This study discusses selected memories of Marielle Franco from the perspective of the concept of dangerous memory (Johann Baptist Metz). Franco was a Brazilian human-rights activist and city councilor of Rio de Janeiro who was assassinated on March 14, 2018. Today she is considered an international symbol in the fight for human, women, and LGBTQ+ rights. This work aims to show what meanings people in her surroundings attributed to her life and how they have transformed following her murder. It argues that the memory of Franco transmitted by people who closely interacted with her represents a decolonial dangerous memory of individual and collective self-empowerment of Black women, LGBTQ+ people, and favelados.

The introductory chapter serves to familiarize readers with Franco’s story and the ambiguous reactions to her assassination. It shows that Franco was remembered as a martyr of God’s kingdom to assert her legacy and to defend her memory against attempts of criminalization. Building on this framing, the study is designed as a contribution to constructive political theology. It analyzes memories of Franco’s life, her surroundings, and the events in the aftermath of her assassination, all of which made visible the everyday oppression and resistance of those who live on Rio de Janeiro’s margins.

1.1 Marielle Franco’s Story and Its Worldwide Resonance

The following biographical representation builds on international newspaper articles after Franco’s assassination on March 14, 2018. Although the chosen articles are not representative and are based on non-Brazilian sources, they deliver an initial impression of her trajectory. Their number and variety reflect the international resonance and significance of Franco’s story.

Marielle Francisco da Silva, abbreviated Marielle Franco, was born in Rio de Janeiro on July 27, 1979. She grew up in Maré, a favela complex with around 140,000 inhabitants in the Zona Norte (North Zone) of Rio de Janeiro. Maré is known for a high rate of deadly gun violence due to its occupation by various drug gangs and frequent violent police incursions.Footnote 1 Franco became a human-rights activist after losing a friend to a bala perdida (stray bullet).Footnote 2 At the age of 19, she gave birth to her only daughter, Luyara.Footnote 3 After joining a preuniversity course organized by CEASM,Footnote 4 a local NGO in Maré, Franco passed the entrance examination for university. She received a scholarship and entered the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC) of Rio de Janeiro in 2002, where she took up her studies in sociology.Footnote 5

After graduation, Franco started working for the politician Marcelo Freixo, who was a member of the socialist party PSOLFootnote 6 at the time. As a state deputy of Rio de Janeiro, Freixo presided over a parliamentary commission of inquiry (CPI) investigating the involvement of politicians and police members in militias. These are paramilitary groups that are most often formed by (ex-)police officers, that have close ties to the state, and that illegally earn money by providing gas and internet distribution, transportation, and “protection services” for the local population.Footnote 7 The results of the CPI, which were presented in 2008, led to the arrest of more than 200 suspects. Through his work, Freixo gained national prominence and later had to be placed under protection due to death threats.Footnote 8

In 2016, Franco ran for city councilor of Rio de Janeiro. She was voted in with the fifth-highest number of votes.Footnote 9 As a city councilor, Franco was considered “an important identification figure and representative of the interests of women and the BlackFootnote 10 population of Brazil.”Footnote 11 Simultaneously, Franco also advocated for LGBTQ+ rights and openly lived in a relationship with her partner, Monica Tereza Azeredo Benicio.Footnote 12

In early 2018, Franco was appointed the rapporteur of a commission installed to monitor the military intervention in Rio de Janeiro. The latter was ordered by the then president of Brazil, Michel Temer (2016–2018), to combat rising urban violence.Footnote 13 NGOs and human-rights activists feared military intervention would further normalize and consolidate violence and human-rights violations in favelas and urban peripheries.Footnote 14 For the same reason, Franco disapproved of the military intervention.Footnote 15 As a human-rights activist, she was also critical of brutal policing in favelas and used her social-media accounts to denounce acts of lethal violence and the last time, only one day before her assassination.Footnote 16

On the evening of March 14, 2018, Franco was shot in the center of Rio de Janeiro while driving home from an event she had spoken at. The hail of bullets that hit Franco’s car also killed her driver, Anderson Gomes. A close friend and advisor of Franco survived. Shortly after the assassination, thousands of people protested in Rio de Janeiro and other Brazilian and international cities.Footnote 17

The international attention that Franco’s assassination received put a lot of pressure on the Brazilian authorities to solve the case as quickly as possible,Footnote 18 but the investigation has only proceeded slowly and experienced setbacks. Only in March 2024 were the alleged masterminds arrested. It can be assumed that militias were involved in Franco’s murder, but the exact motive remains unclear as of May 2024. The courts must now further investigate the suspicions.Footnote 19

After Franco’s assassination, the 2018 congressional and communal elections saw a sharp increase in the number of Black women candidates; a phenomenon that has been interpreted as “the Marielle effect.”Footnote 20 Three of Franco’s former staff members—Renata Souza, Mônica Francisco, and Dani Monteiro—were elected state deputies of the state of Rio de Janeiro. Talíria Petrone, a city councilor of Niterói and a close friend and political ally of Franco’s, was elected a federal deputy. They (and other Black women) have been called “Marielle Franco’s seeds.”Footnote 21

In a short time, Franco became a worldwide symbol of resistance and inspiration in the fight for women, racial, and LGBTQ+ rights. Her name continues to be remembered by human-rights activists, social movements, and collectives all around the globe. As a result of the international resonance, different memorials have been created to commemorate Franco’s story and to testify to the ongoing importance of her legacy. In Europe, the most famous example is the Jardin Marielle Franco in Paris, which opened in September 2019 and memorializes Franco as a human-rights activist, feminist, and city councilor of Rio de Janeiro.Footnote 22

1.2 About the Background of This Study

For a long time, social scientistsFootnote 23 and feminist researchersFootnote 24 have pointed out that the person of the researcher matters in how research is done. Against this background, I would like to start with a few words about my background and motivation for undertaking this study.

My origin is quite different from Marielle Franco’s. I grew up as a white, middle-class woman in Switzerland, studied Protestant theology, and was ordained as a pastor of the Swiss Reformed Churches in 2018. Before engaging in this study on Franco’s trajectory, I had no connection to Brazil or Latin America. Thus, sadly, I am one of the numerous individuals worldwide who only became familiar with Franco’s story after her murder. In my case, it was one day after Franco’s assassination that I first read an article about her in a German newspaper.Footnote 25 The article reported even less than what was said above. Still, her story made a profound impression on me. As a lesbian woman and a feminist,Footnote 26 aware of the challenges of intersecting forms of discrimination,Footnote 27 I could only imagine the manifold challenges in Franco’s life, her bravery and strength to face them, and her creativity and persistence in turning them into a progressive political agenda.

Deeply touched by Franco’s story, I started to research it and followed the events after her murder. The size of the street protests and the extensive mobilization of people in Brazil and abroad surprised and amazed me. Following these events, I could not escape the impression that something profound was happening. As a theologian and pastor, attentive to the spiritual dimension of what people experience, I felt like I was witnessing a resurrection when I saw footage of the street protests where people affirmed “Marielle vive!” (“Marielle lives”), “Marielle presente!” (“Marielle is present!”). To me and also to other observers of the events, the extent of people’s sympathy manifested in those days indicated that Franco’s death was more than a tragic headline about to be quickly forgotten. Rather, her death seemed to turn into a moment of kairos, as theologians would say, which allowed deeper insights into the current state of Brazil’s democracy, social challenges, and people’s hopes and fears. This becomes evident if one considers developments in the last decades in Brazil.

Since Brazil’s independence in 1822, democracy has not been a given. There have been various important advances but also setbacks in realizing a democratic society there in the twentieth century. In Brazil’s more recent history, this is especially apparent in relation to the military dictatorship (1964–1985), which will be discussed in more detail later. The military dictatorship did not abolish democracy, but it did severely restrict the population’s rights to political participation. Despite the restoration of political rights and the return to a civil government in 1985, Brazilian democracy remained under pressure throughout the 1990s due to social inequalities based on class, race, and gender, rising urban violence, and inflation.Footnote 28

Against this background, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva’s election as president in 2002 after three unsuccessful attempts had a high symbolic value. Unlike Brazil’s previous presidents, Lula was not a descendant of the elites but came from a humble family in Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil. Trained in the metal industry, Lula had turned into a charismatic leader of the large union strikes in the 1970s. In 1980, he became one of the founding members of the left-wing PT,Footnote 29 which advocated for workers’ rights.Footnote 30

Lula’s first presidential administration (2003–2006) was met with high hopes by his leftist supporters. To honor their campaign promises, Lula and his PT government invested substantial effort in fighting hunger and social inequality through social policies.Footnote 31 Yet contrary to the expectations of many supporters, Lula largely continued the neoliberal economic policies of the previous government under Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2003). In the context of ongoing low GDP rates and a major vote-buying scandal in the National Congress (the Mensalâo scandal), the PT became increasingly politically isolated. In 2006, Lula and the PT were only reelected thanks to the support of the formal and informal working classes, which had benefited from their social policies.

Lula’s second administration (2007–2010) softened the previous economic course with neodevelopmental aspects. Strong economic growth helped him consolidate his alliances. Internationally, Brazil was highly regarded.Footnote 32 At the same time, however, political divisions within the country continued. Specifically, a neoliberal alliance formed, uniting various groups that felt threatened by the policies of the PT government.Footnote 33

In 2010, Dilma Rousseff was elected as the first female president of Brazil.Footnote 34 As Lula’s chosen successor, she seemed to have inherited both his voters and his opponents, without being able to count on a significant voter base of her own. She further developed the economy in the direction of neodevelopmentalism. However, partly due to the effects of the global economic crisis, the Brazilian economy began to falter. As a result, the government returned more strongly to neoliberal strategies. Crumbling alliances and new corruption cases caused public confidence in the PT to wane. In the summer of 2013, large street protests arose and revealed tensions and dissatisfaction over the poorly performing economy, the isolation of the government, and the lack of improvements in public services.Footnote 35

Despite these tensions, Rousseff was narrowly reelected in 2015. Faced with ever-increasing social and economic problems, the PT government eventually adopted an economic stabilization program that caused further alienation from the party’s social base. At the same time, the government maintained its social programs, which angered the upper middle class. A new corruption scandal surrounding the state-owned oil company Petrobras escalated the situation.Footnote 36 In this context, a new-right mass movement emerged that demanded “the end of corruption” and Rousseff’s impeachment and rejected PT’s progressive social agenda and economic course.Footnote 37

Rousseff’s impeachment followed in 2016. It resulted from a politically ambivalent and questionable process. As the Brazilian political scientist Leonardo Avritzer notes, “the declaration of votes made clear what was suspected all along, namely, that most MPs [members of parliament, KM] were not impeaching the president but illegally recalling the president mandate in order to implement a new economic and social order not sanctioned by the polls.”Footnote 38 For this reason, many have called the impeachment a golpe (coup d’état).Footnote 39

In the aftermath of Rousseff’s impeachment, Michel Temer of the neoliberal PSDB,Footnote 40 the main opposition party, took office as president. He almost immediately terminated most of the secretariats for rights and social protection established since Lula’s first administration. These included, among others, the Ministry of Human Rights and Citizenship and the Ministry of Women, Racial Equality and Human Rights. These developments were later described as a “re-organization of political hegemony in a crisis context,”Footnote 41 whose results were a fragmentation of the left and the rise of the new right to the power.

In the face of all these turbulent developments and the extraordinary resonance of Franco’s murder, I began to wonder about the deeper meaning of her story in Brazil’s current social and political context. I started to ask myself how Franco’s leftist surroundings perceived her trajectory, what hopes were associated with it, and what the consequences of the murder were for them. These questions became even more pressing after October 28, 2018, when Jair Messias Bolsonaro, an ultraright politician and ex-captain in the army paratroopers, was elected the new president of Brazil; a result which demonstrated how powerful the new right—whose agenda strongly contrasted with what Franco had stood for—had become.

As I thought about different ways of capturing the voices of people in Franco’s surroundings, the idea of doing an oral-history research project about her trajectory started to take shape. Put briefly, oral history is “the practice of interviewing eyewitnesses or other people with knowledge of particular events or topics that occurred within their lifetimes.”Footnote 42 It shares many similarities with journalism, especially if it concerns more recent events.Footnote 43 Yet oral history is not only interested in what happened and how these events have been evaluated. Over the last decades, there has also been a growing interest in how events are remembered and what role such memory plays in the present.Footnote 44

At the same time, I was also motivated as a theologian to start an oral-history project on the memory of Marielle Franco and its meaning in the present. As described above, I had the impression of witnessing a resurrection when I saw the street protests after Franco’s assassination. This means that from the beginning, I also saw a spiritual significance in the developments after her murder. That I was not alone in this was made clear to me by the events I describe in the following sections.

1.3 “Not Just an ‘Activist’”: The Polarization of Brazilian Human-Rights Discourse

In Brazil, only a few hours after Franco’s assassination, a wave of fake news started to appear on social media.Footnote 45 Among these posts, one became especially popular. It was a Facebook post by Marília Castro Neves, a judge on the Court of the State of Rio de Janeiro, that stated that Franco was not just a human-rights activist but was also involved with criminals who guaranteed her election as a city councilor.

The point is that this Marielle was not just an “activist”; she was involved with bandits! She was elected by the Comando Vermelho and broke “commitments” made to her supporters. More than any other person “away from the favela,” she knows how debts are collected by the groups she did business with. Even we know this. The truth is that we will never know for sure what determined the death of the city councilor, but we are confident that her behavior, dictated by her political engagement, was decisive in her tragic end. Anything else is mimimi by the left trying to add value to a corpse as common as any other.Footnote 46

According to Neves’s post, Franco was connected to the Comando Vermelho,Footnote 47 one of Rio’s most famous criminal factions.Footnote 48 It is involved in arms and drug trafficking and occupies parts of the favela complex of Maré, where Franco lived most of her life.Footnote 49 With her post, Neves argued that Franco’s murder was a consequence of her way of doing politics, as it allegedly entailed involvement with criminals. To her, Franco’s death was no different than that of many others who are killed for doing business with the wrong people.

Franco’s family, staff members, and party colleagues quickly clarified that these accusations were wrong and defamatory.Footnote 50 Nevertheless, the post enjoyed widespread circulation and approval because it served and affirmed a specific discourse on human rights.Footnote 51 Unlike in other countries, human rights in Brazil are not commonly perceived as rights for human beings as such. Instead, they are often understood as “rights for defending criminals.”Footnote 52

To understand where this perception and evaluation of human rights comes from, one needs to go back to the country’s transitional period from military dictatorship (1964–1985) to democracy. During the military dictatorship, political and civil rights were restricted to varying extents. The first phase of the military dictatorship lasted from 1964 until 1968 and was characterized by the silencing of critical voices within the political system through restricting their political rights.Footnote 53 The second period from 1968 to 1974 was the time of the strongest repression. Among other developments, it saw the suspension of habeas corpus for alleged crimes against national security, the imprisonment, torture, and killing of political prisoners, the reintroduction of the death penalty, and strong censorship of newspapers and other media. The Catholic Church was the only institution that managed to maintain some autonomy. Its progressive branches became the cradle of the political opposition.Footnote 54 After this climax of repression, the years between 1974 and 1985 were characterized by increasing liberalization and opening. In this period, political and civil rights were reintroduced, which allowed the political system, party landscape, and civil society to build anew.Footnote 55

The origins of the polarization in Brazilian human-rights discourse today go back to the period of political opening. In this context, various civil-society groups and organizations started to demand rights to health, housing, and other necessities to improve the living conditions of the population.Footnote 56 As part of this broader development, there were also groups demanding human rights for political prisoners.Footnote 57 After the 1979 Amnesty Law and the release of political prisoners, the same groups started claiming human rights for nonpolitical prisoners and “ordinary” criminals, many of them imprisoned without trial and sometimes tortured. Yet in the 1980s, public opinion became increasingly critical of the idea of granting human rights to “ordinary” criminals, as urban violence and a public sense of insecurity were rising.Footnote 58 Consequently, part of Brazil’s population started to reject the principle that human rights are to be granted to every human being. Instead, they started to claim that “human rights should only be granted to ‘(up-)right humans.’”Footnote 59 This opposed not only the democratic principles of the 1988 Constitution but also the Brazilian government’s efforts to protect human rights on a broad level.Footnote 60

Against this background, it is now possible to return to Neves’s post and call attention to its formulations. As seen above, Neves’s post stated that Franco was not a human-rights activist but a “defender of bandits.” As my brief excursus on the history of human rights in Brazil has shown, this accusation is not uncommon. Human-rights activists in Brazil are often accused of defending people who do not deserve to be defended. Apart from this, it is also striking to observe that the post appeared only a few hours after Franco’s murder. At a moment when hardly anything was known about what happened, Neves stated that “we will never know for sure what determined the death of the city councilor.” Unlike Franco’s allies, Neves did not raise the question of who ordered the killing and for what reasons. For her, solving the case seemed to be neither a moral nor a political obligation. Instead, she stated that Franco’s corpse was “as common as any other,” aligning her murder with many others whose causes will never be clarified. As a consequence of this view, every other possible reaction to Franco’s murder (for example, exerting political pressure to solve the case) was “mimimi of the left,” as she put it—in other words, the political left’s attempt to present itself as the victim of alleged structural injustices.

To conclude, it is important to point out that Neves’s post was not the only attempt to contest Franco’s legacy and memory as a human-rights activist, but it was exemplary of the others.Footnote 61 All these attempts together caused “a second death of Marielle,” as the Brazilian theologian Cesar Kuzma and others have noted.Footnote 62 Franco was thus killed not only physically through her murder but also socially through the reactions to it.

At the same time, however, there were also different initiatives to counter these attacks against Franco. Franco’s relatives took legal action against fake news on social media in general and against Neves in particular.Footnote 63 Social-media users also directly combatted fake news about Franco on the respective channels and platforms. Since these efforts on social media were one of the most important inspirations for undertaking this study, I will cover them in more detail in the next section.

1.4 Jesus “Hanging Out with Poor People and Defending Bandits and Prostitutes”

In the days after Franco’s murder, several tweets with theological content gained a lot of visibility.Footnote 64 The first was posted on the evening of March 16, 2018, two days after Franco’s murder. It read:

I don’t know why [there is] so much commotion because of the death of this Jesus, wasn’t he the one who went around hanging out with poor people and defending bandits and prostitutes? I don’t understand the reason for so many demonstrations. When a Roman soldier dies, nobody says anything, I don’t see a post in homage. Stand up for human rights in this.Footnote 65

Although this tweet lacked an explicit reference to Franco, the issues it raised and the timing made the connection unmistakable. In the following, I will propose two different readings of the tweet.

If we understand the tweet literally, it seems to be by a person with a critical perspective on human rights who cannot understand the public uproar following Jesus’s death.Footnote 66 Distancing themself from Jesus, who stood up for morally dubious characters such as criminals and prostitutes, the tweet’s author urges human-rights activists to do more for “Roman soldiers,” which can be understood as an allusion to police officers who ensure law and order, sometimes even risking their lives to do so.

To understand this allusion better, it is important to consider the current public-security challenges in Brazil.Footnote 67 With the sharp rise in urban violence and crime since the 1980s, the police and their methods have been increasingly questioned and even declared a failure.Footnote 68 Factors involved in the inadequate performance of the police force include insufficient public investment, poor training of police officers, an “authoritarian legacy,”Footnote 69 the “insistence on warfare as a metaphor and point of reference for public security operations,”Footnote 70 and corruption.Footnote 71 In response, there have been different reform efforts to democratize public security, like, for example, the introduction of community policing projects.Footnote 72 At the same time, public security and policing methods have also become increasingly militarized.Footnote 73 As a consequence, drastic warfare methods (like the invasion and occupation of territories by units of the military police and army) have been legitimized for combating drug trafficking in favelas. This is sometimes referred to as a “war against drugs.” In this highly violent context, police officers often risk their lives and sometimes also die in the line of duty.Footnote 74

Against this background, the tweet rightly highlights the problem of police officers (“Roman soldiers”) dying in service and points out that human-rights activists are often somewhat reluctant to consider the rights of members of the police. This is because the police are responsible for many human-rights violations and lethal incidents.Footnote 75 This problem mainly occurs in favelas and the peripheries in the form of “collateral damage” from the “war on drugs.” As I will later show with the example of Marielle Franco, people living in favelas have to deal not only with missing or precarious infrastructure and drug trafficking in their living environment but also with police violence, fatalities from stray bullets,Footnote 76 and blanket suspicion and criminalization from the public.Footnote 77

In contrast to this interpretation of the tweet, it can also be understood differently if we take its timing into consideration. The tweet was posted and shared in the context of Holy Week and Easter in 2018 (March 25 to April 1), when there were a lot of demonstrations against Franco’s assassination. Against this background, the tweet reframes the public agitation after Franco’s murder within the Christian memory of the agitation before Jesus’s crucifixion. One can, of course, question the appropriateness of this reframing. But the point is that the tweet undertakes this reframing in a country with a rich Christian (Catholic) legacy and a current strong (evangelical) Christian presence in the population.Footnote 78 This leads to an ironic subversion of what the tweet literally says. Jesus Christ (read: Marielle Franco) is not an irrelevant marginal figure. Instead, his (her) actions had a great political meaning exactly because he (she) moved at the margins of society. He (she) was one of those human-rights defenders who are belittled and ridiculed because they stand up for those at the margins of society. The protection of human rights is not primarily about protecting those who are representatives of the state and provide for its security. Rather, human rights are about the dignified survival of those who are not recognized as integral members of society.

In this tweet, the parallels between Jesus Christ and Marielle Franco were not yet made explicit, but this changed in the example presented in the next section.

1.5 Marielle Franco and Jesus Christ as Martyrs of God’s Kingdom

On March 20, 2018, a few days after the tweet discussed above, Henrique Vieira, a socially progressive pastor of a Baptist church,Footnote 79 gave a speech during an interreligious ceremony. This ceremony was organized in honor of Marielle Franco and Anderson Gomes and took place in front of the city hall on Cinelândia in Rio de Janeiro where thousands had gathered to mourn.Footnote 80 In his speech, Vieira directly compared Jesus Christ and Marielle Franco, which attracted a lot of public attention.Footnote 81 After greeting Franco’s and Gomes’s families, Vieira said the following:

Jesus, Black, favelado Footnote 82 from Nazareth, Marielle, Black, favelada from Maré. Jesus came to the temple, causing trouble. Marielle came to the city hall of Rio de Janeiro, causing trouble. The cross couldn’t silence the voice of Jesus, and those shots couldn’t silence the voice of Marielle.

We are alive, and the dream remains. […] I want to reaffirm, with all love and respect, that the colonels of faith, the peddlers of the temple—Crivella, Malafaia, and company—would kill Jesus today. They don’t control the faith of Sister Dorothy, Francis of Assisi, Chico Mendes, Teresa d’Ávila, Martin Luther King, Marielle Franco, John the Baptist, Jesus of Nazareth. They do not control these Black people, these poor people, these people who use the name of Jesus to promote love and grace.

I want to finish by saying, with all my affection, that the dream is still alive. I want to say that it is necessary to respect pain. One must respect pain. Pain is sacred ground. Are we crying? We are. Do we feel weak sometimes? We do. But our tears and our weaknesses will move the structure of this world. And we still dream—the dream of a country where Black people are not guilty until proven guilty; the dream of a country where women defeat machismo once and for all; the dream of a country where all forms of love are right; the dream in which the parliament is occupied by indigenous people, quilombolas,Footnote 83 peasants, homeless people, Black women; the dream in which no child will go hungry, in which there will be no latifundia.Footnote 84 There will be no social inequality. There will be no rich or poor. Because justice will flow. Because enough is enough: Black people will not return to the slave quarters; LGBTs will not return to the closet; women will not return to submission. And our dreams will not stay in a coffin, because they are alive. We are the seed. We are the future. We are the revolution.Footnote 85

In this speech, the strict parallelism between Jesus Christ and Marielle Franco stands out. This parallelism is an implicit, typical reference to martyrdom, even if the term does not come up explicitly. Vieira sees Franco as a “martyr of God’s kingdom,”Footnote 86 who died like Jesus Christ. Martyrs of God’s kingdom are not martyrs for the Christian faith in a strict sense, but martyrs who stood up for the same causes that Jesus Christ defended, such as justice, love, freedom, and mercy.Footnote 87 This understanding of martyrdom goes back to liberation theology, which expanded the traditional understanding of martyrdom in the face of the widespread persecution of Christians who fought for social justice in Latin America in the twentieth century.Footnote 88

In the second part of the speech, Franco is grouped together with other murdered social activists, martyrs, and saints, who are connected by their hope for a more just society. Vieira distinguishes this group and Christian believers who stand up for Black and poor people from well-known conservative Brazilian evangelical preachers (such as Silas Malafaia or Marcelo Crivella) who possess great wealth and economic power. In Vieira’s speech, they are grouped together with the religious, political, and economic elites of Jesus’s time, who condemned him to death.

In the third part of the speech, Vieira affirms that the fight for a more just society will continue after Franco’s murder. Franco might be dead, but her and other people’s dreams live on. This turns the memory of her and other martyrs, even if not explicitly mentioned, into dangerous memory (Johann Baptist Metz), which challenges and confronts society with hopes of the past that have not yet been fulfilled.

In the same paragraph, Vieira denounces different problems that cause social suffering. Among these problems, he calls attention to the criminalization of Black people (in the “war against drugs”); machismo;Footnote 89 LGBTQ+phobia; the underrepresentation of different groups of the Brazilian population in congress, which is dominated by white, male, middle-to-upper-class representatives; the existence of hunger and social inequality perpetuated by, among others factors, the ownership of large tracts of land by the few (latifundia), which excludes many others from a dignified life. Finally, Vieira also affirms that those who recognize themselves in the project that Franco defended will become “seeds” that carry on her legacy and dream.

As a theologian, I was deeply impressed by how Vieira used theology and the idea of martyrdom to articulate the meaning of Franco’s trajectory and to affirm the continuation of her legacy. His speech became the decisive inspiration for me to approach and research Franco’s story not only from a historical perspective but also from a perspective of political theology centered around the concept of dangerous memory, which was already briefly mentioned above and will be elaborated more fully in what follows.Footnote 90

1.6 Research Aims and Outline

This study on the memory of Marielle Franco has two main objectives. First, it aims to show how Franco’s story is remembered by people from her surroundings. My main research interest is understanding the meaning of Franco’s trajectory and the reasons for the strong mobilization after her murder. As a heuristic lens to the interviews collected for this study, I use Johann Baptist Metz’s concept of dangerous memory, which was also implied in Vieira’s speech. As I will show later, the memory of Franco contains numerous aspects that resonate with Metz’s understanding of dangerous memory. Yet significant aspects of the memory of Franco also go beyond this concept. This leads to the second objective of this work. This study aims to elaborate a decolonial understanding of dangerous memory that arises from the interpretation of the memory of Marielle Franco. I argue that dangerous memory is not just about remembering victimized people’s suffering, death, and unfulfilled hopes. Rather, dangerous memory is also about practices of the individual and collective (self-)empowerment of marginalized groups who “refuse to be victims” (bell hooks)Footnote 91 in a context that is perceived as dangerous and threating.

Against the background of these research objectives, the study is structured as follows:

  • In Chap. 2, I elaborate the concept of dangerous memoryFootnote 92 in the work of the German Catholic theologian Johann Baptist Metz. In short, the dangerous memory of Jesus Christ and other dangerous memories recall unfulfilled hopes and unjust suffering. They are kept alive by individuals and communities that stand in solidarity with those whose lives and processes of becoming subjects were interrupted. Such memories are dangerous to the status quo and what is taken for granted. They challenge any idea of history or progress that forgets, overlooks, or sacrifices the unjust sufferings of the past to the future. The concept of dangerous memory will later serve as a lens for approaching the memory of Marielle Franco in the interviews done for this study.Footnote 93

  • In Chap. 3, I present the four core categories that emerged from the data analysis. The category “‘things that society considers very perverse’: social representations and violence” provides insight into Franco’s living context in Brazil. It shows how hegemonic social representations of favelas, women, Black people, and lesbian women are used to legitimize different forms of violence against these social groups. This category establishes the background against which the later developments in Franco’s life need to be read. The category “‘a being in construction’: Marielle Franco’s biography” gives an overview of her trajectory from the favela complex of Maré to the city council of Rio de Janeiro. It shows how Franco, a member of a social group that was marginalized in multiple ways, managed to construct her trajectory and career. The category “strategies of individual and collective (self-)empowerment” explains different processes through which Franco was empowered and through which she also empowered other people with a similar background. The category “(re-)continuations and amplified resistance after Marielle Franco’s assassination” provides insights into the aftereffects of Franco’s assassination, which not only represented a brutal loss but also gave impulses for the individual and collective self-empowerment of marginalized people, among them a striking number of Black women.

  • Chapter 4 provides an interpretation of the data. First, I interpret the findings from the perspective of dangerous memory as understood by Metz. As to be seen, this interpretation is valid but also one-sided because it focuses on the aspect of victimization. If only the victimization of Franco is remembered, other parts of her life, including the achievements and dynamics of subject formation and emancipation, are rendered invisible. Against this background, the second part of the chapter provides a more in-depth interpretation of the data that departs from the context of my interview partners and the challenges that context poses to subject formation. In this context, Judith Butler’s theory of subjectivation through subjection will help account for the uneven power relations and challenges that Franco and those in her surroundings had and still have to struggle with.

  • The results of the data interpretation provide the foundation for a decolonial understanding of dangerous memory that focuses not only on suffering but also on individual and collective self-empowerment. In the conclusive Chap. 5, I summarize the contours of this differentiated understanding of dangerous memory and give an outlook on contexts in which the concept might be relevant in the future.

1.7 Terminology and Research Methodology

This study is a contribution to the field of constructive political theology and is situated in a transnational context, as it interrelates Brazilian, European, and US-American perspectives and discussions. In the following, I will first clarify the terminology used in this monograph and then introduce the methodology.

1.7.1 Constructive Political Theology

Political theology is an ambiguous term that can be conceptualized in different ways.Footnote 94 In general, it consists in an analysis of interrelations between individual, collective, or institutional discourse about God and the political and draws normative implications from this analysis. In a more restricted sense, the political refers to state power. In a broader sense, as in this study, it refers to “the use of structural power to organize a society or community.”Footnote 95 Political theology is therefore a way of thinking or doing theology that is sensitive to power.

In what follows, I will use the term political theology as understood by Johann Baptist Metz, one of the leading thinkers of the so-called new political theology that emerged in the 1960s in Germany. New political theology called into question the assumed privacy of religious beliefs and reflected on the ethical and political implications of Christian hope. Its primary aim was to raise the political consciousness of both theology and churches and to contribute to the struggle for human dignity and emancipation from a Christian perspective. These concerns were increasingly linked to the sensitivities of the postwar context “after Auschwitz” and the question of how to deal with the memory of the Jewish victims of World War II.

The term constructive theology is not self-evident if one acknowledges that every theology has a constructive component. Today, it is mainly used as a term of demarcation from systematic theology, from which it also derives its profile.Footnote 96 Constructive and systematic theology are both concerned with Christian doctrines but differ in their contexts and goals. Typically and ideally, systematic theology reflects and accounts for the content of Christian doctrines against the background of modern scientific thinking and sensibilities and tries to bring it into a coherent and logical overall context.Footnote 97 Constructive theology, by contrast, is about reflecting on the content of Christian faith in the face of the lived present and pluralist social and cultural developments that people often experience as crises.Footnote 98 Similar to Metz’s understanding of political theology, constructive theology seeks to critically understand and engage Christian faith and beliefs in ways that contribute to social change and justice.Footnote 99

Based on this context, this study uses the term constructive political theology as a concretization of political theology that emphasizes the moment of crisis and seeks ways to engage the Christian tradition to contribute to social change and justice after Franco’s assassination.

1.7.2 Data Collection and Analysis According to Grounded Theory

To date, qualitative social research in political theology is rather a marginal phenomenon. Yet as this project will demonstrate, qualitative social research has great potential for political theology. In general terms, as the British theologian Luke Bretherton polemically states, “qualitative research helps generate new insights and calls political theology down from its speculative heights in order to attend to the concrete and quotidian navigations of life.”Footnote 100 This also applies to my experience in conducting this study. More concretely, empirical research on the daily life of Marielle Franco and her surroundings has been crucial to rendering visible how different forms of oppression actually manifest and what strategies of resistance were used to counter them.Footnote 101 In light of this, I hope this study can contribute to a more empirical approach to political theology.

I based my data sampling and interpretation on the principles of grounded theory, which is well suited for exploratory research like the present study, since it closely interrelates the analysis and collection of data.Footnote 102 The main sources of this research project are ten “episodic interviews”Footnote 103 with people from Marielle Franco’s close surroundings. I conducted the interviews during a field stay in Rio de Janeiro in August and July 2019. I found my interview partners by approaching them directly (primarily via social media or official contacts) or by being put in touch via existing contacts. Unfortunately, the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, which started at the end of 2019, made another research stay in Rio impossible, so I was not able to collect any further data. For this reason, I had to fill in some gaps with information from other sources such as newspaper articles.

Being on site and becoming familiar with the places where Franco lived and worked was crucial to this study because it allowed me to explore topics and contexts that the Brazilian and international public are not well aware of, for example, Franco’s work in the Human Rights Defense and Citizenship Commission of the Legislative Assembly of Rio de Janeiro and her closeness to mothers whose children had become victims of human-rights violations.Footnote 104

At the same, doing field research in Rio also made me more fully aware of the permanent and daily presence of urban violence and gave me an impression of what it means to live in such an environment.Footnote 105 This experience led me to take the notion of danger in dangerous memory more seriously. As reflected in Sect. 2.3.4, danger is not only a metaphor for something potentially unsettling (as in Johann Baptist Metz’s understanding) but might also designate a situation in which people feel that their lives are actually threatened (as in Walter Benjamin). Against this background, I will use both the concept of dangerous memory (Metz) and the concept of “memory in a moment of danger” (Benjamin) to interpret the data in Chap. 4.

1.7.3 Sensitizing Concepts

As an inductive research approach, grounded theory is not theory-free but suggests using established theories and knowledge as a heuristic lens for seeing what is meaningful in the data without imposing an interpretation on it. At the same time, it expects the data also to reveal new, previously unknown aspects not captured by existing theory.Footnote 106

In this study, Johann Baptist Metz’s concept of dangerous memory was the main sensitizing concept for approaching the collected data on Marielle Franco, which is why it will be discussed in detail in the next chapter. The core section of my engagement with Metz is Sect. 2.3, where I will analyze the relations between dangerous memory and subjects, practices, and time. This conceptual analysis served to sensitize me for the underlying notions and assumptions about being and becoming a subject, practice, and solidarity in the data on Marielle Franco, which will be discussed in Chap. 4.

Another, but less central, sensitizing concept was “popular memory,” which was introduced in the 1980s and is considered a classic concept in oral history and memory studies.Footnote 107 The concept suggests that the making of history is the result of a dynamic interplay between public and more private constructions of the past that are mediated through power relations. A dominant (or hegemonic) memory is strongly shaped by public representations of history that circulate through state institutions, culture, and the media. As such, it provides a common frame for interpreting more private reminiscences shared among families, communities, and social movements. However, a dominant memory is neither self-evident nor stable but continually renegotiated and questioned by the people whose voices are subordinated, marginalized, or silenced.Footnote 108 Since the 1980s, oral historians have increasingly attempted to reclaim these voices.Footnote 109 But collecting data from these groups is not enough to reclaim their memories, as the Popular Memory Group has highlighted:

[The study of popular memory] is a necessarily relational study. It has to take in the dominant historical representation in the public field as well as attempts to amplify or generalize subordinated or private experiences. Like all struggles it must […] have two sides. Private memories cannot, in concrete studies, be readily unscrambled from the effects of dominant historical discourses. It is often these that supply the very terms by which a private history is thought through. Memories of the past are, like all common-sense forms, strangely composite constructions, resembling a kind of geology, the selective sedimentation of past traces.Footnote 110

In this study, the concept of popular memory was a useful lens for seeing how people in Marielle Franco’s surroundings have questioned the dominant (or hegemonic) social representations of favelas, women, Black women, and lesbians, which they have experienced as oppressive. From a theoretical standpoint, social representations are “images that condense manifold meanings that allow people to interpret what is happening; categories which serve to classify circumstances, phenomena and individuals with whom we deal, theories which permit us to establish facts about them.”Footnote 111 Social representations “establish what is real” by constituting and orienting the practices of individuals, groups, and institutions and by shaping their identities, roles, and “locations in the world.”Footnote 112 Hegemonic social representations are widely accepted and used to defend matters of “general interest” or to support the views of the “majority.” However, they primarily represent the interests of the dominant group.Footnote 113 Yet in the act of representing someone or something, there are always possibilities for reinterpreting, negotiating, and subverting meanings.Footnote 114 Against this background, Chap. 3 will show numerous examples of how people in Franco’s surroundings have negotiated hegemonic social representations of favelas, women, Black women, and lesbians that have impacted their lives in negative ways and how they have attempted to represent these groups in more life-affirming and liberative ways.

Yet another sensitizing concept was the analytical concept of intersectionality, which has been developed by Black feminist thinkers. It investigates the simultaneous overlapping of different discriminations based on class, race, and gender.Footnote 115 This concept was crucial to understanding Franco’s social background and to seeing the intersecting challenges she had to deal with, as presented in the core category “‘things that society considers very perverse’: social representations and violence.”Footnote 116

1.7.4 Limits of This Study

The coding process according to the principles of grounded theory gave rise to the four core categories, which have already been mentioned above and will be more fully elaborated in Chap. 3. In this study, I refrained from fully integrating the four categories into one coherent theory. The first reason for forgoing such an integration is that two of the four core categories do not arrive at the point of “theoretical saturation.”Footnote 117 This limit concerns, on the one hand, the core category of “‘things that society considers very perverse’: social representations and violence.” In its current state of development, the category only rudimentarily shows how various discriminations overlapped in Franco’s life and affected her. On the other hand, there are also limits to the core category “(re-)continuations and amplified resistance after Marielle Franco’s assassination.” Here it would have been important to gain more insight into how Black women who were not close to Franco actually perceived her before and after her death in order to understand better the perspectives of the “seeds” outside formal politics.

The second reason why I refrained from fully integrating the findings is more pastoral and has to do with recognizing how deeply Franco’s assassination affected people. Against this background, I found it impossible to integrate the four categories into a “resurrection theory,”Footnote 118 even though that would have appealed to me as a theologian. But my interview partners taught me that resurrection is not about theoretical coherence or closure. Instead, it is about dealing with the wounds that remain and trying to find new sense in life. If there is a way to write about resurrection, then it is not through the abstract language of theory but through stories that respect the void and silences.

Due to these limits, my analysis in Chap. 3 is midway between a fully integrated theory and a “thick description.” This is not a tragedy since I did not intend to develop a theory about Franco but rather wanted to rethink the concept of dangerous memory in light of her story and the memories of her. For this purpose, the results of the coding process—especially the core categories “Franco’s personal biography” and “strategies of individual and collective (self-)empowerment”—are saturated enough and provide solid ground for further reflection.

1.7.5 Ethical Considerations

The interview transcripts were anonymized by omitting names and other information that would make it possible for readers to draw conclusions about the interviewee’s identity. This was a fundamental measure against jeopardizing their safety. This is also why this study does not fully disclose the interview transcripts.

When the content of an interview was sensitive, I asked my interview partners if that content could be disclosed in the study. Depending on their answers, I integrated it into the work or kept it confidential. During the conversations, my interview partners sometimes also mentioned topics that concerned other people with whom I could not conduct an interview. In these cases, I weighed whether the topic was already known to a broader public or if it affected the integrity or safety of the person mentioned. Based on that, I decided to include or elide their names.

The interview partners signed a consent form stating their voluntary participation in the study. At the same time, this document also granted their right to withdraw their consent at any time.