Ph.D. candidate
About
Hi, I'm Mari Stanev. My research interests focus on Latin American archvies with a local and global commitment and perspective. My current project centers Brazil (RJ+ Goias) and Mexico (Mexico City). I am half way through writing a dissertation on the global phenomenon of police Pacification (militarized violent policing that is carried out in the name of peace or to pacify specific territories of the contemporary nation-state). My research explores how the "colonial archive" reveals occluded histories of policing and counter-policing as Black and Indigenous resistance from the height of the colonial enterprise in the long 18th century all the way to the contemporary neoliberal nation-state.
My dissertation's working title is "Sovereign Noise in Times of Peace: Carceral Modes of Listening in the Planetary Repository of Pacification from Early Modern Pax Hispanica to Neoliberal Police Pacification Units." Its 4 chapters explore the "live archival" of different instances of pacified policing starting from the PRESENT! in discussing Marielle Franco's anti-policing work in Rio de Janeiro, and using her contemporary concerns to spur an archival exploration of the proliferation of the term "Pacification" to signify continued frustrated genocide attempts gainst Black and Indigenous sovereign territories in Brazil (Ch1-2). From there, I work backwards in time to critique the trans-imperial Iberian policy of Pax Hispanica in the 1600s to discuss the idea of policing criminal demographics in times of "peace" as an inherently colonial mechanism of territorial control.
