Abstract
Many contemporary security issues entail the domestic military deployment, which is deemed to blur the division between armed forces and police. This argument relies on the theoretical coalescence between territory, political authority, and community. In contrast, I argue the military domestic deployment is largely grounded on the process of defining and redefining the boundaries of the community to be protected, which informs the organization of the instruments of force and is shaped throughout the process of legitimizing a particular kind of violence deployment. This article analyses the parliamentary minutes on three domestic military operations in Brazil—Operation Rio (1994), Operation Arcanjo (2010), and the Operation Rio de Janeiro (2017)—through the moral exclusion framework and shows that the debates about whether or not the armed forces should be deployed are embedded in the struggle of drawing the community’s boundaries.
Introduction
The military domestic deployment in operations involving the use of force is entailed in many contemporary security policies aimed to deal with different issues such as transnational organized crime, especially drug trafficking, terrorism, control of migratory flows, and environmental crimes. It is characterized in the literature as a blurring of the division between internal and international security (Bigo, 2001, 2016; Eriksson & Rhinard, 2009; Lutterbeck, 2005), military forces and police (Celi, 2016; Edmunds, 2006; Friesendorf, 2012; Ojo, 2008; Weiss, 2011), defense and public security (Saint-Pierre, 2011), as well as crime and war (Andreas & Price, 2001; Feldman, 2006). The notion of blurring became pervasive in the literature because this kind of military operation challenges the traditional notion, according to which the political world is divided between domestic pacified realms in opposition to an anarchical international system. Under this perspective, states have an instrument of force aimed to enforce the domestic legal system and another responsible to protect the existence of the political unity. Consequently, the domestic instrument of force (i.e., the police) must act with the minimum degree of coercion while the military is supposed to be highly lethal.
This difference is grounded on the claim that the state is constituted by a well-defined community, within which violence is not an acceptable instrument to solve quarrels and which must be protected from foreign aggression. In this sense, it is surprising that the notion of community has not been a more central issue in the debate about the domestic mobilization of armed forces. In effect, when the scholars are not completely dismissive about the role played by the notion of community, it has a secondary place in the analysis, often equated with the state’s territorial borders. The physical division of a territory, however, does not have a meaning by itself (Paasi, 2009). When scholars argue that deploying the armed forces within this circumscription means to use the lethality instrument against its population, it implies that the territorial delimitation is assumed to be also the delimitation of a community. In this sense, even though it is not extensively discussed, there is a particular notion of community implied in the literature, which is taken for granted and must be further addressed.
In fact, the normality benchmark, upon which arguments about a process of blurring are drawn, is a theoretical framework that welds together territory, political authority, and community. However, as it has been widely discussed in the International Relations and International Security fields, this coalescence reifies a homogeneous collectivity and overlooks the historical violent construction of this unity (Ferguson & Mansbach, 1996; Rae, 2003; Ruggie, 1993; Walker, 1993). The deployment of military forces within its state’s territory, aimed at employing violence against part of its population, reveals that the state’s borders do not mediate the division between lethal violence and a downsized force designed to enforce the law.
I argue that the dispute around shaping and reshaping the boundaries of a community (i.e., shifting forward and backward the line between those included and those excluded) is a central element to understand the internal deployment of armed forces to which the literature on military missions has given little attention. The domestic military operations are to a large extent grounded on the political process of defining and redefining the boundaries of the collectivity to be protected. The community’s delimitation not only informs the organization of force, but it is also shaped throughout the process of legitimizing a particular kind of violence deployment, drawing and redrawing the line between those entitled to protection and those who do not belong and might configure a threat to be combated. Under this perspective, membership is not limited to the internal and external territorial delimitation or to the citizenship formal status, it is rather an intersubjective and malleable delimitation, contingently fixed and grounded on moral exclusion and inclusion. Consequently, this article is not an attempt to precisely identify the community boundaries mediating the use of the military instrument. Instead, the aim here is to show that the legitimation of the domestic military deployment entails the effort to frame the target group as alien to the community.
This argument is developed through the analysis of the parliamentary debates on military domestic missions in Brazil. This country was chosen because of the great number of internal operations performed by its armed forces. For this study, I selected three major military operations against drug trafficking that took place in Rio de Janeiro during this period—Operation Rio (1994–1995), Operation Arcanjo (2010–2012), and Operation Rio de Janeiro (2017–2018). These are significant events in terms of the number of soldiers deployed, the great budgetary resources assigned, and the vast public attention it attracted. They were performed during governments with distinct political stands, suggesting that the dispute about the community’s boundaries, aiming to legitimate domestic military operations, is constant in time and is not particular to a political stance. Moreover, focusing on parliamentary debates allows tracing different discourses and positions that permeate the public debate. Grounded on Opotow’s framework on moral exclusion, which “occurs when individuals or groups are perceived as outside the boundary in which moral values, rules, and considerations of fairness apply” (Opotow, 1990, p. 01), a content analysis was undertaken in 59 parliamentary minutes. 1
Four signs of moral exclusion—derogation, dehumanization, technical orientation, and normalization of violence—were identified in the documents regarding the three moments studied. In addition, two signs of opposition to moral exclusion were observer, which I classified as exclusion condemnation and partial inclusion. In this sense, I aim to show that the process of drawing the community’s boundaries played an important role in legitimating military domestic operations in Brazil.
The article is structured as follows. The next section mentions the literature concerned with the domestic deployment of armed forces, especially in South America, and argues that it is provided to establish an argument grounded on a theoretical division between domestic and international realms, which contrasts with a historical perspective and equates community’s boundaries to territorial borders. In the following section, a brief appraisal of the challenges posed to this traditional framework and the difficulties it generates to explaining the military domestic mobilization is presented. Finally, in the last section, the unsettled dispute around the delimitations of the political community permeated the debate about the deployment of the armed forces in Brazil is illustrated.
Literature Review
Inside, Outside, and Military Missions
Addressing the debate about a blurred division between armed forces and police, Weiss (2011), following Eriksson and Rhinard (2009), argues that even though many scholars claim something is changing in the relationship between internal and external security, there is no general framework to guide empirical research. He proposes then a 2-fold definition based on territorial boundaries and the methods and instruments employed by each institution. On the one hand, police are the actor with authority to employ coercion within the borders of the state, while the armed forces are destined for the international sphere. On the other hand, police equipment and methods are organized toward the minimal degree of violence, while the military is prepared for lethality.
Despite Weiss’s criticism, his framework is precisely the one already grounding, explicitly or implicitly, most of the empirical research. This theoretical conception is the traditional parameter of normality, which is deemed to be challenged by the blurring between police and military, as well as internal and external security. Thus, the solution proposed by Weiss is precisely the theoretical starting point of the position he claims to contest. The differentiation of the state’s instruments of force as proposed by him reflects precisely the theoretical separation between a pacified domestic and an anarchic international sphere—distinctive of the liberal political tradition and constitutive of the International Relations field—which has been guiding empirical research on the state’s instruments of force, although not all authors defend it explicitly.
In this sense, the aforementioned claims about rupture refers more to the theoretical perspective conventionally employed to make sense of the distribution of state force instruments than to the way in which these instruments have been actually deployed historically. The conflict between a normative theoretical framework and the historical phenomena translates into conflicting statements among analysts, which can be observed in the studies about the use of armed forces to combat organized crime, especially illicit drug trafficking, in South America.
In this context, scholars, on the one hand, argue the use of the military instrument to fight drug trafficking represents a distortion of the military’s primary missions, allocating the armed forces for tasks they lack training. These authors point out that the military instrument is prepared for the maximum use of violence, while a fellow citizen who commits a crime must be subjected to the legal system, through the minimum use of force (López, 2003, 2016; Mathias & Soares, 2003; E. R. Oliveira, 1994; Rodrigues, 2016; Sain, 2001; Saint-Pierre, 2007; Winand et al., 2016). At the same time, they stress the fact that although in the post-Cold War era and after the wave of military dictatorships in this region the armed forces’ domestic operations have been mostly directed against crime, the South American military have historically performed countless domestic activities (Rouquié, 1984).
In Brazil, although the target of the armed forces’ domestic missions changed according to historical conjunctures, the role of the military as responsible for maintaining internal order has been a constant (Ramalho, 2018). The Brazilian armed forces were responsible for repressing the indigenous population, in the colonial era, as well as, for the containment of contesting movements against the Brazilian Empire, during the first half of the 19th century. During the First Republic (1889–1930), other than activities such as the command of police and firefighter forces, intervention in local politics at federal command, and the imposition of legal order, the military assault to Canudos’ community between 1896 and 1897 is emblematic. Moreover, the military domestic deployment was particularly present in the Estado Novo dictatorial regime, instituted in 1937, and was one of the main features of the military dictatorship, from 1964 to 1985 (Mccann, 2007; Rouquié, 1984).
In South America, the adoption of the traditional theoretical division as the parameter of normality is central to the scholars concerned with the reintegration of the armed forces into a democratic political regime after the end of the military dictatorships, in the late 1980s. The main concern of this part of the literature was the political control of the elected civilian government over the military, which entailed many questions such as removing the armed forces from the center of the political power, institutionalizing the civilian control over the armed forces, democratically defining the defense policy, overseeing the military compliance with the activities determined by the government, and the efficiency with which they perform these tasks (Bruneau & Matei, 2008; Pion-Berlin & Martínez, 2017).
In this context, some authors saw the great number of internal security operations performed by the armed forces as the outcome of a weak political control over the military (Zaveruccha, 2008). This perspective, however, is dismissive of the fact that the domestic mobilization of the military forces in the recent years is part of the civilian government’s agenda and not a decision of the armed forces (Diamint, 2015). Moreover, Levy (2014), while questioning the relation between civilian control of the armed forces and the propensity to engage in military conflicts, noted that politically controlling the military is different from controlling militarization (i.e., “the mechanisms for legitimizing the use of force”). This is also valid for the domestic deployment of the armed forces, since political control refers to who decides, while defining the military’s missions is a matter of what is decided. Accordingly, Croissant et al. (2010) defined civilian control as the primacy over the decision making, that is, the situation in which the elected government decides and supervises all the armed forces’ activities, precluding any military autonomous decision. Under this perspective, the authors claim that military internal security operations, which they deem an exceptional measure, do not undermine per se the political control when ordered and monitored by the civilian authority.
Two other concerns were raised about the armed forces’ role in democracy. First, the use of violence against fellow citizens, given the systematic human rights violations perpetrated by the military during authoritarian governments. Second, the alert that the recurrence of the armed forces’ internal deployment against nonstate actors could jeopardize their ability to respond to conventional military threats and, consequently, undermine the state’s political autonomy (D’araujo & Castro, 2000; Mathias & Soares, 2003; Saint-Pierre, 2007).
The framework that conceives the organization of the state’s instruments of force through a sharp division between internal and external was adopted by South American scholars mainly because it served the normative goal of withdrawing the military from the political realm. In fact, Pion-Berlin and Trinkunas (2011) oppose this approach claiming it is strictly normative. The authors argue that in Latin America, the claim for a clear division between military and police arises from a civilian distrust in the military, after the authoritarian regimes. According to them, this differentiation leaves the states vulnerable to intermediate transnational threats, which lie at the intersection of military and police attributions. In a later work, Pion-Berlin (2016) proposed what he called a pragmatic approach. He questioned on what occasion it would make sense to allocate the armed forces to domestic tasks and claim the decision process should be based on three aspects: the urgency of the problem, the ability of the armed forces to respond effectively to it, and the lack of a feasible alternative. Pion-Berlin’s argument consists of a proposal of how countries should manage their armed forces missions, rather than an explanation of the decisions already taken. In this sense, he came up with another normative principle. Indeed, the urgency of the problem, the military’s responsiveness, and the lack of another solution are not self-evident issues, but they depend on a process of definition and interpretation. Although several actors observe the same situation, it will not necessarily be perceived in the same way, and even if it is, the action resulting from this perception is unlikely to be homogeneous.
The aforementioned tension between claims about the disruption of normality and the historical recurrence of domestic military operations is primarily a tension of the interpretative framework that gives meaning to a set of activities and modes of action considered proper to the armed forces. The urge to insert reality into an a priori theoretical conception hinders the development of the research agenda, as it leads researchers to split into two poles. On one side, a group that condemns the domestic deployment of the armed forces, characterizing it as a distortion of the normal organization of state force instruments (López, 2016; Saint-Pierre, 2015), and, on the other side, those who advocate for a supposedly pragmatic necessity for this kind of military operation, due to the allegedly new features of the threats in the region (Norden, 2016; Pion-Berlin, 2016; Sampó, 2019).
The question to be asked to understand the mobilization of the armed forces within national borders refers less to the identification of essential police and military activities, as it has been done by most of the literature, and more to how the process of proposing and accepting the use of force takes place. This shifting of focus can prevent analysts from taking a normative theoretical framework as an objective reality. Instead, it implies that the theoretical division between a supposedly pacified domestic sphere and an anarchical international domain must be understood as a normative discourse aiming to legitimate a specific form of organizing the violence. It is under this perspective that I argue the definition of the boundaries of community, claimed to be protected through the mobilization of the armed forces, is, among others, an important element in the legitimation of this particular form of state violence, which is neglected when we address the military domestic deployment through the inside/outside framework. In the following section, I further unpack the theoretical framework conventionally underpinning the debate about military missions and the inadequacies of equating community, territory, and polity.
Community Boundaries and Military Missions
The theoretical framework on which the military missions’ literature grounds its accounts divides the world into mutually exclusive pacified political units and an anarchic international system, assuming a coalescence of political unity, territorial borders, and community boundaries, which reifies community and equates it to the state’s boundaries. Thereby, even though questions about community is mainly absent in the academic debate on the armed forces’ missions, by equating its delimitations to the state’s territory, these authors (e.g., López, 2016; Saint-Pierre, 2015) assume a particular conception about community. In this approach, the territorial boundaries represent the point of separation between a polemic and an agonistic situation, in Julien Freund’s terms (1995). In the first, the absence of a centralized authority produces a self-help system whereby each state must calculate its risks and ensure their existence. In this situation, lethal violence, applied through the military, is considered a legitimate instrument to guarantee the state’s existence (Freund, 1995; Mearsheimer, 2001; Waltz, 2002). The second, in contrast, is characterized by the centralization of the use of violence, which underlies a legal order designed to regulate the relationship between citizens. This situation is defined by the abandonment of the use of lethal violence. Thereby, in the agonistic situation, the figure of the enemy (i.e., those whose physical suppression is accepted) is replaced by the figure of the adversary. The main characteristic of a dispute between adversaries is to be guided by previously determined rules, whose founding norm is non-aggression, and which enforcement is carried out by a third party, the state. Domestically, the state’s force is, in this perspective, restricted to the minimum degree needed to enforce the legal system, since it is dealing with its own citizens (Freund, 1995; Giddens, 2008; Santillán, 1997).
However, tracing the contours of the community is much more difficult than this perspective might suggest. It is not clear what defines the community’s boundaries. As we saw, accounts about community are overlooked in the studies on military domestic deployment. Among the few exceptions, Saint-Pierre’s approach (2011) is grounded on the contractualist perspective, from which he claims community is constituted by those who voluntarily assign powers to a sovereign to preserve their own existence. Under this perspective, a community would be constituted through an instrumental decision taken by a group of individuals who decided to form a collectivity through a social contract. Its boundaries, therefore, would be equated with the physical space dwelled by the individuals involved in this initial contract (M. Anderson, 1996).
On another perspective, the right of the state to declare war and thus the legitimacy of employing its lethality is grounded on the claim that it represents a national community (Walzer, 1977). In this sense, the community’s delimitation is associated with the idea of a nation and its link with territorial state—the nation-state. In this context, the community would be constituted of a group of individuals who identify themselves in an imagined community, based on a common sense of inheritance, symbols, and shared culture (B. Anderson, 2008). The concept of nation, however, is absent in the analyzes of military domestic operations. Rather, the rejection of the armed forces’ mobilization within the state’s borders is often grounded on a third definition of the domestic community, which is the idea that the individuals within this circumscription are under the citizenship formal status (López, 2016). For this perspective, the community’s boundaries are traced through the institutional bound of the individuals with the state, which would guarantee a set of civil, political, and social rights, among which is the restriction of the state’s use of force against them (Brubaker, 1992; Marshall, 1950).
These three perspectives have in common the assumption about community’s homogeneity within the state. The organization of state’s instruments of violence is often analyzed through the assumption that the community to be regulated by the police and protected by the armed forces has some level of internal homogeneity, regardless of how it was constituted. Even though the citizenship and contractualist perspectives conceives a broader degree of diversity among its members in relation to the nationalist approach, it also draws a line of unity—formal legal rights—that overlap the limits of state and community.
When it comes to the empirical perspective, however, the delimitation of the community boundaries, which theoretically and discursively legitimize both the state’s sovereign and its lethal force employment, is less clear. Critics of the overlapping between territorial boundaries, sovereignty, and community argue the communities’ constitution, as well as systems of rules and authority, are not necessarily grounded on territorial boundaries. They also claim that the same territory can be shared by more than one community, such as kinship systems, clans, and nomadic and indigenous populations (Agnew, 1994; Ferguson & Mansbach, 1996; Ruggie, 1993; Sack, 1986).
Accordingly, Walby (2003) reiterates the mismatch between states’ borders and community boundaries, arguing that there are more nations than states. Examples are manifold such as the Basque in Spain, the Québécois in Canada, and the Kurds in the Middle East. Walby further argues that the historical experiences often associated with the nation-state, such as 19th-century Spain, Portugal, and France were in fact empires since it cannot be assumed that the population of territories dominated by colonial and neocolonial experiences and were part of the nation.
As for the formal belonging to a community (i.e., citizenship), it can be highlighted that carrying documents that institutionally recognize the membership to a state does not guarantee that an individual enjoys the rights provided by it. Pearce (2010), for instance, argues that the processes of redemocratization in Latin American countries, during the 1980s, which was formally marked by a greater visibility of civil society rights, did not reflect the reduction of violence suffered by these populations, including the one perpetrated by the state.
This brief appraisal of the complex community debate shows that while there is little controversy about the idea that the organization of the state’s instruments of violence is grounded on the existence of a community to be protected and ruled, the delimitation of this community’s boundaries is widely unclear. The territorial circumscription, the formal citizen status, and the nationality do not enable us to explain the practical division between those who are and those who are not submitted to the state’s lethal force—represented here by the armed forces. In this sense, beyond the examples of mismatch between state boundaries and a homogeneous community, it is essential to understand the empirical and contingent dynamic of drawing the boundaries of the community. It is not possible to neglect the fact that, historically, the construction of what is understood as a pacified domestic environment, characterized by a homogeneous community, was a systematic movement of violent imposition of political authority and unity. Heather Rae (2003) advanced this argument by showing that moments of state-building and reconstruction are followed by large forced population displacements, genocide, ethnic cleansing, or forced conversions. Rae defines this process as pathological homogenization and claims it demarcates the borders of the state as the boundaries of a moral community.
In Brazil, the homogenization process can be observed in the pacification practices, which consisted of operations historically performed by the army, to control the territory and the population (Souza et al., 2017). Pacification was first connected to the war of conquest undertaken by the Portuguese crown against the indigenous (Moreira, 2017). It has been perpetuated in this country’s history, during the 19th century, for instance, the repression of many contesting movements was called pacification. According to Souza (2017), the conservative political elite used the fear produced by popular movements and symbolic devices, negatively characterizing the rebels to advance their project of establishing a centralized state. Moreover, during the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985), the Pacificator Medal, a military award, used to be granted to those who succeeded in the repression against political opposition.
Similarly, Bhambra (2015) claims that analyzes about the concept of citizenship often date it back to the ancient Greek city states and presents the French Revolution and the American War of Independence as milestones of its modern crystallization. She argues, however, that the positive articulation of citizenship through these events simplifies its historical narrative and is dismissive about the exclusions that characterized them. Violent practices of constructing an internal unity reveal that the debate about equality, rights, duties, and inclusion within the modern state was preceded by the elimination of those deemed divergent.
Therefore, properly addressing the organization of the state’s instruments of force involves understanding the process through which the community’s boundaries are defined. Consequently, to grasp completely the military domestic deployment, it is necessary to acknowledge that the violent homogenization, embedded in the ideal of unity, is not a past phenomenon, but a feature of the modern state. As Mandelbaum (2016) argues, the congruency of national body and political unity is a fantasy, whose impossibility demands a target to account for its failure in achieving the complete unity.
Method
To explore the relevant role played by the process of shaping and reshaping the community’s boundaries in the legitimation of armed forces deployment within the state’s borders, I analyzed the parliamentary debates about three major domestic military operations in Rio de Janeiro—Operation Rio (1994–1995), Operation Arcanjo, (2010–2012), and Operation Rio de Janeiro (2017–2018). Brazil is a paradigmatic case to study the normalization of internal military missions. Its armed forces performed various domestic operation throughout the country’s history (Mathias & Guzzi, 2010; Mccann, 2007; Rouquié, 1984). From the 90s, they became predominantly directed to combat organized crime. From June 1992 to November 2019, 138 operations have been performed by the armed forces within the Brazilian territory (Ministério da Defesa, 2020b). Brazil also differs from other countries of the region such as Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, where the domestic deployment of the military was strongly restricted, and Colombia, where the armed forces’ domestic operations were related to facing insurgent groups.
The three selected operations allow us to observe the continuity and pervasiveness of the dispute around the community’s boundaries in the political debates on the military domestic mobilization. Moreover, these are the three major operations of this kind developed since the end of the military dictatorship. Operation Rio refers to a set of public security actions undertaken by the armed forces, in cooperation with federal and state police, in the city of Rio de Janeiro between November 1994 and March 1995. Its focus was to contain crime-related violence. It was the first large-scale operation in urban security the military performed after the military dictatorship. Albeit the 1988 Federal Constitution provided that the assurance of law and order is one of the armed forces’ main functions, it was unclear how the military was to be convoked for this task, in terms of legal procedures, which was solved with an ad hoc agreement between the federal and state governments. During the term of this agreement, the military patrolled urban areas, roads, ports, airports, and bus terminals; carried out the security of the elections; and performed many operations in the favelas—very poor areas composed mostly by irregular and precarious housing.
The second event selected, Operation Arcajo, was triggered by a criminal violence outbreak in Rio de Janeiro, which was marked by bus burning and gunfire attacks. It took place between November 2010 and July 2012—the longest operation of this kind—and cost around 33 million dollars (Ministério da Defesa, 2020a). The first operation under the aegis of Arcanjo was in a favela named Vila Cruzeiro, and after the military incursion and confrontation with armed groups, there was a massive fled of criminals to the neighboring favela—Alemão. This escape was emblematic and caused a stir, especially because it was live broadcasted. Operation Arcanjo does not stand out just for its large media coverage and its substantial budget, but also because it was followed by the creation of an unprecedented Pacification Force, commanded by the army, and granted the prerogative of patrolling, searching, and arresting suspects (Ministério da Defesa, 2010).
Operation Rio de Janeiro, in turn, took place from July 2017 to December 2018. It is the second longer operation of this kind after democratization and had a budget of approximately 58 million dollars—25 million dollars more than Operation Arcanjo, which had a longer duration (Ministério da Defesa, 2020a). It is distinctive not only for its dimensions, but because it was overlapped with a federal intervention in the state of Rio de Janeiro, through which the federal government took over the public security administration, which is entitled to the state’s governor. The president at the time, Michel Temer, assigned the army’s general Braga Neto as the federal intervenor. Consequently, at this point, the armed forces were not only an instrument but also part of the political administration of the public security of the state of Rio de Janeiro.
This study was conducted through the qualitative content analysis of 59 min of the House of Representatives and the Federal Senate sessions on military domestic mobilization, including ordinary and extraordinary meetings, special sessions, public hearings, and meetings of the Congress’ Committee on Foreign Affairs and National Defense. The speeches were analyzed based on the concept of moral exclusion, which allowed identifying the process of stressing the boundaries of the community to be protected. As defined by Opotow (1990), moral exclusion is characterized by the perception that an individual or a social group is not included in the moral values and justice considerations of a particular community. Since this group is deemed not to comply with the community’s moral norms, those individuals are not granted the same rights and protections as the members of this particular collectivity. In this sense, the moral exclusion “perpetrators perceive others as psychologically distant, lack[ing] constructive moral obligations toward others, view others as expendable and undeserving, and deny others’ rights, dignity, and autonomy” (Opotow, 1990, p. 2). Under this perspective, the differentiation between acceptable and unacceptable violence is grounded on a moral relation between those who are approving and employing the force and its targeted group (Wilmer, 2002; Wilmer & Mansbach, 2001).
Discussion: Legitimizing the Domestic Deployment of Armed Forces: The Brazilian Case
The inquiry proceeded by identifying in the parliamentarians’ speeches a set of moral exclusion symptoms, as defined by Opotow (1990), as well as claims opposing it. Four main signs of moral exclusion were identified: derogation (i.e., regarding groups as inferiors, which is identified through claims establishing divisions between good and evil or “we” and “them”); dehumanization, characterized by framing someone as devoid of humanity, incapable to feel, and having no moral compass; technical orientation, which consists of emphasizing technical efficiency over its outcomes; and normalization of violence, which is often the result of the first three symptoms and is constituted by claims presenting actions of force as normal, expected, and acceptable.
Conversely, two narratives opposing moral exclusion were identified, which I classified as exclusion condemnation and partial inclusion. The first refers to claims directly associating the military deployment to socioeconomic or racial discrimination. The second consists in the attempt to include part of the targeted areas’ population, by differentiating them from criminals. It is considered a partial inclusion because in these discourses the employment of lethal force against criminal groups is implicitly or explicitly endorsed. Figure 1 displays the number of parliamentary speeches drawing upon one of these six narratives to defend or oppose the military domestic mobilization.
Coded segments frequency. Source. Elaborated by the author based on parliament minutes.
The recurrence of these indicators reinforces the argument that the legitimation of this kind of armed forces deployment is embedded in a dispute over inclusion and exclusion. It does not mean to say that moral exclusion is the only parameter through which political actors seek to legitimate the domestic mobilization of the military. However, the effort to push forward and backward the lines of the community is an important element to make sense of this process. Moreover, another caveat should be added: it is not an effort to precisely identify the boundaries of the Brazilian community but to show that the legitimation of domestic military deployment is not merely a matter of territorial delimitation or only informed by technical preparedness; instead, it is permeated by contending conceptions about who can be submitted to a particular kind of violence.
That being said, throughout the three moments analyzed, a central part of the debate about domestically deploying the armed forces was structured around the categories of the excluded and the included. The first refers to the targets of the armed forces’ action and unfolds through two main narratives. On the one hand, criminals are framed through collective characteristics, being depicted as well-organized armed combatants. On the other hand, the target group is depicted through personal features, such as irrational, unscrupulous, ruthless, and moral inferiority. Even though both narratives are certainly interwoven, this distinction highlights two different logics through which the criminal groups are presented in the exclusion discourses. The included category, in turn, depicts part of the people dwelling in the targeted area as honorable, hardworking, and honest citizens, who happened to be in an unbearable situation of violence, being victimized by both the criminals and the law enforcement agencies. Although the politicians supporting the military domestic deployment and those opposed to it mobilize these two categories in very different ways, both rely their discourses on it, reproducing this logic.
In all the debates analyzed, parliamentarians advocating for the armed forces’ mobilization against organized crime placed criminals outside the community’s boundaries, characterizing them as an enemy army. Under this logic, the moral exclusion is expressed through metaphors related to warfare or other kinds of political organized violence, such as guerilla, terrorism, narcoterrorism, civil conflict, nondeclared war, urban warfare, and crime’s military headquarter. Table 1 presents the frequency in which these terms appeared in the speeches. Framing violence related to crime in terms of warfare places criminals outside the community’s boundaries, by characterizing them as external enemies. Under this logic, advocating for the Operation Rio, Senator Aureo Mello claimed a part of the population had been transformed “in guerrilla member, in bandit, in combatant, in undeclared and unofficial warfighter” (Brasil, 1994d, p. 6010, translated by the author). Accordingly, discourses about winning a war against crime to save society from violence are pervasive (Brasil, 2018a).
Crime as War Word Frequency.
Source. Elaborated by the author based on parliamentary minutes
On the other hand, discourses advocating for military intervention in public security rely on criminals’ individual, instead of collective, features. Under this narrative, for instance, Senator Mello dehumanizes and frames criminals as morally inferiors claiming that the worst problem was: …the insensitivity, [and] the lack of compassion manifested by criminals of all kinds who are exercising their cruelty, without feeling the slightest remorse or realizing that they are entering the realm of teratology and placing (…) Brazil, this great country, in the list of those with a great number of inferior and primitive beings, who can be leveled with animals, panthers, jaguars, crocodiles. (Brasil, 1994d, p. 6009, translated by the author)
Both the group and the individual narrative aim to justify the military violence mobilized within the state’s borders. In effect, the conclusion to which the claimants recurrently reach through these lines of argumentation is the allegedly pressing need and, sometimes, inevitability to use force, particularly the military force, against the targeted group. The narratives framing criminals as a well-organized armed group seek to naturalize a militarized response through the argument that this is the way an alien enemy is supposed to be fought. Several claimants aver “criminals must be treated with bullets” (Brasil, 2018b, translated by the author), “one does not combat criminals with flowers” (Brasil, 2018c, translated by the author), or claim “it is only possible to combat war with war” (Brasil, 2018a, translated by the author). Deputy Rodrigo Maia even quoted Winston Churchill to sustain that in war, “we must do whatever is necessary” (Brasil, 2018a, translated by the author).
Moreover, this logic is embedded in a notion of technicality, the idea according to which the militarized response to the organized crime is grounded on a technical decision related to the kind of weaponry (Brasil, 2010a) employed by criminals and to the particularities of this kind of combat, defined through expressions as “civil war” (Brasil, 1994d), “urban warfare” (Brasil, 2017b), or “guerilla” (Brasil, 2010a), whose recurrency can be seen in Table 1. As Opotow (1990) argued, focusing on the technical effectiveness over the result of the action (i.e., the deploying the state’s instrument of lethality within densely populated areas) is another sign of moral exclusion. In this sense, casualties are framed as side effects, an unfortunate but expected feature inherent to the situation. For instance, in 2017, the head of the Institutional Security Office, General Sérgio Etchegoyen, referring to the military operation in course in Rio de Janeiro, stated “there will be failures and incidents. We are at war. It will happen. Undesirable things, including injustices, are likely to happen. The society either wants it or does not” (C. Oliveira, 2017). The argument had been made on a number of occasions before Etchegoyen’s speech and has been widely reiterated after it. For instance, in 2010, Senator Leomar Quintanilha admitted that “the consequences are sad, innocent people are falling, but there must be a reaction, it has to be done” (Brasil, 2010c, p. 54209, translated by the author). In 2018, as well, Senator Eduardo Lopes claimed “we can face difficult moments, because there may be a reaction from the criminals, [and] there may be (…) moments of war”, however, “every change requires sacrifice” (Brasil, 2017a).
On the other hand, the discourses grounded on the subjective morality narrative call for a sort of society purification. For instance, in 1994, Deputy Alceste Almeida referred to the Operation Rio as a “necessary purge” (Brasil, 1994a), while Deputy Benedito Sá stated society urged for a moralizing measure (Brasil, 1994c). Deputy Valter Pereira, by its turn, argued violence against criminals was expected, since “homeopathy will not calm down the nerves of criminals who assaulted the public peace and the citizens’ fundamental rights” (Brasil, 1994c, translated by the author).
While the targeted group is negatively characterized, particular groups are hailed as holders of the community’s moral values, which in the Brazilian case are often the armed forces. It is illustrative for this matter, parliamentarians advocating for an expansion of the mandatory conscription as an instrument to combat criminality since they consider the military service to have a moralizing effect, which would supposedly prevent those who served to engage in criminal activities (Senado Federal, 2017). In this sense, the military is characterized as brave or heroes, the “greatest guardians of this great nation and the spine (…) that keeps this body upright and civilized” (Brasil, 1994b, translated by the author).
Politicians opposed to the domestic mobilization of armed forces, in turn, focused their discourses on the second category (i.e., the included). They denounced the discourses aforementioned as prejudiced and racist. Deputy Haroldo Lima, for instance, argued that restricting the drug trafficking issue to the figure of the favela’s criminal “reveals a discriminatory, racist vision that is, consequently, conniving with the real leaders of the drug trafficking” (Brasil, 1994d, translated by the author). Accordingly, the military domestic operations were frequently characterized by the opposition as a war against the poor and the criminalization of poverty (Brasil, 2017b). In this sense, Deputy Jandira Feghali stated “it is the favela’s poor and black people who are in the weapons’ crosshair” (Brasil, 2018a, translated by the author). Under this perspective, Senator Joaquim Beato contested the idea of inevitable casualties arguing that: People who justify the killing of innocents (…), accepting this as a natural consequence of the repression and who then say that ‘you cannot make an omelet without breaking the eggs’ (…) have a stupid brutality, a racist brutality. (…) It is necessary to distinguish who is a favela’s resident and who is a criminal (Brasil, 1994e, translated by the author).
In this sense, the struggle between the opposition to the military domestic deployment and those who advocate it is a matter of where to draw the line between the included and the excluded, rather than a quest about what kind of violence—minimum police coercion or maximum military lethality—can be deployed within the state’s territory. The debate was about who can undergo the state’s lethal violence, meaning who is part of the community. Even though there is not a formal withdrawn of the morally excluded legal rights, exclusionary claims promote a sense of exceptionality that works as a legitimation mechanism for deploying the state’s instrument of maximum force.
Conclusion
As we have seen, the deployment of the armed forces within the boundaries of the state, specifically in operations involving the employment of force, raises concerns about the military and police-specific attributions. It is deemed to be a process of blurring between these two instruments of violence since it challenges the traditional theoretical division between a pacified domestic realm and an anarchical international system. Even though this distinction, and the consequent military–police division, relies on the idea of a homogeneous community to be protected from external threats and internally regulated, the literature on military missions tends to overlook the meaning of community, which is regularly equated to the state’s territorial borders. The Brazilian case reveals that the boundaries of community are indeed central in drawing the line between police and military attributions, which entails defining what kind of violence is acceptable and against whom it can be deployed. This line, however, is not territorial and fixed, as the traditional framework suggests, but moral and unsettled. In this sense, to fully grasp what is changing in this process of blurring, it is fundamental to identify the political process through which the definition of community is being shaped and reshaped.
Supplemental Material
Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-1-afs-10.1177_0095327X20988106 - Violence and Moral Exclusion: Legitimizing Domestic Military Operations in Brazil
Supplemental Material, sj-pdf-1-afs-10.1177_0095327X20988106 for Violence and Moral Exclusion: Legitimizing Domestic Military Operations in Brazil by David P. Succi Junior in Armed Forces & Society
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
For their thoughtful feedback, I thank Armed Forces & Society editor and reviewers. I am also grateful to Bárbara Motta and Michael Williams for reading and commenting previous versions of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by São Paulo Research Foundation—FAPESP (2019/07372-7).
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