Postsecular pacification : Pentecostalism and military urbanism in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

In this chapter, we reflect on the installment of Pacifying Police Units (Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora, UPPs) and on Brazilian military interventions in Rio de Janeiro in the years leading up to the Summer Olympics of 2016. We argue that the ‘pacification’ of the city entailed a rapprochement between religious groups and practices on the one hand and military and police actions on the other. Governmental promises to regain sovereign control of ‘wild’ urban territories leaned on Biblical representations of angelic intervention while governmental practices in urban places leaned on Pentecostal actors. The main argument of the chapter is that the continuum between this political theology and this religious governmentality amounts to what we call ‘postsecular pacification’, which we roughly define as the fusion of military interventions on national soil under democracy on the one hand and religious modes of governing urban territories on the other. To make this argument, this chapter by and large engages with two contemporary scholarly discussions: one centered on the militarization of urban life and the other on postsecular urbanism. We argue that insights harvested from these discussions should be united if we want to understand contemporary power and rule in Rio de Janeiro.