Governance of Vulnerable Youth through Politics of Time: Youth Experiences and Social Projects in the Cidade De Deus Favela, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil

In recent decades, the representation that poor, non-white youth living in impoverished neighborhoods are the main source of violence has become consolidated in Latin America. Concepts such as vulnerable youth (Motta, 2021) and violent youth (Castro, 2013) have become central to public debates about violence and are recurrent in public policies for the prevention and repression of violence, which primarily target poor youth. Social projects aimed at this population express this effort to manage urban conflict through and around poor youth. This text engages with this debate, starting from the ethnography I conducted in the Cidade de Deus favela, specifically the observations in social projects and the (non)relationship of four young brothers, my neighbors, with these projects. At the center of the social projects I studied, and many others, is a concern for the future plans and life projects of youth considered vulnerable. It is not by chance that terms like Autonomy Plan; Individual Plan; Individual Autonomy Plan; Future Project; Life Plan are commonly and recurrently used in social projects of NGOs and in public policies, especially those aimed at youth in impoverished areas. However, I identified a kind of misunderstanding (Rancière, 1996) regarding the future projections and plans expected by the project technicians and the actual plans and projections of a large part of the youth who are supposed to be the targets of these interventions. Based on the life experiences and future plans of these four young brothers, I discuss how concerns about the uses of the present time and future projects shape the State's efforts to govern poor youth. I argue that these conflicts and misunderstandings produce regimes of temporality and time policies that permeate the management of contemporary urban conflict in Brazil and affect the experiences of the State for many young residents of urban peripheries.