ABSTRACT
If violence is structural, resistance must be structural too, and the challenge for populations around the world is not to allow the security agenda to be held hostage by the political or economic elite. Capoeira provides an intense and complex study, but this complexity provides points of contact with artistic practice or ways of life that evade the crushing competition of the neoliberal order and have meaning for their authors. The duality of the game and life implies that security scholars need to take cultural activity, including the imagination and creativity seriously as they have political significance. Including them in security analysis – and therefore ultimately from policy – has an ethical dimension in incorporating a more diverse set of interests into security debate. It is also a political imperative as cultural investigation reveals how societies negotiate and form identities and values. Excluding these element means not only acquiescing in mainstream politics but cutting out avenues that indicate potential for progressive forms of security, resistance and change.
