In the exteriority of the system: victims, liberation-principle, and normativity in resistance practices against State violence

Abstract

This article analyzes the resistance practices of the Network of Communities and Movements Against Violence, founded in Rio de Janeiro in 2004 by relatives of victims of state violence. The research problem is to understand whether such practices can be interpreted as forms of normative production beyond state law. The study adopts a qualitative approach, based on semi-structured interviews and document analysis, articulated with Emmanuel Lévinas’s ethical phenomenology and Enrique Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation. It argues that the Network’s practices do not merely respond to oppression, but constitute concrete forms of normativity endowed with their own ethical validity in light of the liberation-principle. The results indicate that practices of care, denunciation, memory production, legal monitoring, and political advocacy structure behaviors, guide collective decisions, and establish criteria of justice independent of legal formalization. The article concludes that the condition of victimhood does not imply passivity, but may constitute a site of ethical enunciation and transformative praxis, challenging law to recognize forms of normativity produced in the exteriority of the system.