CRIMINAL GOVERNANCE: THE SUBSTITUTION OF PUBLIC LEGALITY BY PRIVATE COERCION

Abstract

This article analyzes how criminal governance in marginalized Brazilian territories challenges the state monopoly on violence and compromises the protection of fundamental rights. The adopted methodology consists of a qualitative, theoretical-bibliographical approach, structured by a narrative review of specialized literature and a deductive analysis of categories from State Theory, critical criminology, the sociology of power, and the doctrine of fundamental rights. The bibliographic corpus includes classical works on legitimacy, coercion, and legal effectiveness, as well as contemporary studies on criminal governance, armed domains, penal selectivity, governmentality, and hybrid normative orders. The results indicate that criminal governance does not represent mere disorder, but rather a competing order that partially replaces state functions and imposes its own normative regimes, such as the so-called crime tribunals, which compromise due process of law, individual liberty, and physical integrity. The article concludes that this phenomenon constitutes a structural affront to democratic citizenship, revealing the material failure of the State’s protective function. The stability produced by extralegal orders is precarious and functional to criminal interests, converting universal rights into contingent and territorially unequal expectations. This scenario demands the reconstruction of legitimate public authority as a condition for the effective protection of human dignity.