More about the project

• Research Focus

  This research proposes that governmental assemblages persist and act beyond policy termination as bureaucratic debris. The core speculation is that when programs end, their constitutive elements — professional expertise, material technologies, administrative protocols, institutional relationships — become agentive debris thatshapes how states subsequently govern marginalized populations. 

  The central research question is: What happens to these fragments of shredded governance, and how do they affect subsequent policy interventions and bureaucratic practice? Do harm reduction workers trained in now-terminated protocols apply that expertise to new contexts, inadvertently constraining or enabling different approaches? Do enforcement tactics developed for concentrated populations get repurposed when encountering scattered individuals? The high-risk dimension is genuine uncertainty: bureaucracies might simply adapt efficiently, reassigning personnel and repurposing equipment without meaningful friction, obsolete frameworks might quietly disappear, and displaced populations might find past program participation irrelevant to present state encounters. 

• Research Team

  Flávio Eiró — Principal Investigator 
  Assistant Professor, Social and Cultural Anthropology · VU Amsterdam 

  Flávio Eiró works at the intersection of political anthropology, sociology, and public administration, with research on how citizens, frontline workers, and political actors construct and contest the state in everyday practice, primarily in Brazil. His research focuses on how international interventions reshape state authority and everyday institutional practice, with particular attention to legitimacy, accountability, and colonial entanglements.

  Guglielmo Guatteri 
  PhD candidate, University of são Paulo and VU Amsterdam 

  Giordano Magri 
  Research associate 

  
  

• News & Events

  To be announced.

• Outputs & (Related) Publications

  • Eiró, F., and  G. Magri.  2026. “ Home at the Margins: Police Violence, Evictions, and the Resistance to Belonging in São Paulo's ‘Cracolândia’.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review  49, no. 2: e70069. https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.70069 
  • Magri G and Eiró F (2025) Shattered trust: Police violence and survival at the margins of the state in São Paulo's ‘Crackland’, Journal of Legal Anthropology, 8(2), 15-42. https://doi.org/10.3167/jla.2024.080202  
  • Magri G and Eiró F (2025) “A política nas ruas: poder e violência na interação das forças de segurança com grupos marginalizados”. In Lotta G and Pires R (eds), Na linha de frente: avanços e contribuições dos estudos sobre burocracia do nível de rua no Brasil. Brasília, ENAP, pp. 239-258. [available here] 
  • Magri G, Amparo AG, Eiró F, and Lotta G (2024) “A ‘Cracolândia’ pelos usuários: Como as pessoas que vivem nas ruas do território percebem as políticas públicas”, São Paulo: Centro de Estudos da Metrópole. Available here.

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