“The Same Bullets”: Circuits of Violence and Materialist Solidarity From Rio de Janeiro's Favelas to Occupied Palestine

Abstract

This paper develops the concept of materialist solidarity: political connection that emerges when peripheralized subjects discover shared position within traceable circuits of violence rather than through sympathetic identification or abstract ideology. Between 2023 and 2025, favela activists in Rio de Janeiro built transnational ties with Palestinian resistance networks by tracing Israeli-manufactured rifles, surveillance drones, and counterinsurgency training deployed in both contexts. Drawing on in-depth conversations with activists, participant observation at key mobilizations, and document analysis of weapons procurement contracts, I examine how this recognition reshapes political subjectivity and generates theory through praxis. The analysis challenges sequential epistemologies dominating solidarity scholarship, demonstrating that political knowledge emerges recursively through entanglements of material discovery, affect, and cultural production rather than through linear stages. This South–South internationalism, organized autonomously from the peripheries, contributes to radical geography by showing how shared infrastructures of violence—not analogy—produce the ground on which transnational solidarity is built.