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The term “organised crime”, which emerged in nineteenth-century America, has undergone a near constant process of redefinition to keep up with the ever changing nature of the reality it seeks to express. That the term must constantly be renegotiated and redefined is, then, nothing new to us. What has, however, been overlooked so far is that the term has a certain dialogic aspect to it which may emerge under a certain set of conditions. The two words that make up the term of course do not constitute a dialogue per se – we have no problem with the notion of organised criminal activity – however, there comes a point under the above-mentioned conditions at which the sheer level of organisation begins to challenge the notion of what can meaningfully described as “criminal”. Such negotiations occur in situations wherein criminal activity has become so organised as to resemble an official State, and the official state, conversely, may become so disorganised in these cases as to appear criminal. These conditions, seemingly, are met in a number of Brazil’s favelas (slums) in which organised crime is known to be rife. Such is the level of organisation within these criminal structures, however, and such is the particular articulation with which these groups exist in relation to the broader, official state, that the notion of what is “criminal” is put under an intense pressure. This dialogue at the centre of the term “organised crime” indeed reaches out to broader, significant, issues regarding how we define the legal, the official and even the corporate within the favela.
“In the always shifting personalities and sets of relationships between bandits and police”, writes Donna M. Goldstein, “it [is] impossible to know for sure how justice [will] be defined in any one particular moment” (Goldstein, 2003, p. 218). Goldstein’s observation highlights the complexity of legislature in a favela context, owing to what she poses to be the “shifting personalities” of those in a position to administer justice. Favelas have highly complex hierarchical structures which involve intricate negotiations of power between a multiplicity of civic, state and criminal actors. The precise nature of these structures is constantly debated; however, what is clear is that this complexity of governance has profound consequences in terms of...