Description
In October 2025, Operação Contenção, a state-sanctioned massacre that left 130 favela residents dead in Rio de Janeiro, revealed with harrowing clarity the material consequences of the ongoing militarization public security under the far-right government of Cláudio Castro. Against recent currents in Critical Military Studies (CMS) that question the analytic validity of “militarization” or seek to replace it with notions of diffuse martiality, this paper argues that the corpses left behind by Operação Contenção attest to militarization’s enduring importance and deadly reality. Recovering and reworking Vagts’s neglected and often misunderstood conception of militarism, the paper argues that militarization should be taken seriously, not only because of the heuristic value if offers in understanding periods where political violence is intensified, but also and primarily for the concept’s usefulness in pushing back against the normalization of the far right. To this end, the paper advances a radical and anti-foundationalist understanding of militarization beyond the traditional study of arms races and civic/military relations. Instead, it sees militarization as the metaphorical and metonymical extension of relations of warfare to the whole social body, a view capable of explaining the contemporary intersection of “culture wars,” militarism, and extreme episodes of political violence. The Rio massacre thus becomes the empirical evidence of the need to remember militarization as a concept whose usefulness comes from the capacity to evidence and dismantle the infrastructures of power, race, and security in twenty-first-century necropolitical democracies.
