Description
This paper traces the evolution and the effects of the “pacification” strategy that has been rolled out over the last decade in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. It problematizes from a critical feminist security studies perspective (inter alia Wibben 2011, 2018; Sjoberg & Jillian 2010) the militarised approach that the Brazilian state has adopted whilst trying to deal with urban poverty, racial segregation and criminal violence within the favelas.
This paper examines the structural consequences of inequality and criminality and the increasing marginalization of favela residents that have stemmed from Brazil’s increasing Neo-Liberal economic policies (Wacquant 2014) and examines the how these have been dealt with, and thus aggravated by, the growing militarisation of policing operations conducted amongst the residents of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro often in the guise of the war on drugs/crime (Oosterbaan & Wijk 2015).
Whilst the state’s security apparatuses have tried to conduct “pacification” operations through the Police Pacification Units in order to reduce criminality and claim back such “ungoverned” spaces by moving the state’s military police away from war-oriented to community based policing (Siman & Santos 2018), this paper shows how the increasing adoption of urban warfare tactics to the detriment of community-based policing initiatives and the disinterest in implementing any serious socio-economic regeneration projects within the favelas (Salem 2017), have strengthened the gendered nature (Amar 2013; Wilding 2010) that such “punitive containment” (Wacquant 2008) measures have had on the racially and socio-economically marginalised favela residents (Stern 2006).
The paper will also show how such gendered and racialised measures have augmented rather than diminished the segregation between favela residents and the rest of the city and have actually increased the insecurity of (particularly women and transgender) favela residents in the name of re-masculinised conceptualisations and daily practices associated with the state's security measures.
