Policing the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro

This book offers a unique look into the world of policing and the frontline of Brazil's war on drugs and analyzes the tensions produced by attempts to modernize the police. Since the return of democracy in 1985, the Military Police of Rio de Janeiro has waged a racialized and gendered war on drugs against armed drug gangs based in the city's favelas, casting the people who live in these communities as internal enemies. In preparation for the Rio Olympics, the police sought to 'pacify' the favelas and their populations through the implementation of a public security program that created new police units in favela communities across the city. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork at Rio de Janeiro's Pacifying Police Units, this book follows police officers across the institutional hierarchy in their daily activities, on patrol, and during training. Tracing the genealogies of contemporary forms of policing-as-warfare through the notion of 'colonial war' and 'cultural war', it highlights the material and ideational dimensions of war as a cosmological force that shapes Brazilian social relations, subjectivities, landscapes, economies, and politics. Drawing on a Deleuzian analysis of war-machine and state dynamics, it shows how practices of elimination co-exist with attempts to transform favela territories and the people that live there and analyzes the link between the moral universe of policing and right-wing populism in Brazil. Through rich and nuanced ethnography, it offers a critical perspective on militarization, policing, and 21st century forms of authoritarianism.