Community policing’s extended military history: Brazilian pacification from the Global Cold War to the Global War on Terror

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the frequently neglected synergies, past and present, between community-oriented policing (COP) and community-centred military interventions in Latin America. From the vantage point of Brazilian pacification efforts, from the Global Cold War to the Global War on Terror, it is argued that COP is a transnational security governance rationale that emerged during the Global Cold War out of the discovery of the ‘community’ as a key target for military interventions seeking to counter the presence of non-state armed actors challenging state authority. This underlying logic survived the end of the Cold War, including in Latin America. In the post-9/11 context COP efforts returned to their militarized Cold War origins, when local security bureaucracies (re)discovered the usefulness of engaging with local communities in order to confront challenges to state power from non-stated armed actors, such as gangs and drug traffickers. This argument will be elaborated through an analysis of on one of the most recent Latin American COP ‘success stories’: the pacification programme operating in Rio de Janeiro since 2008. Drawing on historical and contemporary policy documents, as well as multi-sited empirical fieldwork, the transnational historical entanglements of domestic and external pacification experiences will be highlighted, allowing us to point towards the negative potentials of militarising COP efforts in regards to the inclusiveness of democratic security governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Community policing
• counterinsurgency
• Latin America
• Brazil

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented at the panel ‘Reflections of Community Policing in Latin America’ at the 2019 congress of the Latin American Studies Association. We are thankful for the comments from our discussant, Arturo Alvarado Mendoza, as well as the feedback we received on different drafts of this paper by Annabelle Dias Felix, Tina Hilgers, Louise Wiuff Moe and the journal’s reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 11 of the 13 Force Commanders were Brazilian. Two Chilean Commanders filled interim positions after two Brazilian generals died in 2010 and 2015.

2 Interview with Viva Rio security coordinator, July 12, 2016, Port-au-Prince.

3 Interview with Viva Rio program manager, July 7, 2016, Port-au-Prince.

4 Interview with Haitian journalist, translated from Haitian Creole, November 8 2016, Port-au-Prince.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Stiftung Friedensforschung.