ABSTRACT
Drawing extensively on the three previous chapters, this chapter ties up the loose ends by first illustrating how gang authority and institutions regulating social life in the favelas arose from a continuous and dynamic process of institutionalization, or routinization. This process of co-constitution occurred in at least three linked stages: (1) the process of group formation, (2) the implementation of gang rule at the favela level, and (3) the collective’s relations with the external world. Recognizing this reveals how gang authority within the favelas primarily concerns three concentric collectives, i.e., gang leaders, gang followers, and residents, each of which are ‘structured’ and ‘constituted’ by the actions of individuals, thus demonstrating a recursive micro-macro relationship between them. Thereafter, I juxtapose the institutionalization of gang-based constitutive rules as observed from an ethnographic-sociological lens and legal-rational institutional systems, thus establishing the contours for understanding the process of territorial ‘debordering’ of favelas from broader social structures in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and beyond. Finally, I demonstrate how this process has implications for liberal understandings of norms and rules and their underlying morals and ethics. The chapter concludes the empirical analysis by recapitulating how authority and institutions co-constitutively produce illicit orders in territorial domains.
