This book unearths the buried legacies of modern legal thought, exposing femicide’s deep ties to the afterlives of colonial slavery, while forging countercolonial paths to justice.

In 2018, shortly after the femicide of Marielle Franco, a Black feminist council member in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil elected far-right authoritarian Jair Bolsonaro as president. Within months, femicide rates surged by 220%, laying bare the possible entanglements of white supremacy, misogyny, and representative democracy. This book challenges mainstream analyses of gender-based violence, drawing on critical Black, Indigenous, queer, and feminist thinkers, alongside oral knowledge from frontline activists across Brazil. Through a collaborative and transdisciplinary lens, it exposes femicide as a colonial legacy, as well as the law’s failure to confront it. Questioning the colonial foundations of political-juridical order, the book forges new pathways for justice, reparation, and redress—beyond the necropolitical order and toward a politics of vitality.

This book will appeal to academics, researchers and advanced students with interests across a range of disciplines, including critical legal studies, critical black studies, gender and feminist studies, critical criminology, legal anthropology, social movements, Brazilian studies, and anti/post/decolonial studies.