“To live like a tree, lonely and free / To live as brothers like trees in a forest”

About Flavie Halais

Flavie Halais is a freelance writer based in Montreal, focusing on urban development. She is currently studying the impact of mega-events in Brazil and Rio de Janeiro's pacification program.

Articles by Flavie Halais

Spectacle and surveillance in Brazil

Flavie Halais 2 May 2013

The unprecedented series of mega-events which are set to take place across Brazil in the coming years have lead to heightened security in host cities – a gold mine for the global private defence industry.

Pacifying Rio

FLAVIE HALAIS

Rio de Janeiro has embarked on an ambitious security operation aimed at freeing its favelas from the control of gangs in time for the 2016 Olympics. But what's behind Latin America's most talked about security operation?

Flavie Halais

Nuclear assurances: when a fatwa isn’t a fatwa

SASAN AGHLANI

Ayatollah Khamenei issued a fatwa forbidding the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons. What does its disregard mean for his ability to project authority to both international actors and domestic audiences?

Slow and steady in Kabul

MITCHELL SUTIKA SIPUS

Years of violent conflict and a history of controversial planning in Kabul have stifled urban development in the city.

Dakar unsettled

CAROLINE MELLY

State projects aimed at building a 'global Dakar' alongside the proliferation of diaspora-financed luxury development, highlight the fraught nature of belonging in a city marked by uncertainty.

Conservation and dispossession in Bogotá

DIANA OJEDA and DIANA BOCAREJO and CARLOS DEL CAIRO

The deployment of conservation zones in Bogotá's 'green' neighbourhoods, is fast becoming an alibi for the dispossession of the city's most vulnerable residents.

Pacifying Rio

FLAVIE HALAIS

Rio's favela residents fight mega-event eviction

Flavie Halais 14 February 2013

Gleaming plans for urban revitalization ahead of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics include the not-so-shiny removal of thousands of families in lower-class communities.

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About Flavie Halais

Articles by Flavie Halais

Spectacle and surveillance in Brazil

Pacifying Rio

Nuclear assurances: when a fatwa isn’t a fatwa

Slow and steady in Kabul

Dakar unsettled

Conservation and dispossession in Bogotá

Pacifying Rio

Rio's favela residents fight mega-event eviction

This week's guest editors

A Turkish Spring?

Woolwich - terror or conflict?

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Europe from the bottom up

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Mali: the plot thickens

Remote control war

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