XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

The military and public security in Rio de Janeiro: the collapse of pacification policing and the 2018 federal intervention

• In Event: Forças Armadas, Defesa e Segurança no Brasil contemporâneo

Abstract

This presentation examines the militarization of urban public security strategies by focusing on the case of Rio de Janeiro. This city has built a dismal track record of urban violence derived from the territorial fragmentation of de facto governance and the confrontation of multiple state and extra-legal armed groups. In this context, over the past decades the militarization of public security has been constantly evolving, based on the entanglement of the already established 'military format' of policing in the city and so-called GLO (Guarantee of Law and Order) operations of the federal armed forces. Between 2009 and 2017 this entanglement took a specific form in the pacification policing strategy that was strongly inspired by the experience of the UN peacekeeping operation in Haiti (MINUSTAH) led by the Brazilian armed forces. Also, federal military forces were deployed in specific phases of the establishment of pacification policing in Rio. This synergy of 'peacebuilding' collapsed after 2016, for a variety of reasons, leading in turn to the federal military intervention in public security in Rio de Janeiro in 2018. This experience sheds light on the possibilities and limits of militarized approaches to urban public security, whether framed as warfare or peacebuilding (or both). The paper will argue that militarization of public security is not the best option if the goal is to establish sustainable citizen security in violence-torn cities.

Author

• Kees Koonings, CEDLA University of Amsterdam