Flávio Eiró is an anthropologist of the state and Assistant Professor in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He studies how state authority is made, negotiated and lost in everyday encounters between citizens and the people who act in the state's name: social workers, health workers, police officers, clerks.
His work brings together two fields that rarely read each other, the anthropology of the state and street-level bureaucracy research in public administration. Fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork have taken him from welfare offices and election campaigns in Northeast Brazil to the open-air drug scene of São Paulo's "Crackland", autoconstructed neighbourhoods in Medellín and, most recently, international state-building in Haiti. He publishes in English, Portuguese, French and Spanish.
He co-convenes the EASA Network on Anthropology of the State, co-edits Etnofoor, and sits on the editorial board of the European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology. Before joining VU in 2024 he was a tenured Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen and a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC-funded BROKERS project at Radboud University. He holds a PhD in Sociology from EHESS, Paris.
