Overview
- Offers a rich and nuanced ethnography of the world of policing within one of the most deadly police force
- Examines how social relations and an authoritarian order is constructed through different narratives
- Explores the life of police soldiers serving at the frontline of Brazil war on crime and drugs
Part of the book series: Palgrave's Critical Policing Studies (PCPS)
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About this book
This book offers a unique look into the world of policing and the frontline of Brazil’s war on drugs. It analyzes the tensions produced by attempts to modernize Rio de Janeiro’s public security policies. Since the return of democracy in 1985, Rio's police forces have waged war 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 Olympics in 2016, the police sought to ‘pacify’ the favelas and their populations through the establishment of Pacifying Police Units (UPPs) in many of the city’s favela communities. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork with the police, this book follows 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. It draws on the Deleuzian notion of ‘war machine and state dynamics’ to show how practices of elimination co-exist with attempts to transform favela territories and their people 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 militarized policing and 21st century forms of authoritarianism.
Keywords
- Militarization
- war
- masculinity
- race
- predatory accumulation
- necropolitics
- fascism
- post-colonial studies
- authoritarianism
- favela
- police ethnography
- military police
- warzone
- policing in the Global South
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Tomas Salem is a PhD-fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen in Norway. He carried out fieldwork with the Pacifying Police Units of Rio de Janeiro’s Military Police in 2015 and has an interdisciplinary background from the fields of Public Security and Gender Studies. His research interests span from critical perspectives on masculinity to post-colonial theory, right-wing authoritarianism, state formation and state violence. This is his first book. It is based on his award-winning thesis Taming the War-Machine: Police, Pacification, and Power in Rio de Janeiro and ten years of research on Brazilian policing.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Policing the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro
Book Subtitle: Cosmologies of War and The Far-Right
Authors: Tomas Salem
Series Title: Palgrave's Critical Policing Studies
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Law and Criminology, Law and Criminology (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2024
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-49026-2Due: 06 August 2024
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-49029-3Due: 06 August 2024
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-49027-9Due: 06 August 2024
Series ISSN: 2730-535X
Series E-ISSN: 2730-5368
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXI, 330
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations, 36 illustrations in colour