Politics of the Periphery
Governance and Elections in Brazil's Urban Margins
$194.82
- Hardcover
292 pages
- Release Date
20 October 2026
Summary
Based on more than two decades of ethnographic engagement with the urban margins of Brazil, this book offers unique and detailed insights into the “politics of the periphery.” Providing a long-term analysis of the residents of the periphery of the city of Recife and their interactions with state representatives and institutions, it contributes to a better understanding of the politics of marginalized populations around the world.
Politics of the Periphery takes theorizing bey…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781503646445 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1503646440 |
| Author: | Martijn Koster |
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Imprint: | Stanford University Press |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 292 |
| Release Date: | 20 October 2026 |
| Dimensions: | 152mm x 229mm |
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Critics Review
“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
Martijn Koster is Associate Professor in the Sociology of Development and Change Group at Wageningen University, the Netherlands.
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