VIOLENT ARRANGEMENTS AND HOPE: HOW THE LANGUAGE OF HUMAN RIGHTS WAS ENACTED AFTER A TERRORIST ATTACK IN FORTALEZA, CE, BRAZIL

ABSTRACT

This paper describes some forms of resistance to contemporary violent arrangements - understood as the tense relations, in Brazil, between groups of the violent organized crime and between the latter and the public world - which have emerged in the speech of people who survived or were affected by a terrorist attack in the neighborhood of Benfica, in Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil, occurred in March, 2018. In line with other studies about forms of subjective and collective flourishing in circumstances of violence or political destruction, we will term this form of resistance as 'hope'. By engaging with two interviews conducted with two survivors, a professor, and a human rights' activist, we argue that hope, in these dialogues, amounted to responding to violence not by means of vengeance or extralegal mechanisms of violence but by using tropes that inform the defense of human rights.

Keywords:
hope; human rights; metapragmatics; violence