Subject

Based on ethnographic research involving former bandits, policemen, Pentecostal evangelicals, and actors linked to NGO social projects, this chapter examines situations that make up urban violence. The concept of criminal subjection is used to analyze three great native logics of action that make up a kind of field of solutions to violence: war and death, religious conversion, and social inclusion. Adopting criminal subjection as part of a larger conceptual framework helps focus and capture an essentialist representation of criminalized populations, central to the continued deployment of urban-based violence. Criminal subjection is part of a broader network of repression in Rio embedded in a local subjectivity. Other cultural contexts may be composed of their own repertoires or repertoires similar to those indicated here, which may also make evident the moral grammar of subjectivity that regulates the boundaries between the legitimacy of life and death in urban conflicts.