In this Q&A, Desirée Poets, an assistant professor of political science at Virgina Tech (USA) with a specialisation in Postcolonial Politics, reflects on positionality, collaborative research, and the role of art in social and political change. In her recent book, Unsettling Brazil, she shines a light on how Brazil’s history of dependent development and militarisation continue to shape everyday life, and how local movements are finding creative ways to resist.
Desirée is also the co-curator of the ‘Maré from the Inside’ exhibition and book which documents the lives of residents of Complexo da Maré favela through family portraits, films and written works.
1. As a professor of post-colonial theory, could you explain how you got into this area and why it is so significant today in understanding contemporary global issues?
I’m originally from Rio de Janeiro and was born just after the end of the 1964-1985 military dictatorship in Brazil, when the country adopted the 1988 “citizens’ constitution”, that promised democracy, social justice, and a broad range of individual and collective rights. For example, it replaced the previous indigenista assimilationist policies and guaranteed collective land rights for Indigenous and maroon peoples. But for all its progress, it has failed to deliver many of its promises, including a more substantive and much-needed agrarian reform, and so underdevelopment has persisted in Brazil. Years later, as Brazil prepared to host the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, hopes ran high again in the country that the so-called legacies of these mega-events would spark lasting development. However, when I began my studies in in International Relations, doubts were already surfacing about what these promises meant for countries in the Global South.
When I began my degree, my focus kept coming back to Latin America and Brazil. I wanted to understand what experiences Brazil shared with other countries in the Global South, and where there were differences. I became particularly interested in the question of national development, including industrialisation: for instance, had it created more inclusion, or had it instead reinforced exclusion for Indigenous and Black communities? Post-colonial theory gave me a useful framework to explore these questions. The field was already in dialogue with Indigenous studies, especially Native American studies in the US and with Black radical thought.
My questions first came together when reading the work of political philosopher, Frantz Fanon. He asked the questions that I had been struggling with — about liberation, national development, and the racial and class dynamics shaping those struggles. His image of the colonial city split in two mapped directly onto Brazil: the formal ‘settler’ city on one side, the favelas on the other. Fanon gave me the language to grasp the tensions I grew up with, to place Brazil in a comparative Global South perspective, and to see what was unique about Brazil, and what it shared with places.
2. In your recently published book, Unsettling Brazil, you explore how Indigenous and Black communities in Brazil resist militarised dependent settler colonialism. How did you approach writing the book, and what is its main argument?
Brazil is often described as an extractive colony — a place where wealth such as labour, precious metals, and cash crops were removed without the intention of replacing the existing society with a new one. However, from the start of colonisation in the 1500s, Portuguese settlers did migrate to Brazil in increasingly significant numbers. In this sense, Brazil also functioned as a settler colony, where newcomers “came to stay” and established a new society. Unlike the US, it hasn’t been recognised widely in those terms, partly because settler colonial studies have focused mainly on the English-speaking world, although historians such as Yuko Miki have examined Brazil as a settler colony.
As I discuss in Unsettling Brazil, it is true that Portuguese colonialism in Brazil did not involve as large a movement of European settlers as the Anglophone settler colonies. In this context, Portuguese authorities attempted to transform (that is, “civilise”) Indigenous peoples into settlers in their own lands, a strategy formalised under the Pombaline Reforms of 1759, for example. This raised new questions for me: what do we gain by viewing Brazil through the lens of settler colonialism? Could this framework help us understand its contradictions better? And how do Black and Indigenous struggles respond to both internal (settler) colonialism and Brazil’s place in the global system?
Underdevelopment in Brazilian cities isn’t accidental. Growing up in Rio, I saw that poverty and inequality were built into the system. For centuries, Brazil’s wealth, its minerals, agricultural commodities, labor, and knowledge has been drained, in part by local elites who still benefit from the country’s colonial foundations and have served US and European interests rather than investing in a national project. One urban example of this were the urban “revitalisation” projects implemented in Rio for the 2014 and 2016 sports mega-events, such as the Porto Maravilha initiative in the city’s port area, historically a majority-Black region and home to Cais do Valongo, once the largest slave port in the Americas. Thousands of residents, he majority of whom were Black and less financially secure, were evicted and dispossessed for this project that aimed to create an “investment-friendly” zone that directly or indirectly benefited international tourism, major banks, construction companies, and foreign investors.
Militarisation is central and integral to this system. It operates not only as a tool of domination but also as a core mechanism of capitalist accumulation. Through militarised control, the state secures ‘order’ for international capital and enables the ongoing super-exploitation and dispossession of Black and Indigenous peoples, who remain among the most impoverished and marginalised segments of Brazilian society, all while generating profit for arms manufacturers and private security companies. As I discuss in my book, the policing Pacification Programme, launched to “pacify” the armed drug organisations that operate in Rio de Janeiro ahead of the sports mega-events, largely served this logic. Based on public-private partnerships, the Programme sought to integrate favelas into the market by formalising informal economies, driving real estate speculation, and bringing private services such as banking and telecommunications into the communities, as it turned targeted favelas into war zones and effectively held them under siege.
Contemporary issues such as land invasions, homelessness, police violence, and precarious work in the city and the countryside reflect not just domestic problems. They also reflect Brazil’s dependent, semi-peripheral place in the global system. This is what led me to bring together two analytical frameworks: settler colonialism and dependency theory. Dependency theory, in particular shows how economies like Brazil’s are structured in ways that continually reproduce underdevelopment.
Around the World Cup in 2014, I encountered Aldeia Maracanã activists, who were occupying the abandoned Museu do Índio (The Museum of the Indian) by the Maracanã Stadium. Their struggle brought Indigenous rights and urban struggles into the spotlight. The group were eventually evicted by the government in preparation for the sports mega-events. I began to see the contradiction: Brazil was using these mega-events to try to reposition itself as a global power, as a way of overcoming dependency. Yet in the process, it was repeating colonial and dependent patterns. I became interested in how movements like Aldeia Maracanã resisted both internal and external pressures to defend their constitutional rights.
For the book, I also worked with Quilombo Sacopã, an urban community of Afro-descendants living just a few blocks from my old school. The invisibility of a maroon community so close to where I grew up really shocked me and made me rethink what Brazilian society chooses to see and erase. I also worked with communities in Rio’s Complexo da Maré, the largest favela in Latin America. Unlike Indigenous and Maroon groups, favelas are not recognised as ethnic communities, so lack collective land rights — a legacy of Brazil’s failure to carry out agrarian reform. By narrowly defining who is “ethnic” (officially, Brazil counts just 1.3 million Maroon descendants and 1.7 million Indigenous people out of 213 million), the state restricts collective land rights, keeps recognition numbers low and keeps the land controlled by white elites, agribusiness, and real estate interests.
“I began to see the contradiction: Brazil was using these mega-events to try to reposition itself as a global power, as a way of overcoming dependency. Yet in the process, it was repeating colonial and dependent patterns.”
Desirée Poets
3. Inspired by your article in E-International Relations, I wanted to ask you how has the practice of self-reflexivity influenced your research design, process, and presentation? And how do you navigate the tensions between personal experience and scholarly objectivity?
As a white Brazilian based at a UK institution, I had to confront difficult questions around ethics, accountability and power. Feminist ethnography did offer some tools for building more horizontal relationships with the communities I was working with. Because my research is about underdevelopment, I realised that I could not reproduce the same extractive practices I critique, especially given that academic knowledge production is itself shaped by North–South asymmetries. This is why I turned to self-reflexivity and positionality: to make visible the power relations of race, class, gender, and nationality that structure research. As human geographer Sam Halverson notes, academia often trains us to extract local knowledge as raw data, stripped of context, and convert it into exchange-value in journals, books, and conferences – enriching publishers while relying on unpaid academic labour. Acknowledging this dynamic is the first step toward doing research differently.
This is why I combined two levels of analysis: the personal (positionality and self-reflection) and the structural (the political economy of academic knowledge production). This approach helped me to design a methodology that recognised the structural limitations of academic research, and tried to resist them.
One of my commitments was to always make my analysis available to the communities I was working with. I returned to the communities to discuss my emerging analysis regularly and we often debated the scholarship with which I was in dialogue, and, in turn, their responses reshaped my thinking. For instance, Audra Simpson’s idea of Indigenous “refusal” was challenged by activists who prioritised building state capacity and national sovereignty in Brazil. In this way, the book’s framework emerged from these conversations, making the theory co-created. I carried this approach into later projects like the Maré from the Inside exhibit, where artists from Brazil travelled with us. This in a small way, pushes back against the North–South asymmetry that marks so much of research.
I tried to bring insights from Indigenous studies by listening to community analysis, and adding my own perspective. I shared the work with the communities at different stages. For example, after drafting a chapter, I would return and say: “This is what I’ve written, here are the references, let’s discuss it.” We would sit down and go through it together. People would respond: “I would highlight this more, or I don’t think those authors are really capturing our experience”, or “this part needs to be clearer.” In that way, the writing became a conversation. When the book was finished, I also sent the full manuscript back in Portuguese, so that the communities would have access to it as well.
4. You call for an interdisciplinary framework centred on community voices. How do you see this shaping future scholarship and activism on decolonisation in Brazil and beyond?
My recent work connects settler colonialism, dependency, and imperialism in Brazil to understanding Palestine today. While settler colonial studies (SCS) has helped us understand Israel as a settler colony, key Settler Colonial Studies (SCS) scholars such as Patrick Wolfe have paid less attention to the role of imperialism, as scholars like Max Ajl have argued. Combining the two lenses shows, for example, how settlers across these disparate contexts collaborate with imperialism (especially US interests), and how tactics and strategies of pacification (such as economic co-optation that aims to manufacture consent for settler rule) that have attempted to suppress Indigenous and Black peoples’ resistance in Brazil, are also used against Palestinians.
Back in June 2023, I was developing this framework and helping link the NGO Redes da Maré, located in Rio’s Complexo da Maré, with the Arab Center for Alternative Planning in Nazareth (Palestine) during a workshop co-organised by Sharri Plonski, at Queen Mary University of London. What struck me was that the dynamics I recognised from Brazil appeared in even sharper form in Palestine. Brazil’s 1988 Constitution, however limited and undermined in practice, at least offers a framework of formal inclusion. In contrast, Palestine faces a regime of formal apartheid and an Israeli military occupation that is ideologically, diplomatically, materially, and militarily supported by the United States.
The framework is most useful when it enables us to create these comparisons that generate solidarities across the Global South, as it highlights the interplay of domestic conditions like internal colonialism and broader global patterns without collapsing contextual differences.
5. You curated the Maré from the Inside exhibition and book. Could you tell us about this project?
I want to highlight two co-organisers of Maré from the Inside exhibition, Henrique Silva and Andreza Jorge. Henrique arrived in Maré at a young age and is a life-long community organiser there, including through his work with Redes da Maré (the favela’s largest NGO); Andreza was born and raised in Maré and is currently a doctoral researcher at Virginia Tech, and also a community organiser and educator. I met Henrique in 2018 while learning about Redes da Maré, which plays a central role in addressing the challenges of underdevelopment that residents face, including urban violence, and in building community-led responses.
Henrique often highlights how, during the World Cup and the Olympics, favelas were always represented from above with aerial shots — a distant, top-down view. He then worked with an Italian photographer to take family portraits of residents in Maré and, alongside Nicholas Barnes, a lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St Andrews, they began to reclaim that gaze by focusing on the creativity and strength of the people in those communities within the favelas.
At the time, I was reflecting on how arts, museums, and collective memory shape struggles for justice. For example, for Maroon and Indigenous communities, ties to land are also cultural, religious and spiritual. In Northeast Brazil, for instance, the Toré ceremony became central to Indigenous land rights. Such traditions show how culture, memory and knowledge are part of the struggle for decolonisation.
I also wanted to keep sight of the material and immaterial dimensions of struggle, so when Henrique and Andreza proposed an exhibit centring their own narratives, it fit perfectly. We curated it at Virginia Tech after earlier showings at Brown, Grinnell, and Bard under Nicholas Barnes’ leadership, then brought a second version to the UK, including to the University of Edinburgh during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Now headed to the University of Colorado Boulder, the project flips the usual North–South dynamic: artists from Maré lead the vision and management, with new
Now headed to Colorado, the project flips the usual North–South dynamic: artists from Maré lead the vision and management, with new collaborators joining at each stage.
6. You have a lot of experience of collaborative work, especially with directly involving local communities. What advice or tips would you give?
Some ethnographic fieldwork overlooks how local struggles connect to global questions, structures and issues. In my view, that can sometimes decontextualise the struggles at the local level. As a student of International Relations, I always saw Rio’s communities as part of Brazil’s wider fight for national sovereignty.
My two lessons: never lose sight of the global–local relationship, and always treat fieldwork as collaborative. Looking back, I wish I had involved local communities earlier in my PhD design. In International Relations, projects start with research questions; in anthropology, it starts with communities. There’s value in both – holding on to big questions alongside shaping them in dialogue with local communities.
The real challenge is how to connect big global analytical questions with the lived realities of local communities. That’s the moment when scholarship becomes meaningful and truly collaborative. When working with marginalised groups, neutrality isn’t possible – you are positioned in solidarity. This creates space for meaningful collaboration. Approaching fieldwork as a sustained conversation with communities can create a politically meaningful and intellectually productive exchange: they help us see our own disciplines differently, while our frameworks, theories and texts can sometimes help situate their struggles in a broader context.
“The real challenge is how to connect big global analytical questions with the lived realities of local communities. That’s the moment when scholarship becomes meaningful and truly collaborative.”
Desirée Poets
The best way to do this is to slow down at the research design stage and work with communities to shape a project that serves and matters to them. Another thing that was really helpful for me was connecting with people in maroon, Indigenous, and favela movements who were also academics, often doing a masters or a PhD. Those relationships opened up space for genuine research collaboration that challenged the hierarchical relationship between the “local informant” and the “academic expert”. But I would also argue that in all encounters with community members in the field (such as carrying out qualitative interviews), the researcher’s role is to engage in dialogue rather than position their contributions as merely raw data or inputs for academic interpretation.
One powerful outcome of this approach has been co-authorship, which as Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Richa Nagar has written about extensively, gives formal recognition to the collaborative work that emerges from these relationships. Co-authoring transforms the very framing of the project: it’s no longer presented as the product of a lone researcher, but as a shared scholarly process built with and shaped by the communities involved.
Read Unsettling Brazil: Urban Indigenous and Black Peoples’ Resistances to Dependent Settler Capitalism
by Desirée Poets (The University of Alabama Press)
Unsettling Brazil analyses favela, quilombola, and indigenous communities’ responses to settler colonialism in urban Brazil. Based on ethnographic research and her experiences growing up in Brazil, the author tells the stories of communities in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and Belo Horizonte
