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Policing as Pacification: Postcolonial Legacies, Transnational Connections, and the Militarization of Urban Security in Democratic Brazil

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Police Abuse in Contemporary Democracies

Abstract

In this chapter, Markus-Michael Müller examines the (post)colonial and international dimensions of police abuse in democratic Brazil. He argues that Rio de Janeiro’s “successful” experience with Pacification Police Units (UPPs) is best assessed with pacification, rather than policing, at the center of the analysis. The chapter reveals that the UPPs are the direct result of the reimport of urban counterinsurgency practices from Colombia and Haiti (in the latter, Brazil is in charge of the military component of the UN peacekeeping mission MINUSTAH). Müller shows how this reimport of counterinsurgency practices to Brazil is embedded within a larger (post)colonial institutional legacy of police repression in the name of pacifying the racialized and marginalized “urban other” to support a particular political economy.

Research for this chapter was conducted within the context of the research project “Transnational Peacebuilding as South–South Cooperation: Brazil’s MINUSTAH Experience,” funded by the German Foundation for Peace Research. Portions of this chapter draw upon Markus-Michael Müller (2016) “Entangled Pacifications: Peacekeeping, Counterinsurgency and Policing in Port-au-Prince and Rio de Janeiro.” In Jana Hönke and Markus-Michael Müller (eds.), The Global Making of Policing: Post Colonial Perspectives. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016, with permission of the publisher.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ZI Lateinamerika-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Markus-Michael Müller

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  1. Markus-Michael Müller
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

    Michelle D. Bonner

  2. Union College, Schenectady, New York, USA

    Guillermina Seri

  3. St. Bonaventure University, St. Bonaventure, New York, USA

    Mary Rose Kubal

  4. University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

    Michael Kempa

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Müller, MM. (2018). Policing as Pacification: Postcolonial Legacies, Transnational Connections, and the Militarization of Urban Security in Democratic Brazil. In: Bonner, M., Seri, G., Kubal, M., Kempa, M. (eds) Police Abuse in Contemporary Democracies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72883-4_9

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