary qualitative study of the history of policing in Brazil and its colonial underpinnings, providing theoretical accounts of the relationship between biopolitics, space, and race, and post-colonial/decolonial work on the state, violence, and the production of disposable political subjects.

Sabrina Villenave is affiliated at the University of Manchester, at the Department of Politics. Her research interest focuses on Critical Security Studies and its late critique on race and racialization. She is interested in postcolonial and decolonial critiques of International Relations, and in the legacies of African Slave Trade organized by the Portuguese Empire. Currently she is working with the themes of "War on Drugs" in Brazil as a legitimizer of police violence against favela dwellers, under the frame of exceptionality, security apparatus and the depoliticization of disappearances after the dictatorship in the country under the theoretical frame of necropolitics.

Introduction Chapter 1 - Between a revealed past and a treacherous present Chapter 2 - Between nation-building and modernity Chapter 3 - The police apparatus: Between highly noticeable killings and unnoticed disappearances Chapter 4 - Black Bodies the meat of lowest value in the market Chapter 5 - Hidden in plain sight: liminal spatiality in Brazil Concluding thoughts