This article examines residents' everyday experiences and perceptions of changing urban politics and racism in a "pacified" favela, or poor informal neighbourhood, in Rio de Janeiro, drawing on longitudinal ethnographic data from 2011 to 2018. The findings suggest that despite a discourse on inclusion, human rights, and citizenship, the police pacification program and urban security interventions aimed at "civilizing" the favela's residents as "undesirable others," drawing on racialization. The naturalization, legitimization, and reproduction of police violence promote the operation of racial and socio-spatial inequalities and privileges through what I describe as pigmentocratic everyday practices. These processes continually shape the condition of possibilities for the dehumanization of blackness, exclusion, inclusion, and resistance in a society influenced by the myth of racial democracy and that celebrates both diversity and ideologies of whitening.
This article draws on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork to explore residents’ everyday experiences of urban militarisation in a ‘pacified’ favela in Brazil. The findings indicate some residents’ satisfaction with the police pacification unit (UPP) during its first years, when weapons were taken off the street. However, since 2017, shootouts have occurred daily, and favela residents now state that they feel like hostages between the police and traffickers and believe that the UPP never worked. I argue that the pacification programme operates drawing on ‘coloniality of power’, while unfolding new forms of militarisation/pacification as a changing-same, increasingly ‘borderising bodies’, as Mbembe writes. Simultaneously, as bodies are increasingly being borderised by the work of death, the struggles to decolonise territories also unfolds beyond the physical borders. The increased legitimisation of militarisation towards the urban poor draws on a ‘racial axis’, wherein certain bodies are seen as threats becoming contested ‘borders’.
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