Presentation short abstract

This paper explores how Rio de Janeiro's biopolitical disaster risk governance produces "unruly precarity" in favelas. It argues that the failure of state anticipation creates emancipatory spaces, as residents mobilise resistance through their shared vulnerability.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how the biopolitical governance of disaster risk in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, has produced a state of unruly precarity in favela communities. Following the 2010 landslides, city authorities adopted a "paradigm shift" in disaster response, leveraging urban resilience and risk technologies to justify mass removals. This approach, framed as a rational anticipation of future disasters, is revealed as a racialised technology of government that obscures a long history of state-led precarisation.

The paper argues that this risk-based governance constitutes a form of failed anticipation, not in its technical prediction of environmental events, but in its political refusal to acknowledge the historical and structural drivers of vulnerability. By characterising favelas as 'high-risk areas' through probabilistic calculations, the state attempts to manage a future threat but instead produces a condition of permanent transience and induced precarity. This refusal of the social and historical context to be contained by depoliticised risk models constitutes the core unruliness of the state's anticipatory project.

Crucially, the paper explores the emancipatory spaces that emerge from this unruliness. Drawing on a feminist and decolonial framework, the research highlights how favela dwellers resist displacement by mobilising their shared and produced vulnerability. This resistance is an unruly refusal of the state's biopolitical calculus, manifesting in epistemic, temporal, affective, and material forms of contestation. These acts of resistance demonstrate that the failure of state anticipation is precisely the moment where spaces for emancipatory change arise.