Description
This paper analyzes the production of military operations in peripheral contexts, considering
the relations that local forces establish with technological innovations. Focusing on the
Brazilian case, it delves into the technological solutions to enhance situational awareness
and command and control capabilities, interrogating how these technologies matter in the
process of imagining and producing contemporary modalities of military violence. Drawing
from CSS and STS, especially Lucy Suchman’s work on imaginaries of omniscience, this
paper expands a previous research on drone use by the Brazilian military (Janot and Assis
2025) to understand how their practices and expectations circulate between urban and
jungle environments by looking at operations conceptualized and performed in the Amazon
region. While both contexts are framed by the armed forces as a complex, foreign terrain
that needs to be perceived, controlled and managed through systematic intelligence, the
Amazon is being further imagined as a hub for opportunities in learning and innovating due
to its framing as an unique hub of risks and threats (border dynamics, organized crime,
environmental issues, international disputes, traditional and originary communities). Hence,
this work will argue that information technologies matter in producing new forms of military
authority that emphasize the armed forces’ logistics and managerial capacities in
administering complex environments, not only because of how they are used, but how they
are expected and imagined by the agents when they perceive and conceive the world
around them as theaters of operation.
