Contesting privilege with right: the transformation of differentiated citizenship in Brazil

This paper suggests that new understandings of rights associated with right to the city movements in many cities around the world are subverting special treatment rights (understood as privilege) and the systems of differentiated citizenship that support them. To make this case, it examines the Brazilian formulation of differentiated citizenship as a telling historical example of a politics of difference based on a combination of universal membership and special treatment rights. It argues that by denying the expectation of equality and emphasizing that of compensatory equity in the distribution of rights, Brazilian citizenship became an entrenched regime of legalized privileges and legitimated inequalities. This paper then analyzes the insurgence of an urban citizenship in the poor peripheries of Brazilian cities since the 1970s, which promotes new kinds of contributor rights, the text-based rights, and the right to rights. It ends with a discussion of the entanglements and contradictions of these formulations of citizenship and rights.