Abstract
Approaching urban social conflicts in Brazil and in Palestine/Israel in terms of settler colonial theory allows the identification of the historical racist structures involved in the violent pacification of racialized native populations. Settler colonialism does not end with the declaration of independence but persists in the postcolonial context through the constant expropriation, extermination, confinement, and assimilation of racialized populations in the service of capitalist accumulation by settler elites. The cases of Jerusalem and Rio de Janeiro exemplify this process.
Analisando conflitos urbanos sociais no Brasil e na Palestina com respeito à teoria de colonização permite a identificação das estruturas racistas históricas envolvidas na pacificação violenta de populações nativas. O colonialismo não termina com a declaração de independência. Ele persiste no contexto pós-colonial por meio de constantes expropriações, extermínio, encarceramento e assimilação das populações nativas. Tudo a serviço da acumulação capitalista das elites colonizadoras. Os casos de Jerusalém e Rio de Janeiro ilustram esse processo.
The journalist and human rights activist Gizele Martins, a resident of the Maré favela in Rio de Janeiro, wrote the following after visiting Palestinian/Israeli territories in 2017 at the invitation of Israeli and Palestinian organizations (Martins, 2017): What the residents of the favelas of Maré, located in the north zone of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, experienced during the World Cup is not very different from what the Palestinians undergo in their dwellings today. Just as it is there, the militarization of life is constant and frightening. In Palestine, daily hunts are part of their lives. Here, aerial armored vehicles also fly daily over favelas as part of their lives. . . . Thus there is no alternative but to resist and report each step of this international militarization that is killing the life of a population that has been impoverished over time. Free Palestine! Hurray for the favela!
A few months later she launched, together with other Brazilian and international social movements, the No Armored Cars: Favelas for Life and against Operations campaign, demanding the end of the pacification program of military and police occupation of the favelas (Miranda, 2017). Some of the armored cars used by the Rio de Janeiro military police, purchased for the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, were manufactured by the Israeli company Global Shield (Estadão, 2013).
In March 2018, the Rio de Janeiro councilwoman and activist Marielle Franco, also a resident of the Maré favela, was shot dead in an ambush in the city center. There were demonstrations of solidarity with Marielle all over the world, from the European Parliament to the U.S. Black Lives Matter movement, and messages from Palestinians saying, “Together we face injustice.” The Palestinian National Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Committee wrote the following (BNC, 2018): Our struggles are deeply connected. This is especially true because, both locally and nationally, Brazilian governments have deep military and security relations with the Israeli regime focused on occupation and apartheid. They are importing technologies and training “field-tested” methods to attack our bodies, to repress Brazilian social movements, and to kill the poor black population. We will continue to internationalize our popular resistance and link our struggles to end the militarization and racist oppression of favelas from Rio to Palestine.
Many connections can be established between the spatial context in which occupation takes place in Palestinian territories and that of some Brazilian cities in which militarization, violent daily life, and social injustice are basic components of capitalist accumulation and social exclusion. However, more than elements of a social situation of extreme violence, which exist in many urban areas, the transnational connections between Palestinian and Brazilian social movements show a similarity of urban sociopolitical structures in Palestine/Israel and Brazil. This is not just a matter of these processes’ arising from the transition to the contemporary capitalist context and their links with the militarization of social life and urban spaces for the accumulation of capital, as has been argued up to now by researchers seeking to bring the two contexts together (Mendonça, 2018; Valente, 2015). It could also be argued that this daily militarization is associated with a rationalist transfer of policies aimed at resolving the governance challenges that operate in such contexts 1 (Machold, 2015). The knowledge developed by the Israelis to control Palestinians has become a paradigm and a global brand of security conveying forms of social control from one place to another (Halper, 2015; Khalili, 2012; Machold, 2015).
Without ruling out other approaches, our argument is that the daily oppression and resistance in these contexts are two dimensions of the same process in Palestine and Brazil. We consider it necessary to go beyond simply reporting the existence of similar urban military activities to ask how this social context shapes conflicts. This implies the need to understand that the two urban realities are represented by the same mode of transnational domination, which produces particular social formations, and the type of primitive accumulation related to this process, settler colonialism (Veracini, 2016). Therefore, rather than investigating the flows that directly link the experiences of oppressed populations in Palestine/Israel and Brazil, this article will analyze the conflict situations in these locations as historical products of the mode of accumulation of settler colonialism. This mode of accumulation is reestablished and structurally perpetuated because of the persistence of its logic of elimination of racialized populations under the neoliberal mode of domination (Lloyd and Wolfe, 2016; Veracini, 2016). Racist structures are established to promote the dispossession of racialized populations, confining them to segregated, stigmatized, and highly securitized spaces that allow both the identification of and the establishment of alliances among oppressors and oppressed (Clarno, 2017; Collins, 2011; Svirsky, 2014; Veracini, 2012).
Wolfe (2006: 402) has argued that in settler colonial societies native populations are permanently subordinated to the power of settlers, even in postcolonial contexts, and therefore such societies are “impervious to regime change.” This assumption is essential to our understanding that genocide, mass incarceration, socio-spatial segregation, expropriation, and pacification of racialized populations in Palestine/Israel (Palestinians) and in Brazil (blacks and the other socially marginalized groups that make up the ralé [common people]) 2 are not accidental (the result of the absence of the state, the violent nature of these populations, or modern processes such as industrialization, urbanization, and neoliberalization) but constitutive of the persistence of the settler colonial logic related to the elimination and confinement of racialized populations in the process of expanding the boundaries of the settler colonial society 3 (Lloyd and Wolfe, 2016; Wolfe, 2006).
The settler colonial logic is maintained by the rearrangement of colonial practices and discourses in contemporary times. An important example is the updating of racist structures with regard to racialized native populations formerly seen as backward, barbarous, savage, unproductive, dangerous, and therefore susceptible to being exterminated and deprived of their land and now viewed in Arab-Muslim-terrorist connections in the Palestinian case and in black-poor-favela-dweller-trafficker connections in the Brazilian case (Flauzina, 2006; Lloyd and Wolfe, 2016). Other factors are neoliberal forms of capital reproduction, including dispossession, extermination, and confinement of “disposable” racialized populations (Lloyd and Wolfe, 2016; Veracini, 2016).
In sharing an ethos with settler colonialism, the neoliberal mode of accumulation not only reorganizes structural forces in settler colonial societies but also expands this form of domination throughout the world by making nonnatives subject to regimes similar to those historically imposed on indigenous peoples and thus enabling greater solidarity between native and nonnative peoples at the local and global levels (Veracini, 2015b; 2016). Collins (2011) sees the extension of transnational solidarity to Palestinians in the universalization of problems regarding access to water, land, mobility, and dignified life by the violent practices of neoliberalism worldwide.
The settler colonial theory is particularly relevant to this analogy between the Brazilian and Palestinian contexts because of the increasing number of surveys examining Palestine/Israel issues in a global context, comparing them with, for example, settler colonialism in the United States, Canada, South Africa, and Australia (Salamanca et al., 2012; Veracini, 2015a). “Settler colonialism” describes the historical process by which a group attempts to occupy and assert its sovereignty over native lands and replace the existing native population as part of a project of domination. This invasion is structural and not a single event. Addressing settler colonialism as a structure exposes the fact that it cannot be relegated to the past and at the same time that the present must be historicized. Additionally, settler colonialism is a category of analysis that may be applicable to different historical processes, since there is great diversity in the formation of these settler colonial societies. It is important to emphasize that settler colonialism is always partial, unfinished, and constantly being reinvented (Kauanui, 2016).
Settler colonial studies mostly ignore the city as a strategic place of dispute between colonizers and colonized people. When the city does appear, it is only as a spatial container for bodies and lives, overlooking the interaction between settler colonial structures and urbanization processes. According to Hugill (2017), the settler colonial city’s organizing principle is not primarily exploiting local resources and populations but supporting access to territories for the purpose of state formation, settlement, and capitalist development. It should also be noted that, although critical urban theory has been considered important for examining the inequalities produced by globalized capitalism when new socioeconomic spaces are created, it has neglected the significance of specific structures of settler colonialism as a key dimension of theorizing cities in modernity. Urbanization operationalizes the spatial and economic expropriation of colonized people. The racist imaginary implanted by colonizers of native peoples aims to conceal the colonial nature of cities (Porter and Yiftachel, 2017).
For this reason, this article focuses on Rio de Janeiro and Jerusalem, urban spaces historically emerging from violent social conflicts in which local populations are seen as threats to the social order. Large portions of these populations live concentrated and segregated in places precariously established as informal settlements, with a high poverty rate and poor living conditions, stigmatized as “dangerous” and, consequently, often subjected to state policies of great private interest such as securitization, pacification, revitalization, modernization, urbanization, and integration. Analyzing these conflictive situations through the settler colonial framework will help us to understand the relationship between violence, racism, and capital accumulation in urban areas both historically and in the present. However, settler colonialism has important limitations, among them the exploitation of racialized populations. Although some theorists argue that this is a secondary concern (Veracini, 2016), it is relevant for understanding the reproduction of power, space, and capital and should be more widely discussed theoretically.
Settler Colonialism, Neoliberalism, and Security Policies
The violent deprivation of lands where poor populations live and work for the accumulation of capital by already enriched sectors has captured the attention of researchers examining the dynamics of the reproduction of capital ever since Marx, who considered it a phenomenon of primitive accumulation (Marx and Mandel, 1990). While some view this element as a distinct event, others conceive it as a component of the capitalist accumulation process. Considering the violence of the neoliberal mode of accumulation, Harvey (2003) calls it “accumulation by dispossession.” Similarly, Sassen (2014) observes a “logic of expulsion” in neoliberalism. The result is an increase in inequality and the creation of precarious, impoverished, unemployed and surplus workers, usually confined to informal, precarious, segregated, walled-off, and heavily guarded housing, excluded from the process of capital reproduction (Clarno, 2017; Graham, 2011; Wacquant, 2009).
Settler colonial studies have, however, pointed out that the preferential accumulation of space, without necessarily exploiting the labor of dispossessed populations, has been central to settler colonialism for centuries (Coulthard, 2014; Veracini, 2016). In settler colonialism, colonists seek to occupy and assert sovereignty over native lands. For this it is necessary to replace the population of the destination country by expropriating their land and by confining and/or assimilating them. In contrast to other kinds of colonialism, in which colonial structures of racial differentiation operate to exploit the natives’ labor and natural resources, settler colonialism involves actions to create a national home for the settlers and obscure the structural system of domination. The logic of elimination is about normalizing the settler colonial project not only through the physical but also through the symbolic and cultural exclusion of the natives by means of assimilation methods such as the granting of citizenship (Wolfe, 2006).
Therefore, in settler colonial societies, the natives are seen as expendable, and the relationship between settler colonialism and capitalism entails not only extracting forced labor from racialized populations but permanently eliminating unwanted people and accumulating their lands and wealth (Coulthard, 2014). Coulthard uses Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation to demonstrate that dispossession is a continuous process. In the settler colonial mode of accumulation, territory is the constant factor, while racism legalizes and legitimizes a “civilizing project” that aims to make the land productive (Wolfe, 2006). As colonial areas spread, they become entangled with many other types of spaces related to the dynamics of modernity, urbanization, and globalized capital. Thus settler colonial urban centers or rural areas are likely to be similar no matter where they are located. The social spaces established in settler colonialism are, to a large extent, closely associated with areas of urbanization and modernity, and consequently, when native people resist this process, they are immediately associated with the rejection of development and progress (Veracini, 2010).
In describing the land, race, and government issues associated with accumulation, we assume that settler colonialism is an appropriate theoretical paradigm for grasping particular violent situations (see Clarno, 2017; Lloyd and Wolfe, 2016; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015) such as those that occur in Rio de Janeiro and Jerusalem. Even in postcolonial contexts such as Brazil and Israel, which became sovereign states respectively in 1822 and 1948, the settler colonial logic persists in other respects. Excluded and segregated parcels of urban areas inhabited by racialized populations function as “external areas” to be reproduced by capitalism in order to overcome the constant crises of capital overaccumulation in the same way that occurred in colonial periods, when native lands were legally understood as empty, unproductive, and sparsely inhabited by native “barbarians” and “savages” (Lloyd and Wolfe, 2016).
In a globalized world where there is no longer an “outside” to be expropriated by European colonial powers, racism can play a fundamental role in the creation of this external “Other” to be excluded and have its land expropriated within a legal framework that makes expropriation not necessarily a criminal offense (Lloyd and Wolfe, 2016). The colonizer’s fear of the colonized as a potential threat to the project and to the colonizer’s life justifies violent measures to protect settlers and the labeling of the areas where the colonized live as “dangerous” places that should be avoided, segregated, and pacified (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015).
For capitalism, racialized populations are important for maintaining workers’ fragility, extending exploitation to informal economic activities, and promoting the expansion of precarious housing in urban peripheries (Clarno, 2017). The greater the number of unemployed and fragile workers, the more dissatisfied people who need to be controlled so as not to disturb the social order or interfere with capital accumulation. In such cases, measures of preventive securitization may be employed. Part of this process is the establishment of profiles of “dangerous” people based on supposedly technical risk criteria but either reproducing previous racial criteria or contributing to the racialization of new population groups in drug, terror, migration, poverty, and crime “wars” in various parts of the world (Neocleous, 2011).
Thus, for Clarno (2017), neoliberalism is a form of racial capitalism in which racist policies and elimination and confinement measures are privatized and considered “natural choices” of the market. He points out that, around the world, neoliberal projects intersect with other projects that are not always primarily focused on capital accumulation. This requires concentrating on the complex formations that result from the development of simultaneous projects, which tends to reorganize forms of domination, promoting partial autonomy for historically oppressed groups or projects to reduce inequality without eliminating racism (Clarno, 2017). According to Clarno the connection between racial capitalism and settler colonialism produces a regime of neoliberal apartheid in Palestine/Israel and in South Africa characterized by the marginalization and securitization of racialized populations. There are equivalent situations in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in regimes of private property, urban planning, and security (Blatman-Thomas and Porter, 2018; Howard-Wagner, Bargh, and Altamirano-Jiménez, 2018; Tomiak, 2017). Similarly, Jessé Souza (2017) shows that in Brazil these racialized “Others” (blacks and indigenous people) have historically been eliminated because there is an understanding that they lack the social, moral, and cultural preconditions for participating in modern, liberal, capitalist society. They thus become, generation after generation, a structural ralé. This view reduces all social and political problems to the logic of capital accumulation, concealing the social conflicts of Brazilian society and their origins and consequently naturalizing social inequality and the exclusion of blacks and indigenous people (J. Souza, 2017). In other words, the settler colonial root of neoliberal processes of dispossession and pacification of racialized populations, assimilated to settler colonial society by the extension of citizenship, is normalized as a “market” matter.
Settler Colonialism in Palestine/Israel and Brazil: Racism, Fear, and Pacification
Palestine/Israel
Settler colonial studies portrays Zionism 4 as an ideology and a political movement that subject Palestinians to expropriation, appropriation of land, and destruction of historical memory in pursuit of a new society and a Jewish state (Salamanca et al., 2012). Like other instances of settler colonialism, Zionism is engaged in a zero-sum competition with the native population to control the land. Aware of the violent character of their settler colonial enterprise, intellectuals of the Zionist movement in Palestine in the early twentieth century such as Theodor Herzl and Vladimir Jabotinski imagined a Jewish state that was heavily militarized and “surrounded by walls” to exclude Palestinians and restrain any kind of resistance (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015). The ethnocentrism and racism of the Zionist colonial project, which sought to bring civilization and modernity to Arab barbarians, meant no destiny for natives except expulsion, death, confinement, or assimilation to the Jewish state (Sayegh, 2012). This was reflected both in the construction of fences and surveillance towers in the earliest Zionist colonies in Palestine and the building of walls and checkpoints that fragmented the territory in the interest of security.
The Israeli security regime is historically constituted by the dialectics between the expulsion of Palestinian natives, seen as inferior, and the colonizer’s fear that they will return to their lands (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015). Intensified pacification of the natives occurs historically through the hegemony of the “fear industry” that permeates all levels of Israeli society, building an image of the Palestinian population as a threat—whether within Israel, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem), or in exile—that allows them to be persecuted anywhere in the world (Salamanca et al., 2012; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015). From 1967 to 2015, at least 263,500 Palestinians were expelled from their homes in the Occupied Territories by forced expropriation, house demolition, military operations, revocation of residence rights, and discriminatory denial of building permits (IDMC, 2015). In this and the expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians and the demolition of more than 500 villages in the ethnic cleansing of 1947 and 1949 (Pappé, 2006), the continuity of the logic of “elimination” in Israeli settler colonialism throughout history is apparent. Israel has confined the Palestinians to small land parcels that are increasingly isolated and guarded on the pretext of containing “terrorist threats” (Weizman, 2017).
However, this logic is not restricted to the Occupied Palestinian Territories but a constituent part of the State of Israel itself, even in a postcolonial context. This can be perceived in the Judaization of regions such as the Negev/Naqab, Galilee, and Jerusalem (Plonski, 2017; Yacobi, 2016) and the segregation, expulsion, and division of the Palestinian populations of Israel (Shihade, 2012), discriminated against by at least 30 laws and deep social inequality (half of the Arab population in Israel is classified as poor, compared with approximately 20 percent nationwide [Hesketh et al., 2010]).
Brazil
Latin America has been neglected by contemporary settler colonial studies. In the Southern Cone, the main contributions analyze the new settlement wave of white European settlers and the novel conflicts between colonists and natives in the nineteenth century that produced the “whitening” of these nations (Goebel, 2016; Gott, 2007). Despite this gap in the literature, Gott (2007) points out, it is observed that the behavior of white settlers toward indigenous populations in Latin America is similar to their behavior in Anglo-Saxon settlements and that they were unique in oppressing two different groups in their territories, Amerindians and enslaved African blacks (Gott, 2007). Veracini (2011) observes that slavery is a hybrid regime that combines the logics of elimination and exploitation, and thus it is apparent that the forms of domination of racialized populations of the colonial structure vary with the historical circumstances. Consequently, both Amerindians and Africans are subjected to both logics at different points in the historical process. The sovereignty of the white settlers over the land, however, persisted into the postcolonial period.
Although Brazil has not yet been systematically examined in terms of Wolfe’s (2006) theory of settler colonialism, we argue that there are constitutive elements of this kind of colonialism in the actions of white settlers in this country aimed at eliminating natives and, since the abolition of slavery, African blacks, who, although not natives, were subjected to the same behavior as was aimed at natives from the moment that they came to be considered disposable by the settler colonial society. In order to interpret Brazilian social conflicts in terms of settler colonial theory, we will establish a dialogue with the literature that has sought to identify the racism and the centuries of slavery of the black population in Brazil as fundamental to understanding social conflict in this country.
Settler colonialism in Brazil was initially marked by “pacifications” of indigenous populations led by Portuguese Christian and military missionaries including expropriation, elimination, confinement, and assimilation of entire indigenous communities in an effort to “civilize” them—to produce individuals capable of working for the capital accumulation of the Portuguese settlers (Oliveira, 2014). From the moment the pacifications became burdensome (as early as in the sixteenth century), colonizers began to import African natives as a captive labor force and as agents of involuntary settlement. The natives became redundant populations and targets of increasingly systematic massacres, being confined to small parts of their original territory or forcibly assimilated into colonial society as the frontier expanded into the interior of the country (Alencastro, 2000; Barros and Peres, 2011; Oliveira, 2014). The contempt with which white settlers treated the racialized Africans from the outset may point to the operation of the settler colonial logic of elimination against them. Although their livelihoods and places of residence were considered threatening, criminalized, repressed, and destroyed, the settler colonial order was established to keep blacks both excluded and productive. Africans killed in the course of labor, resistance, or escape were promptly replaced by new captives until the end of the slave trade in 1850 (Barros and Peres, 2011; Moura, 1995).
The end of the trans-Atlantic captive market coincided with the beginning of a new wave of immigration of new white settlers throughout Latin America. Between 1821 and 1932 Brazil received around 4.3 million settlers, mainly in the Southeast and the South 5 (Goebel, 2016). Despite the abolition of slavery and the granting of Brazilian citizenship to blacks, the white elite employed the idea that free black populations were pathologically dangerous and biologically incapable of performing the kind of work that the modern capitalist order demanded to keep them socially, economically, and politically excluded from settler colonial society (Moura, 1995; J. Souza, 2017). Thus the former slaves who came to settle in big cities in search of work, establishing informal settlements known as favelas, became a redundant population for the new Brazilian capitalist cycle (Ferreira, 2009; J. Souza, 2017). Consequently, the settler state power employed against the racialized Afro-descendants aimed not only to reproduce them as labor but also to “eliminate” them and expropriate their land in patterns similar to those historically applied to the natives.
Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century, racism continued to be reinvented in new political, social, and cultural practices and discourses in Brazil, keeping the common people structurally excluded (Flauzina, 2006; J. Souza, 2017). At the beginning of the 2010s, 76 percent of the poorest 10 percent of the population were black. Among the richest 1 percent this number dropped to 15 percent in a country where blacks represented over half the population (53.6 percent [IBGE, 2015]). By 2014, 67 percent of Brazil’s prison population was black and 56 percent between 18 and 29 years old (DEPEN, 2014). According to the 2015 survey, about 30,000 young people from 15 to 29 years old were victims of homicide every year in the country, and 77 percent of them were black—almost four times the proportion among white Brazilians of the same age (Waiselfsz, 2015).
Settler Colonialism, Pacification, and Resistance in Jerusalem and Rio de Janeiro
Jerusalem
Jerusalem occupies a key position in the Israeli-Palestinian issue. It is one of the places most deeply impacted by Israeli settler colonialism and also profoundly connected to transnational capital flows. Because it is located on the border between the formal territory of Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, it brings together the contradictions and connections of the two Israeli governance systems, becoming a place that expresses many of the features of the settler colonial structure of Palestine/Israel (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015; Yiftachel, 2016).
Divided by the Israeli and Transjordan authorities in 1949, Jerusalem’s historical social structure was disrupted, splitting families and ending the coexistence of Arabs and Jews that existed there (Abowd, 2014). From then on West Jerusalem underwent intense Judaization after the expulsion of virtually all its Arab residents (Abowd, 2014).
Starting with the occupation of East Jerusalem by Israelis in 1967, a new stage of settler colonialism began, producing the expropriation of thousands of Palestinians to bring about the Judaization of the space conquered by means of legal institutional instruments permeated with the racist ideology that been part of Israel’s security policies and urban planning from the outset (Alkhalili, 2017). Palestinians living in the annexed areas became permanent residents of Jerusalem without citizenship, subjected to public policies that sought to move them toward the fringes of the municipality or to the increasingly densely populated urban centers of the West Bank. Since 1967, 37 percent of Palestinian property in East Jerusalem has been expropriated for Jewish settlements, highways, and other facilities, while another 54 percent has been declared “green space” in which construction is banned (ICAHD, 2017). In 2017 alone, Jerusalem’s city government evicted some 60,000 Palestinians (OCHA, 2018). Currently, the Palestinian population of Jerusalem, which accounts for about 37 percent of the municipal population (approximately 370,000 people), is confined to 11 percent of East Jerusalem (ICAHD, 2017).
Because only 10.1 percent of the municipal budget is earmarked for Palestinians, the community has a deficit in virtually all municipal services, including housing, classroom construction, and health facilities (ICAHD, 2017). Lack of garbage collection, damaged roads, lack of lighting, and increasing poverty convey the impression that Palestinian neighborhoods are dangerous and rundown places that must be avoided and subjected to urban renewal and security measures to attract more tourists and international investors, justifying the Palestinians’ permanent expulsion, pacification, and elimination from the landscape. Palestinians are viewed collectively as potential criminals and terrorists (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015; Weizman, 2017).
The lands expropriated by the Israeli government are being used for the construction of Jewish settlements that have turned into true colonial complexes surrounding “Great Jerusalem” (Weizman, 2017). While many of these settlements are based on state-oriented planning to colonize as much territory as possible with as few Arabs as possible, the real estate market plays a central role in constructing such buildings, making private capital a vehicle of state policies that correspond to settler colonialism (Allegra, 2013; Clarno, 2017; Yacobi and Tzfadia, 2019). One of the ways in which transnational capital is involved in Israeli settler colonialism is through financial institutions such as the Belgian Dexia and the U.S. AIG, which fund the construction of settlements. Ireland’s Cement Roadstone Holdings owns 25 percent of the stock of Israel’s Mashav, which supplies 75–90 percent of the cement used in Israel, including for the construction of the wall, settlements, and checkpoints. The Danish-Belgian G4S, a global private security giant, through its branch in Israel (Hashmira) offered security services to settlements, prisons, and the police and equipped checkpoints such as Qalandia, which links Jerusalem to Ramallah with metal detectors (Galand, 2010).
From the Arab-Jewish conflicts in the Old City in the 1920s to the Knife Intifada of 2015–2016, there have been numerous episodes of native resistance and settler oppression in Jerusalem. Consequently, the city has become a highly militarized, securitized urban space, monitored and fragmented by security measures. One measure aimed at controlling Palestinians is the magnetic cards that serve as identification for residents. They contain iris information and digital biometrics that can be accessed at checkpoints by Israeli soldiers. Along with intelligent surveillance cameras scattered throughout the city and a computerized data system, they establish automated control over Palestinians with regard to all aspects of their lives. Therefore Palestinians in Jerusalem can be fined and detained at any time by an Israeli police officer for various reasons (Samman, 2013).
For Palestinians the experience of living in enclaves in Jerusalem means constant persecution and monitoring. Their existence is disciplined daily by police actions that pose a constant threat (Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015). In addition, more and more Palestinians are confined to settlements created exclusively for Jews such as Kafr Aqab and the Shuafat refugee camp. They are left to fend for themselves and subjected to police and military actions such as entering people’s homes whenever they want to, even if they do not have warrants (Alkhalili, 2017; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015). In this way, everyday actions such as buying bread, going to school, and visiting friends become potentially dangerous acts that could bring about death or imprisonment.
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro in the twentieth century was marked by fear of violence that was used to justify security and modernization measures in the favelas, which were stigmatized as a producers of criminals and traffickers, in connection with global circuits of capital and new trends in military urbanization (Saborio, 2014). The analysis of Rio de Janeiro, where one in five was a slum dweller in 2010 (1.4 million people), is representative of a country with a slum population of 11.42 million (IBGE, 2011).
While the favelas were considered a problem, this view went hand in hand with the late-nineteenth-century issue of the freed blacks, who were excluded from the country’s industrialization process. They were treated as a surplus population that settled on the edges of the large cities in search of employment (Ferreira, 2009; J. Souza, 2017). Thus the tensions, conflicts, and fears of the rural slave-owning system took over urban spaces, maintaining their exclusiveness through the constant criminalization of blacks’ ways of life. They no longer lived exclusively in quilombos but also in informal settlements established by Afro-descendants in Rio de Janeiro (Batista, 2003).
Inspired by the urban renewal promoted in Paris in the nineteenth century, the government wanted to transform Rio de Janeiro into a “modern tropical city.” Employing hygienic and racial interpretations of the dwellings of former slaves, the state promoted the removal of at least 3,000 slums where Afro-descendants lived in central Rio de Janeiro. The confluence of racial projects and capital accumulation was evident when on top of the rubble avenues, tramways, and buildings were constructed for the growing local bourgeoisie (Ferreira, 2009). It was not long before all the favelas became targets of military repression and removal and their criminalization began. However, state policies were unable to curb their growth (Davis, 2006). Beginning in the 1960s the military dictatorship, on the pretext of eradicating the communist threat represented by the common people, removed at least 62 favelas and almost 175,000 people from the central region, confining them to distant housing centers (Freeman and Burgos, 2017). Once again, the areas were taken over by large real estate developments (Ferreira, 2009).
The emergence of the “war on drugs” in the 1980s produced a new stigmatization of favelas, which were considered dangerous places dominated by traffickers (Batista, 2003). The most recent security measure for dealing with the favela “problem” is the pacification police unit (UPP), launched in the context of the activities of national and international capital in the city in connection with the megaevents of 2000 and 2010. It is no coincidence that the pacification policy focuses on the favelas close to the wealthiest neighborhoods, tourist spots, main access roads, and sports facilities (Freeman and Burgos, 2017).
Supported by large national and transnational corporations such as Coca-Cola, Souza Cruz, and Bradesco Seguros, as well as contractors, private service providers, business associations, nongovernmental organizations, and the Brazilian Football Confederation (Vieira, 2016), the occupation of drug-controlled favelas began in 2008, when the police moved from curbing prohibited activities to controlling areas considered dangerous (Silva, 2015). Pacification units operate as checkpoints, monitoring the residents of favelas and traffickers, disrupting the urban socio-spatial structuring, creating internal boundaries, and restricting the movements of the population, who face a constant state of siege (Saborio, 2013; M. L. Souza, 2012). As a result of restrictions imposed on their development, including the removal of houses and the construction of walls and barriers for “environmental” reasons and urban planning (Ferreira, 2009; M. L. Souza, 2015), the favelas have become virtual “reserves” for the confinement of racialized populations, disconnected from each another and heavily monitored by devices such as cameras and drones (Cardoso, 2013; Saborio, 2013). The daily presence and control of movement in the favelas has not stopped crime there but simply increased the surveillance and disruption of the daily lives of their residents (Menezes, 2014; Saborio, 2013).
It is estimated that around 22,059 families were removed between 2009 and 2015, of which 4,120 were directly related to the megaevents (Comitê Popular Rio da Copa e das Olimpíadas, 2015). Just as in the 1960s, slum dwellers were relocated to popular housing far removed from their original dwelling places. However, the evictions that took place in the neoliberal context of the twenty-first century were driven by a combination of threats, promises, misinformation, and intentional generation of insecurity that amounted to terror (Freeman and Burgos, 2017). In the areas where the favelas had existed, stadiums, public transport systems, expressways, squares, and museums were built with national and transnational capital (Freeman and Burgos, 2017). An important example of this is Porto Maravilha, a revitalization of the port area that involved the expulsion of residents of the country’s first slum, Morro da Providência, to create a commercial space entirely developed by private enterprise. The community had been built by freed slaves in the late nineteenth century and housed generations of port workers but had always been viewed by the authorities and the upper classes as a threatening place that needed to be removed. Around 5 million square meters of public land were granted to the private entities that now manage the entire area, while the region’s 30,000 poor residents continue to be threatened by real estate speculation and live in other pacified favelas in the city (Freeman and Burgos, 2017).
Final Considerations
In general, it has been possible to point out here that impoverished racialized populations and their disputed living spaces in Jerusalem and Rio de Janeiro have become segregated and highly securitized enclaves with social inequality through the combined action of colonial and neoliberal powers. Thus a kind of neoliberal apartheid has been established in these cities (Clarno, 2017). These powers are expressed in discourses and actions of security, modernization, pacification, and integration embedded in racist structures of settler colonialism that seek to eliminate racialized populations and seize their territories. Therefore, they are confined to increasingly smaller areas of land. The similarity of the Palestinian and Brazilian cases shows that conflicts, especially urban ones, in cities of the Global South are still strongly marked by their colonial structures. Thus the settler colonial theory has proved a valuable tool for interpreting the situations observed in Jerusalem and in Rio de Janeiro. We hope that it will contribute to an increase in research on the past and the present of settler colonial power in Brazil and Latin America.
Beyond this, the structural logic of settler colonialism highlights the need for a new decolonizing agenda to establish a “post-settler” society (Svirsky, 2014). One goal of this article is to reveal the settler colonial aspects of mechanisms of oppression in order to contribute to collaborative Brazilian, Palestinian, and Israeli resistance to settler colonialism, capitalism, and racism. Another goal is therefore to help strengthen the transnational struggle against the logic of pacification and accumulation of settler colonial and neoliberal powers, both locally and globally.
We believe that settler colonial urbanism must be analyzed from the perspective of dynamic structuralism (Yiftachel, 2016). The immense power of structural forces must be acknowledged, along with their dynamism and contingency in the face of interactions, struggles, and mobilizations. The focus on native-settler relations should operate as an opening toward broader urban citizenship for other marginalized groups. As native-settler relations continue to evolve along colonial lines, a set of new settler colonial relations is developed in parallel. These depend on colonial structures to employ new exploitative, marginalizing, and essentializing practices with larger groups of migrants, refugees, former slaves, contract workers, minorities, women, settlers, and youth.
Footnotes
Notes
Bruno Huberman is a Ph.D. candidate in international relations in the San Tiago Dantas Post-Graduate Program of the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, São Paulo State University, and the University of Campinas and a researcher at the National Institute of Science and Technology for United States Studies. Reginaldo Mattar Nasser is a professor in the same postgraduate program at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and also a researcher at the National Institute of Science and Technology for United States Studies. Patricia Fierro is a translator living in Quito, Ecuador. The authors are grateful for the comments of editors Ronaldo Munck, Pablo Pozzi, and Richard Potter and for the work on this issue of the editorial collective of Latin American Perspectives. This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior–Brazil, Finance Code 001.