The Representation and Other Imaginings of Pacification: From Government Speeches to Lived Experiences in Rio de Janeiro's Favelas
Public Deposited- Last Modified
- May 5, 2020
- Creator
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Ritter, Juliana de Souza
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Geography
- Abstract
- In 2008, Rio de Janeiro’s government launched a project to pacify favelas through the implementation of Pacifying Police Units (UPPs), establishing a continuous military presence in the lives of its residents. The project required not only physical occupation, but also a vast publicity campaign of daily commercials, videos of each pacification, and events held within favelas with top government officials in attendance. Through active constructive discourse, this propaganda developed a singular image of favelas and their residents: of a place and people that necessitated pacification. However, the implementation of the project fell short of its publicized goals. The vastness of favelas—home to 1.5 million or about 24% of Rio de Janeiro’s population—problematizes pacification as a ready-made military project that is not tailored to each favela’s needs. While the UPPs claim within their logo that “the UPP came to stay!” people who live in favelas see pacification differently, using words like “spoiled” to describe its current state. After the inaugural year of the UPPs, I was asked to write a fifteen-page research paper on something that I was passionate about. This was my sophomore year at Chapel Hill High School and the beginning to my interest in what would be several class assignments, an internship, a geography capstone paper, and now an honors thesis about the pacification of favelas in Rio de Janeiro. I have accompanied pacification since 2009 through Brazil’s vast changes such as the FIFA World Cup, Olympics, impeachment of Dilma Rousseff, and countless corruption scandals. Within the classroom setting, my focus on pacification was always limited to historical research and analyses that could be done using data accessible to me and within a semester’s time span. The development of this project into my thesis allowed me to expand to questions that could be answered by multiple sources of data. In this thesis, I examine the current state of the military project and ask: How does the Brazilian government’s construction of pacification differ from the lived experiences of residents within pacified favelas? Further, how is the government representing pacification in a way that makes it palatable to international audiences, the pacifying police, and favela residents themselves? To answer these questions I will begin by situating pacification within the political geography literature on territory and power, and outlining how these are expressed in geographies of militarization and securitization. I then draw on the history of Rio de Janeiro in order to contextualize favelas and previous tactics of favela removal. Considering both the geographical concepts and history of pacification, I provide the reader with the tools to follow my discussion of twenty-five government speeches between 2008 and 2016, as well as five semi-structured interviews with six favela residents.
- Date of publication
- spring 2017
- Keyword
- DOI
- Resource type
- Rights statement
- In Copyright
- Note
- Funding: Gillian T. Cell Senior Thesis Research Award in the College of Arts & Sciences administered by Honors Carolina
- Advisor
- Ritter, Juliana
- Degree
- Bachelor of Arts
- Academic concentration
- Geography
- Honors level
- Honors
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Graduation year
- 2017
- Language
- English
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