Stateness / Estatalidade: Reconceptualizing Bureaucratic-Technical State Effects That Perform Agency, Governmentality, and Subjectivity

Stateness represents a new concept created by the authors of the chapter, building on and diverging from Foucault’s notion of governmentality. Focusing on knowledge production practices of state bureaucracies, the concept is informed by a meticulous and historically grounded tracing of official data on crime and of public policies. To map state rationalities and discourses in detail, this chapter offers a case study of how statistics regarding deaths by stray bullets are bureaucratically constructed. Stray bullets is a Brazil-specific category that encapsulates drive-by shootings, friendly fire, accidental weapons firing by police, and exchange of fire during police invasions of neighborhoods and consolidates it into a single statistical jumble. By pointing out that most cases happen in the same places—the poorest areas of Rio’s metropolitan region—the argument in favor of randomness is dismantled. Even less random is the fact that these bullets are most commonly found in racialized bodies—of course, most of their victims are Black.