Research
I study how organized crime reshapes political life. When armed groups govern a territory — setting the rules of daily life for the people who live there — they also change who votes, who can run for office, who wins, and who is exposed to violence. I work these questions out mainly in Rio de Janeiro, with georeferenced administrative microdata.
Criminal governance and elections
The political weight of an armed group depends on how deeply it is integrated into the political system, more than on how much territory it holds. Integrated groups build durable, reciprocal ties to parties and candidates and govern the people under them as a constituency; peripheral groups hold ground by force alone. Reading criminal governance as a question of political incorporation lets me explain why groups with similar territorial power move elections in opposite directions. I formalize this as a typology — integrated, peripheral, and hybrid governance — and trace it through turnout, voter registration, candidacy, and who wins.
The state and organized crime
The state is part of the infrastructure of criminal order. Formal decisions, above all who is put in command of the local police, redraw the borders of criminal control and feed electoral capture. Policing is one of the levers through which the state reorganizes the order it claims to fight, and penal discourse in the legislature lends that order legitimacy.
Order, collapse, and gendered violence
Order holds violence in check. When a governing authority breaks down — criminal, police, or hybrid — what surfaces is the violence it had been containing. Reading that violence means keeping two ledgers at once, the institutional record and the real one, because under criminal governance the two diverge systematically, and the gap between them is itself evidence of capture. The same logic runs through gender. Armed order at once restrains and produces violence against women.
Race and political violence
Political violence in Brazil has a racial grammar. Who becomes a target in political life, and where, runs along two lines that I keep separate, one of race and one of territory. I also show how parliamentary discourse normalizes police lethality against Black citizens.
Democratic institutions and civic space
Alongside crime, I work on the institutions of democracy and the space for civic life. I have studied the merit-based civil service and the patronage that wears it down, and the social movements that contest the boundaries of civic space. What ties this to my main agenda is capture, the takeover of public institutions by private interests.
publications
Peer-reviewed articles
- Lins, I. N., & Machado, C. A. M. (2024). The geography of militia voting in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Teoria & Pesquisa, 33, 1–54.
doi.org/10.14244/tp.v33i00.1083 - Lins, I. N., & Machado, C. A. M. (2023). Crime is political: theoretical elements for a neoinstitutionalist analysis of paramilitary groups in Rio de Janeiro. Brazilian Journal of Political Science.
doi.org/10.1590/0103-3352.2023.42.271780 - Lins, I. N. (2023). From the Baixada to the South Zone: paths of racial political violence in Rio de Janeiro. Brazilian Public Security Review, 17, 188–207.
doi.org/10.31060/rbsp.2023.v17.n1.1532 - Lins, I. N., & Ferreira, J. V. B. (2022). Penal populism in parliamentary discourse: the debate on police violence in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies (2019–2021). Revista Eletrônica de Ciência Política, 13.
doi.org/10.5380/recp.v13i1.82629 - Parnes, H. R., Lins, I. N., & Trindade, P. S. (2020). Engagement, identity, and networks: a case study of the School Without Party movement. Revista Eletrônica Interações Sociais, 4, 79–92.
periodicos.furg.br
Book chapters
- Giannini, R., Lins, I. N., Cerqueira, M., & Leite, R. (2023). The merit system in Brazil and worldwide. In G. Lotta & V. Campagnac (Eds.), República em Notas (Vol. 1, pp. 331–354). Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó. (Jabuti Prize semifinalist)
books.google.com - Giannini, R., Lins, I. N., Cerqueira, M., & Leite, R. (2023). Recommendations to strengthen the public service merit system. In G. Lotta & V. Campagnac (Eds.), República em Notas (Vol. 1, pp. 355–365). Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó.
Technical reports
- Lins, I. N. (2025). Women, peace and security: gender violence prevention policies in the Brazilian Armed Forces and Police. RESDAL.
- Giannini, R. A., Lins, I. N., & Aguirre, K. (2024). Challenges and recommendations for the Amazon from women human rights and environmental defenders in Peru. Igarapé Institute. igarape.org.br
Working papers & preprints
- Lins, I. N. (2026). Voting under criminal governance: electoral mobilization by criminal organizations. SSRN. under review
ssrn.com/abstract=6672040 - Lins, I. N. (2026). Who can compete under criminal governments? Political selection in local elections. SSRN.
ssrn.com/abstract=6849338 - Lins, I. N. (2026). Criminal order and gendered violence: gang control, state repression, and violence against women in Chicago. SSRN.
ssrn.com/abstract=6873281 - Lins, I. N. (2026). Criminal governance and electoral capture in Rio de Janeiro: a spatial typology of the vote (2008–2024). Working paper.
- Lins, I. N. (2026). When police governance redraws the territorial borders of criminal governance. Working paper.
- Lins, I. N., & Albarracín, J. (2026). When it overflows: the national turn of criminalised politics in Brazilian democracy. Working paper.
- Lins, I. N., & Maia, B. (2026). Who can commit violence? Criminal governance and the reorganization of gender violence (Rio, Belém, Chicago). Working paper.