G D Willis
Biographic Data
| ID | 18920 |
|---|---|
| NAME | G D Willis |
| GIVEN NAMES | G D |
| FAMILY NAME | Willis |
| SIGNATURE | WILLIS G D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Cambridge |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1870-559X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 127 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1975 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Growing in and from Crisis: Environment, Labor, and Capital in Brazil’s Exponential Prison Expansion
Although there is widespread academic recognition of the damage effected by carceral systems, of the accelerating climate fallout, and of the unequal and crisis-ridden nature of capitalism, these three dimensions are rarely conceptualized in relation to each other. Drawing on extensive primary research conducted across Brazil, we document how managers have increasingly sought to make claims about the prison’s usefulness for combatting problems of…
Health workforce planning should be strategy or policy-driven: From linear forecasts to normative futures
From ‘ID’ to proactive profiling: Identity, selective governance and the speculative making of bodies as borders
In today’s age of revanchist nationalism and xenophobia, ‘identity’ is commonly understood as a question of collective belonging. But another valence of identity is highly empirical, associated with the individual and constantly enforced by and beyond the state: ‘ID’, or ‘identity verification’. A focus on ID is novel because a new kind of speculative identity verification is apace: digital identity. We argue that, distinct from biometrics and ot…
Making sense of clandestine graves: Material epistemology and the political geography of uncertain knowledge
How might we begin to establish meaning, understanding and justice out of something that is meant not to be found? In this article, we approach the growing problem of clandestine graves to ask what can be read from them, including why they matter, why they are found, and how they are becoming an intractable part of life for millions of citizens. Departing from the clandestine graves of São Paulo and Mexico, we argue that these material spaces are…
Trust and safety: Exchange, Protection and the Digital Market-Fortress in Platform Capitalism
As a space of exchange that transcends historic jurisdictions, the Internet lacks a dominant security provider. This research examines how and why firms in platform capitalism have developed their own method and means of protection. 'Trust and Safety' (T&S) is a novel division of labour that has become nearly ubiquitous in the industry, encompassing many of the concerns raised about the influence of technology on politics, society and economy. Th…
Special issue introduction: Burial and the politics of dead bodies in times of Covid-19 (part 2)
When the rst wave of COVID-19 ravaged the world in 2020, we made a call for a special issue of Human Remains and Violence to document early experiences and re ections on the management of those who died from the virus. In hot spots of the pandemic in particular, the sudden surge in numbers of dead bodies overwhelmed o en under-resourced and unprepared institutions of death care; new protocols of management of potentially infected dead bodies chan…
Eating pizza in prison: Failing family men, civil punishment, and the policing of whiteness in São Paulo
Police work is obviously a question of pursuing subjects. In postslave societies, one figure dominates; police are always after the young Black man. Meanwhile, another distinctive subject of policing exists. In São Paulo, Brazil, police detectives are also worried about the failing White father. He represents a crucial kind of problem: he weakens whiteness by subjecting White children to the indignities that Black children face. His punishment is…
Special issue introduction: Burial and the politics of dead bodies in times of Covid-19
This article considers how the reburial and commemoration of the human remains of the Republican defeated during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) is affected by the social, scientific and political context in which the exhumations occur. Focusing on a particular case in the southwestern region of Extremadura, it considers how civil society groups administer reburial acts when a positive identification through DNA typing cannot be attained. In so d…
Mundane disappearance: The politics of letting disappear in Brazil
Every year between 20 and 25,000 people ‘go missing’ in São Paulo state in Brazil. But in Brazilian law disappearance is just a fato atípico, an ‘atypical occurrence’. There is no causal relationship between act and violence to be legally found. Nor, it seems, is there a pursuit to know. In a region well recognised for political disappearance, I ask for a deeper and historicised consideration of how disappearance has worked politically, and why i…
Legitimacy in Criminal Governance: Managing a Drug Empire from Behind Bars
States, rebels, and mafias all provide governance beyond their core membership; increasingly, so do prison gangs. US gangs leverage control over prison life to govern street-level drug markets. Brazil's Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) gang goes further, orchestrating paralyzing attacks on urban targets, while imposing a social order throughout slums that sharply reduces homicides. We analyze hundreds of seized PCC documents detailing its drug b…
The Exceptional Prison
Between 2013 and 2016, police in one Brazilian city killed 3,287 people-66.5 percent of whom were black. It might not seem surprising, then, that this place is also one of the only in the world that has a prison just for police. But this prison is exceptional, a "model" place, as those who run it say. It isn't "dungeon-like" or a "warehouse of black lives," as scholars describe prisons in this country and elsewhere. Among an apiary, a tilapia pon…
The Potter's Field
I unpack the “potter's field” as an everyday practice and a category, especially as it operates in the material treatment of bodies as a mirror of life. I examine this space of “worthlessness” as it exists in liberal capitalism. From the potter's fields of São Paulo, Brazil, I consider how these are, in fact, mundane mass graves, made politically useful as a means to obscure important bodies alongside those who are, today, the subjects of terror.…
Violence, bureaucracy and intreccio in Brazil
For Brazil’s ‘violence worker’ street-level bureaucrats, violence is woven into everyday practice. But violent influence flows in multiple directions; from the state to society, within the state and its agencies, from violent actors upon state bureaucrats. Real and potential violence defines the bureaucratic regime of truth, alongside the influence of a self-defined organised crime group. Using ethnographic evidence, I show some of the fissures t…
Before the Body Count: Homicide Statistics and Everyday Security in Latin America
Homicide statistics are a widely accepted metric of security and democracy. This article argues for a focus on how bodies come or do not come to be counted - of what happens before states enumerate. The experience of São Paulo relates that how many people die and how many do not is connected to the governance of an organised crime group known as the PCC. The punishment practices of the PCC and groups like it throughout Latin America reshape the l…
City of clones: Facsimiles and governance in São Paulo, Brazil
São Paulo is a megacity defined by formal and informal patterns of urbanization. Informally urbanized spaces are not absent of state intent, despite appearances. Grassroots-led social and spatial practices for survival, agency and self-governance contribute to the reproduction of urban political order in surprisingly unoriginal and routinely recognizable ways. This article argues that these unexceptional informal practices can be understood as 'f…
The Killing Consensus: Police, Organized Crime, and the Regulation of Life and Death in Urban Brazil
This book describes the work of homicide detectives in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. In the midst of violence, detectives investigate two types of crimes—homicide and the routine killings of citizens by police known as resisting arrests followed by death. These two types of violence relay two different logics of killing, one on the part of an organized crime group known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital or PCC, and the other of a state broadly …
Antagonistic Authorities and the Civil Police in São Paulo, Brazil
This article draws on participant observation research in a Civil Police station ( delegacia ) in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, to disentangle existing notions of police resistance to democratic change. Through processes such as “talk of castigation,” the Civil Police reproduce three kinds of authority—public, institutional, and criminal—that influence how police work is done. These authorities are antagonistic, battling over different normative…
Process and Pattern in Institutional Reforms: A Case Study of the Police Pacifying Units (UPPs) in Brazil
Afloat on Lowell's Dolphin
Legitimacy in Criminal Governance: Managing a Drug Empire from Behind Bars
States, rebels, and mafias all provide governance beyond their core membership; increasingly, so do prison gangs. US gangs leverage control over prison life to govern street-level drug markets. Brazil's Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) gang goes further, orchestrating paralyzing attacks on urban targets, while imposing a social order throughout slums that sharply reduces homicides. We analyze hundreds of seized PCC documents detailing its drug b…
Process and Pattern in Institutional Reforms: A Case Study of the Police Pacifying Units (UPPs) in Brazil
Before the Body Count: Homicide Statistics and Everyday Security in Latin America
Homicide statistics are a widely accepted metric of security and democracy. This article argues for a focus on how bodies come or do not come to be counted - of what happens before states enumerate. The experience of São Paulo relates that how many people die and how many do not is connected to the governance of an organised crime group known as the PCC. The punishment practices of the PCC and groups like it throughout Latin America reshape the l…
Mundane disappearance: The politics of letting disappear in Brazil
Every year between 20 and 25,000 people ‘go missing’ in São Paulo state in Brazil. But in Brazilian law disappearance is just a fato atípico, an ‘atypical occurrence’. There is no causal relationship between act and violence to be legally found. Nor, it seems, is there a pursuit to know. In a region well recognised for political disappearance, I ask for a deeper and historicised consideration of how disappearance has worked politically, and why i…
Trust and safety: Exchange, Protection and the Digital Market-Fortress in Platform Capitalism
As a space of exchange that transcends historic jurisdictions, the Internet lacks a dominant security provider. This research examines how and why firms in platform capitalism have developed their own method and means of protection. 'Trust and Safety' (T&S) is a novel division of labour that has become nearly ubiquitous in the industry, encompassing many of the concerns raised about the influence of technology on politics, society and economy. Th…
The Exceptional Prison
Between 2013 and 2016, police in one Brazilian city killed 3,287 people-66.5 percent of whom were black. It might not seem surprising, then, that this place is also one of the only in the world that has a prison just for police. But this prison is exceptional, a "model" place, as those who run it say. It isn't "dungeon-like" or a "warehouse of black lives," as scholars describe prisons in this country and elsewhere. Among an apiary, a tilapia pon…
Eating pizza in prison: Failing family men, civil punishment, and the policing of whiteness in São Paulo
Police work is obviously a question of pursuing subjects. In postslave societies, one figure dominates; police are always after the young Black man. Meanwhile, another distinctive subject of policing exists. In São Paulo, Brazil, police detectives are also worried about the failing White father. He represents a crucial kind of problem: he weakens whiteness by subjecting White children to the indignities that Black children face. His punishment is…
Special issue introduction: Burial and the politics of dead bodies in times of Covid-19
This article considers how the reburial and commemoration of the human remains of the Republican defeated during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) is affected by the social, scientific and political context in which the exhumations occur. Focusing on a particular case in the southwestern region of Extremadura, it considers how civil society groups administer reburial acts when a positive identification through DNA typing cannot be attained. In so d…
Violence, bureaucracy and intreccio in Brazil
For Brazil’s ‘violence worker’ street-level bureaucrats, violence is woven into everyday practice. But violent influence flows in multiple directions; from the state to society, within the state and its agencies, from violent actors upon state bureaucrats. Real and potential violence defines the bureaucratic regime of truth, alongside the influence of a self-defined organised crime group. Using ethnographic evidence, I show some of the fissures t…
Making sense of clandestine graves: Material epistemology and the political geography of uncertain knowledge
How might we begin to establish meaning, understanding and justice out of something that is meant not to be found? In this article, we approach the growing problem of clandestine graves to ask what can be read from them, including why they matter, why they are found, and how they are becoming an intractable part of life for millions of citizens. Departing from the clandestine graves of São Paulo and Mexico, we argue that these material spaces are…
City of clones: Facsimiles and governance in São Paulo, Brazil
São Paulo is a megacity defined by formal and informal patterns of urbanization. Informally urbanized spaces are not absent of state intent, despite appearances. Grassroots-led social and spatial practices for survival, agency and self-governance contribute to the reproduction of urban political order in surprisingly unoriginal and routinely recognizable ways. This article argues that these unexceptional informal practices can be understood as 'f…
Afloat on Lowell's Dolphin
Antagonistic Authorities and the Civil Police in São Paulo, Brazil
This article draws on participant observation research in a Civil Police station ( delegacia ) in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, to disentangle existing notions of police resistance to democratic change. Through processes such as “talk of castigation,” the Civil Police reproduce three kinds of authority—public, institutional, and criminal—that influence how police work is done. These authorities are antagonistic, battling over different normative…
Process and Pattern in Institutional Reforms: A Case Study of the Police Pacifying Units (UPPs) in Brazil
The Killing Consensus: Police, Organized Crime, and the Regulation of Life and Death in Urban Brazil
This book describes the work of homicide detectives in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. In the midst of violence, detectives investigate two types of crimes—homicide and the routine killings of citizens by police known as resisting arrests followed by death. These two types of violence relay two different logics of killing, one on the part of an organized crime group known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital or PCC, and the other of a state broadly …
Before the Body Count: Homicide Statistics and Everyday Security in Latin America
Homicide statistics are a widely accepted metric of security and democracy. This article argues for a focus on how bodies come or do not come to be counted - of what happens before states enumerate. The experience of São Paulo relates that how many people die and how many do not is connected to the governance of an organised crime group known as the PCC. The punishment practices of the PCC and groups like it throughout Latin America reshape the l…
City of clones: Facsimiles and governance in São Paulo, Brazil
São Paulo is a megacity defined by formal and informal patterns of urbanization. Informally urbanized spaces are not absent of state intent, despite appearances. Grassroots-led social and spatial practices for survival, agency and self-governance contribute to the reproduction of urban political order in surprisingly unoriginal and routinely recognizable ways. This article argues that these unexceptional informal practices can be understood as 'f…
The Potter's Field
I unpack the “potter's field” as an everyday practice and a category, especially as it operates in the material treatment of bodies as a mirror of life. I examine this space of “worthlessness” as it exists in liberal capitalism. From the potter's fields of São Paulo, Brazil, I consider how these are, in fact, mundane mass graves, made politically useful as a means to obscure important bodies alongside those who are, today, the subjects of terror.…
Violence, bureaucracy and intreccio in Brazil
For Brazil’s ‘violence worker’ street-level bureaucrats, violence is woven into everyday practice. But violent influence flows in multiple directions; from the state to society, within the state and its agencies, from violent actors upon state bureaucrats. Real and potential violence defines the bureaucratic regime of truth, alongside the influence of a self-defined organised crime group. Using ethnographic evidence, I show some of the fissures t…
Legitimacy in Criminal Governance: Managing a Drug Empire from Behind Bars
States, rebels, and mafias all provide governance beyond their core membership; increasingly, so do prison gangs. US gangs leverage control over prison life to govern street-level drug markets. Brazil's Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) gang goes further, orchestrating paralyzing attacks on urban targets, while imposing a social order throughout slums that sharply reduces homicides. We analyze hundreds of seized PCC documents detailing its drug b…
The Exceptional Prison
Between 2013 and 2016, police in one Brazilian city killed 3,287 people-66.5 percent of whom were black. It might not seem surprising, then, that this place is also one of the only in the world that has a prison just for police. But this prison is exceptional, a "model" place, as those who run it say. It isn't "dungeon-like" or a "warehouse of black lives," as scholars describe prisons in this country and elsewhere. Among an apiary, a tilapia pon…
Special issue introduction: Burial and the politics of dead bodies in times of Covid-19
This article considers how the reburial and commemoration of the human remains of the Republican defeated during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) is affected by the social, scientific and political context in which the exhumations occur. Focusing on a particular case in the southwestern region of Extremadura, it considers how civil society groups administer reburial acts when a positive identification through DNA typing cannot be attained. In so d…
Mundane disappearance: The politics of letting disappear in Brazil
Every year between 20 and 25,000 people ‘go missing’ in São Paulo state in Brazil. But in Brazilian law disappearance is just a fato atípico, an ‘atypical occurrence’. There is no causal relationship between act and violence to be legally found. Nor, it seems, is there a pursuit to know. In a region well recognised for political disappearance, I ask for a deeper and historicised consideration of how disappearance has worked politically, and why i…
Special issue introduction: Burial and the politics of dead bodies in times of Covid-19 (part 2)
When the rst wave of COVID-19 ravaged the world in 2020, we made a call for a special issue of Human Remains and Violence to document early experiences and re ections on the management of those who died from the virus. In hot spots of the pandemic in particular, the sudden surge in numbers of dead bodies overwhelmed o en under-resourced and unprepared institutions of death care; new protocols of management of potentially infected dead bodies chan…
Eating pizza in prison: Failing family men, civil punishment, and the policing of whiteness in São Paulo
Police work is obviously a question of pursuing subjects. In postslave societies, one figure dominates; police are always after the young Black man. Meanwhile, another distinctive subject of policing exists. In São Paulo, Brazil, police detectives are also worried about the failing White father. He represents a crucial kind of problem: he weakens whiteness by subjecting White children to the indignities that Black children face. His punishment is…
Trust and safety: Exchange, Protection and the Digital Market-Fortress in Platform Capitalism
As a space of exchange that transcends historic jurisdictions, the Internet lacks a dominant security provider. This research examines how and why firms in platform capitalism have developed their own method and means of protection. 'Trust and Safety' (T&S) is a novel division of labour that has become nearly ubiquitous in the industry, encompassing many of the concerns raised about the influence of technology on politics, society and economy. Th…
Making sense of clandestine graves: Material epistemology and the political geography of uncertain knowledge
How might we begin to establish meaning, understanding and justice out of something that is meant not to be found? In this article, we approach the growing problem of clandestine graves to ask what can be read from them, including why they matter, why they are found, and how they are becoming an intractable part of life for millions of citizens. Departing from the clandestine graves of São Paulo and Mexico, we argue that these material spaces are…
Health workforce planning should be strategy or policy-driven: From linear forecasts to normative futures
From ‘ID’ to proactive profiling: Identity, selective governance and the speculative making of bodies as borders
In today’s age of revanchist nationalism and xenophobia, ‘identity’ is commonly understood as a question of collective belonging. But another valence of identity is highly empirical, associated with the individual and constantly enforced by and beyond the state: ‘ID’, or ‘identity verification’. A focus on ID is novel because a new kind of speculative identity verification is apace: digital identity. We argue that, distinct from biometrics and ot…
Growing in and from Crisis: Environment, Labor, and Capital in Brazil’s Exponential Prison Expansion
Although there is widespread academic recognition of the damage effected by carceral systems, of the accelerating climate fallout, and of the unequal and crisis-ridden nature of capitalism, these three dimensions are rarely conceptualized in relation to each other. Drawing on extensive primary research conducted across Brazil, we document how managers have increasingly sought to make claims about the prison’s usefulness for combatting problems of…
Political science (15 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Politics (12 works) · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance (8 works) · Corporate governance (6 works) · Criminology (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (4 works)