Professor Fiona Macaulay

Research

I have published over 50 research articles, book chapters, knowledge transfer reports, (including in Spanish and Portuguese) and two books, covering my research interests on gender, development, political parties and processes, violence, human rights and criminal justice organisations. With a background in area studies - Latin America -- my research has always been interdisciplinary, encompassing political institutions and political sociology, with strong intersections with criminology, law and public policy.

My expertise is especially centred on Brazil.  One strand of my research examines the institutional processes that drive or impede reform in the security sector (police and prisons) and in the criminal justice system. These may include social factors, such as civil society pressure, political and policy pressure (legal change), internal bureaucratic logics as well as external factors such as the influence of bilateral or multilateral assistance. My interest in the values and practices of criminal justice systems in the region dates back to my work as Brazil researcher for Amnesty International. I have secured funding over the years from a variety of sources (foundations, research councils, the British government and corporations). I have written on police and prison reform in the region, identifying wider patterns and dynamics, as well as engaging in country-level analyses, both of good practice (for example, the Resocialization Centres in São Paulo) and of the many entrenched, structural problems besetting the Brazilian prison system. I have provided several expert witness reports on prison conditions in Brazil in extradition cases. 

I have current research on the intersection of the security sector with the politics of representation and policy-making, supported by a grant from the British Academy/Leverhulme. With my research colleague Frederico de Almeida of UNICAMP, I am analysing the migration of security actors (mainly police) into politics, a phenomenon I had noticed and documented for some years. The number of police officers entering elected office quadrupled in the October election that brought former army officer, Jair Bolsonaro, to the presidency. These actors often constitute themselves as a public security cross-party caucus (bancada da bala) in legislative spaces This issue has much wider relevance beyond Brazil for theories of democratic decay, the emergence and spread of far-right nationalist-populism, civilian-military alliances outside of strictly ‘military’ regimes, military/police ‘developmentalism’ and democratic separation of powers.  

Another strand of my work focuses on gender. I have researched a number of interlinked areas, with a common thread of examining how women’s groups influence policy making (at a macro and micro level), both within the conduit of political representation, and outside of it. One of the policy areas I have analysed over the years is responses to domestic violence, and the interplay of domestic and international forces on how local institutions begin to change their practices. My most recent book analyses how Brazilian society and criminal justice agencies have been developing effective policies and practices to tackle the problem of feminicide. 

My feminicide research demonstrates how I often work at the intersection of security sector reform and gender-based violence, and pay attention to practitioner voices. I have also been able to transfer pedagogical methods that I developed with my students at Bradford to develop a training programme with the Brazilian police. In 2020 I wrote a 120 page training manual on gender-based violence for use by Brazilian police instructors to use in police academies. It is produced and distributed by the Brazilian Forum on Public Security (FBSP), a research, policy and advocacy network with which I work closely (it brings togethers policymakers, researchers and security sector actors, mainly police). This project was funded, at various stages, by the Avon Foundation, the British Embassy and Uber. 

Please check out my profiles on academia.edu and researchgate for a full listing of my publications