The Criminalization of Social Movements during the Bolsonaro Government (2019–22): State-Centered Perspectives on Crimes of the State

This article examines the criminalization and repression of social movements in Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic as forms of state crime. It conceptualizes the articulation between the state and corporations as a central means to produce and sustain structural violence. Integrating Southern theory with state crime scholarship, we develop an analytical approach from below for understanding contemporary criminalization and repression within conjunctures of authoritarian governance and capital protection, which extend beyond Brazil, but take a distinctive form within it. Empirically, we use Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro (2019–2022) as an illustrative case of democratic backsliding in which pandemic governance intensified coercive and exclusionary state practices. Drawing on 25 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with social justice activists, we analyze how relations between the state and progressive organizations deteriorated through intensified repressive and authoritarian practices. This study reveals how criminalization served as a strategic tool, alongside the erosion of dialogue and dismantling of democratic institutions, to attempt to demobilize social movements through legal proceedings that reframed dissent as crime, surveillance practices targeting organizers and police repression that escalated intimidation. We argue that these components were mobilized in a climate of heightened crisis conditions to suppress organized dissent and accelerate state-corporate protection of capital interests .