The chapter draws on the complex realities of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to explore the various forms of representational resistance enacted by residents. These forms of resistance respond to over a century of representational and material violence enacted on what are often described as ‘informal’ urban development. Most recently, the authors turn to the last 20 years that saw the intersection of favela upgrade programmes and militarised securitisation policies that hold the aim to integrate and pacify these territories in the service of a neoliberal mega-event driven city. Tracing the roots of symbolic erasure to the colonial legacies of forced removal and urban cleansing, and to the social and spatial control of favelas in the 20th century, we introduce contemporary cases of organised groups in favelas who are exercising ways to assert citizenship and the right to sovereignty. These insurgent practices include peace marches, collective meetings, writing manifestos, co-designing plans and policy advocacy campaigns with the aim of interrupting the state’s continued necropolitical agenda.