ABSTRACT
Brazil’s contemporary security situation epitomises twenty-first-century challenges to ways that security is conventionally understood as well as to neoliberal definitions of security. The country is not subjected to physical external attacks to its sovereignty or territory, and has one of the largest economies in the world. It holds regular elections, has lifted tens of millions of people out of poverty this century. At the same time, it faces extreme forms of insecurity that interact with each other, clustering round the inter-related issues of inequality, gang- and state-violence, and turmoil within political institutions. Capoeira continues to redistribute security through cultural resistance. The mechanisms that have been identified are now put to political awareness, building communities, and finding alternatives to the mainstream through activism, project work and soft power. The contemporary forms of cultural resistance are more legal and more overtly articulated than they were in the past, but the struggle of capoeira is ongoing.
