Brown University doctoral candidate Stephanie Savell, supervised by Dr. Catherine Lutz, will undertake research on the transnational circulation of security expertise, state authority, and citizenship. International and domestic security operations are often treated as distinct but frequently military institutions and overseas deployments may affect domestic policing. The researcher's goal is to discover if and why it matters for policing and for the urban poor that security knowledge and practices circulate internationally, and that the distinct boundaries between police and military are fading.
The research will focus on a Brazilian policing model that employs techniques refined while leading the United Nations' peacekeeping force in Haiti. Data collection will be carried out in a Rio de Janeiro shanty town or favela where police forces are active. She will employ a mix of social science research methods including interviews, life histories, and participant observation, to understand how residents, police and military forces, and policymakers operate, experience, and assess this policing model.
This research is important because it takes a novel ethnographic approach to studying security, which is more often studied with other social science methods. Ethnography can shed light on what security means in everyday lives, highlighting the surprises and contradictions of lived experiences of policing policy. This is an urgent task in an era when many governments are eager to implement policies to diminish crime-related urban violence. Moreover, this study will further our theoretical understandings of state sovereignty, the interlinking of security and human rights, militarized policing, and the consequences of this increasingly common type of state authority for marginalized city residents. Funding this research also supports the education of a graduate student.
Rio de Janeiro has a controversial police program that aims to replace drug trafficking gangs’ control of favelas – vast informal settlements throughout the city – with "Police Pacifying Units." The "pacification" program, launched in 2008, purportedly breaks with a historical pattern of violent police raids on favelas to crack down on drugs, and favela residents’ corresponding reliance on trafficking gangs, not police, for systems of order on a day-to-day basis. The first step of pacification, however, resembles the police raids of the past: a military-style incursion into favelas, often drawing on army personnel, equipment, and tactics. Today these incursions are followed by occupations of urban neighborhoods and intensified social programs, with the government advertising these programs as democratic "community policing." I explored these issues through 15 months of ethnographic research (January 2013 – March 2014) on police pacification. I focused on the immense favela Complexo do Alemão, where an almost two year military occupation preceded the installation of police units. Living in the favela for a year, I built relationships that gave me access to residents’ beliefs, in a context of fear and reticence with outsiders. I conducted interviews with, and participated in and observed the daily activities of residents. Traveling out of the favela, I did the same with police and military operatives, policymakers, and security strategists in Rio de Janeiro. Multi-sited research posed challenges – I could not conduct research with police in Alemão, for example, for fear of being seen as an informant – but it also gave me a unique vantage point. Rather than simply investigating public security from a single or even multiple points of view, my dissertation examines how the experiences and ideas of various groups intersect and collide. This methodology enabled me to go beyond polarized perspectives that either unquestioningly support state practices, or universally condemn policing among the urban poor. My analysis highlights how security language and practices shape, and are shaped by, communities, cultures, and identities. Though many scholars and activists rightly denounce the militarization of policing, and argue that police pacification is merely a continuation of past state repression under a different guise, these arguments do not account for the complexities of this case. Contrary to Western liberal notions of democratic policing, many favela residents find value in masculinized, dominant, and at times violent forms of coercive authority. This partially explains why Alemão residents accorded more legitimacy to the military occupation than to the current police presence in their neighborhoods. The variety of security forces in the favela – police, military, and trafficking gangs – each see themselves as moral actors, motivated not just by desires for control or profit, but also by such goals as securing residents’ rights to state services, or providing order through peaceful conflict mediation. In order to theorize the intersection of security and rights, I showcase a unique group of favela activists who are calling for their "right to public security," or protection of life, body, and property. Finally, I argue that any study of security must recognize the pressing structural insecurities of everyday favela life, including environmental and financial precarity. When policymakers and public discourses focus on problems of crime and policing in favelas, such attention renders other insecurities less visible. By discussing what fear, safety, and security actually mean in the cultural context of everyday favela life, my account avoids this blindspot. In recent U.S. news, the shooting death of Michael Brown at the hands of police in Ferguson, Missouri raised outcries against the "militarization" of policing. My dissertation investigates a related case in Brazil, and there are countless other examples of growing tensions between militarized police and citizens in democratic states worldwide. Contemporary events highlight the need to understand the essential role of security policy in global societies, as well as the diverse perspectives the population might have on policing. To do so, we must go beyond mainstream security studies, a field that remains somewhat state-centered in perspective, preventing understanding citizen perspectives. Through a grounded, contextually rich study of the everyday meanings of security, my research upends taken for granted assumptions about the nature of policing, rights, and state authority itself.
