Violence against civil society actors in democracies: Territorialization of criminal economies and the assassination of social activists in Brazil

Abstract International NGOs and cross-national scholarship have drawn attention to a type of political violence particularly prevalent in democracies of the Global South: the assassination of social activists. We argue that the decentralized yet systematic nature of this targeted, lethal violence requires a theoretical framework and empirical approach addressing subnational dynamics. Specifically, we suggest that a significant share of these assassinations stems from the presence of highly territorialized illicit activities, particularly those based on dispossession. These criminal economies are sustained by networks of local elites and criminal actors – criminal-political networks – that develop forms of extra-legal governance and redefine land ownership and resource use, provoking resistance from local communities. When confronted by activist-led challenges, these criminal-political networks respond with lethal violence. We assess this theory through an empirical study of the Brazilian Amazon. Our statistical analysis indicates that the frequency of assassinations is significantly associated with industrial deforestation, a highly territorialized illicit practice involving dispossession. A qualitative case study of the municipality of Altamira further confirms that lethal violence against social activists can be attributed to criminal-political networks responding to local resistance against industrial deforestation, rather than to less territorialized drug trafficking. By bridging debates on criminal governance and socio-environmental conflict, the article contributes theoretically to the growing research on repressive violence against civil society actors in democratic regimes. Empirically, the study demonstrates how the micropolitics of this violence necessitate a focus on subnational variation, akin to micro-level approaches in civil war studies.