Description
The present paper addresses the intersection between the tasks assigned to the armed forces and the political control over the military institutions in the Global South, highlighting military identity and coloniality as explanatory factors. It responds to the growing concerns about the involvement of the armed forces in domestic tasks, as well as the political involvement of the military. Both works on the nexus between internal and international security and the expansion of the armed forces’ activities and studies on civil-military relations, frame the military involvement in domestic security and politics as disruptions of the normal organization of state’s instruments of violence. These phenomena, however, are historically recurrent in countries of the Global South. The ambiguity between exception and continuity is explored through the Brazilian case. It is argued that the way in which the Brazilian military makes sense of its relationship with the state and society is informed by a postcolonial anxiety, grounded on the mismatch between the desired image to be replicated – the modern ideal of a professional military organization – and the role the military has historically played.
