Description
The distinction between armed forces and police is traditionally addressed through the division between the domestic and international realms, which equates three different and independent kinds of boundaries: physical borders, the reach of political authority, and the belonging to a community. Drawing upon this conception, scholars have claimed that contemporary security policies blurred these lines. However, the blurring argument, grounded on an aprioristic conception about how the state’s instruments of force are to be organized, fails to explain both cases in which military domestic deployment is not a historical exception, being instead socially and legally institutionalized, and the processes through which a particular kind of the state’s use of force becomes accepted or rejected. The present thesis tackles this gap by moving away from the aprioristic inside/outside framework and focusing on the question of how certain uses of the armed forces are legitimated and delegitimated. It provides an analytical framework to empirically address the legitimation of military operations, which is applied to the domestic mobilization of the armed forces but is also appropriate to analyze other uses of violence. Legitimacy is regarded as the process of shaping and reshaping the line of the acceptable action, which is grasped through discursive patterns forging an apparent consensus around the adequacy or inadequacy of a course of action. The instrument of analysis proposed here is applied to the Brazilian case, mapping out the public debate on three major domestic military operations against crime – Operation Rio (1994-1995), Operation Arcanjo (2010-2012), and Operation Rio de Janeiro (2017-2018).
