Brazil-Israel Relations and the Marketing of Urban Security Expertise

Abstract

The transnational (re)making of contemporary urban pacification practices, discourses, and technologies between Brazil and Israel is underpinned by coercive entanglements. The Israeli experience with the occupation of the Palestinian territories has brought the Israel Defense Forces and the country’s private security industry international recognition for their urban warfare skills and related security technologies; Brazil has recently gained international recognition for urban pacification efforts that emphasize the country’s military’s ability to combine “hard” and “soft” skills, thereby foregrounding the nexus of military and humanitarian forms of engagement on urban battlefields. Empirical findings framed by critical scholarship on pacification demonstrate how recent shifts in the military and diplomatic relations between the two countries seek to symbolically capitalize on their own and each other’s urban warfare experiences to promote themselves as security experts capable of addressing a range of future urban threat scenarios—from urban warfare to antigang and antiriot policing and peacekeeping. A reorganização transnacional das práticas, discursos e tecnologias de urbanização contemporânea entre Brasil e Israel são movidas por envolvimento coercitivo. A experiência israelense de ocupação dos territórios palestinos trouxe prestígio internacional às Forças de Defesa Israelense, bem como à indústria de segurança particular do país, em virtude de tecnologia de combate urbano. Brasil recentemente alcançou reconhecimento internacional pelos esforços de pacificação urbana, que enfatizam a habilidade das forças armadas do país em combinar “soft and hard skills”, criando assim um nexo de interação militar e humanitário no campo de batalha urbano. Observações produzidas em moldura crítica acadêmica sobre pacificação demonstram de que modo mudanças recentes nas relações diplomática e militar dos dois países visam capitalizar simbolicamente as experiências respectivas para promoverem a si mesmos como especialistas em segurança capazes de tratar uma variedade de cenários urbanos de risco—desde a guerra urbana contra gangs até o policiamento de manifestações.

The triangle of security governance: Sovereignty, discipline and the ‘government of things’ in Olympic Rio de Janeiro

“…The second discussion that is important for this article looks at digital security technologies specifically applied in the context of the so-called Global South, where policing powers and ‘the right to kill’ are much more diversely distributed across public and private sectors and criminal and non-criminal domains (Denyer Willis, 2015; Diphoorn, 2015). Informed by a postcolonial posture, scholars have shown how a globalized security assemblage of technologies, materialities, knowledge and discourses established the urban settings of the postcolonies as new testing grounds for learning about and developing new security technologies before they are subsequently retransferred to Northern, Eastern and Southern cities (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2006; Grassiani and Müller, 2019; Hönke and Müller, 2012; Müller and Steinke, 2018). In relation to these tendencies towards testing new technologies in settings of intensified state violence, there is also a growing body of literature that contests the dominant narratives of a techno-fix that politically proposes technological solutions to otherwise pressing problems (Bruno et al, 2019; Cardoso, 2012).…”

Insurance technopolitics: Car theft, recovery, and tracking systems in São Paulo

“…Addressing recent transformations to the management of risk, O’Malley (2009) argues that ‘risk in and of itself’ is not growing exponentially, but that the propensity and the disposition to treat processes according to the logic of risk is. Paying particular attention to this process, part of the literature addresses the issue of policies for risk management and the technization of urban security (Graham, 2017; Grassiani and Müller, 2019; Wilson and Weber, 2008). Urban territories have become fertile ground for the growing market for services and technology in the security realm, part of which is made up of the insurance market, including car insurance companies.…”

Geopolitics as an ethnographic object and agenda

“…The state actors or those who assume to represent ‘the human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’ (Weber, 1994, p. 310) share this claim increasingly with non‐state actors, among whom ethnographers find new interlocutors, as in the case of privatization of warfare, intelligence and policing (Low & Maguire, 2019). Whether one traces contract mercenaries of global wars in Afghanistan, Bosnia and elsewhere (Coburn, 2018; Li, 2020; Singer, 2003); private security companies (Diphoorn & Grassiani, 2019; Grassiani & Diphoorn, 2017; Grassiani & Müller, 2019); supranational policing agencies (Andersson, 2014; Feldman, 2012, 2018); the makers of national security culture and architecture (Collier & Lakoff, 2022; González, 2010; Gusterson, 1996, 2004; Masco, 2014); or critical infrastructure protection policies (Cavelty & Kristensen, 2008), the proliferation of actors and agents of geopolitics‐in‐the‐making underscores the networked, diffuse and often sinister operations of war, militarism and securitization gone global and neoliberal. Confronting militarism and securitization stimulates scholarly inventiveness to devise new instruments and techniques to overcome their seeming opacity (see Pallister‐Wilkins et al., 2020) and to design new conceptual currencies to break their ostensibly hegemonic pervasiveness.…”