Pacification, Capital Accumulation, and Resistance in Settler Colonial Cities: The Cases of Jerusalem and Rio de Janeiro

• Author: Bruno Huberman,Reginaldo Mattar Nasser
• Date: 01 May 2019
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19835523
• Published date: 01 May 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X19835523

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 226, Vol. 46 No. 3, May 2019, 131–148

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19835523

© 2019 Latin American Perspectives

131

Pacification, Capital Accumulation, and Resistance in

Settler Colonial Cities

The Cases of Jerusalem and Rio de Janeiro

by

Bruno Huberman and Reginaldo Mattar Nasser

Translated by

Patricia Fierro

Approaching urban social conflicts in Brazil and in Palestine/Israel in terms of settler

colonial theory allows the identification of the historical racist structures involved in the

violent pacification of racialized native populations. Settler colonialism does not end with

the declaration of independence but persists in the postcolonial context through the con-

stant expropriation, extermination, confinement, and assimilation of racialized popula-

tions in the service of capitalist accumulation by settler elites. The cases of Jerusalem and

Rio de Janeiro exemplify this process.

Analisando conflitos urbanos sociais no Brasil e na Palestina com respeito à teoria de

colonização permite a identificação das estruturas racistas históricas envolvidas na paci-

ficação violenta de populações nativas. O colonialismo não termina com a declaração de

independência. Ele persiste no contexto pós-colonial por meio de constantes expropriações,

extermínio, encarceramento e assimilação das populações nativas. Tudo a serviço da acu-

mulação capitalista das elites colonizadoras. Os casos de Jerusalém e Rio de Janeiro ilus-

tram esse processo.

Keywords: Settler colonialism, Pacification, Resistance, Brazil, Palestine/Israel

The journalist and human rights activist Gizele Martins, a resident of the

Maré favela in Rio de Janeiro, wrote the following after visiting Palestinian/

Israeli territories in 2017 at the invitation of Israeli and Palestinian organiza-

tions (Martins, 2017):

Bruno Huberman is a Ph.D. candidate in international relations in the San Tiago Dantas Post-

Graduate Program of the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, São Paulo State University,

and the University of Campinas and a researcher at the National Institute of Science and

Technology for United States Studies. Reginaldo Mattar Nasser is a professor in the same post-

graduate program at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and also a researcher at the

National Institute of Science and Technology for United States Studies. Patricia Fierro is a transla-

tor living in Quito, Ecuador. The authors are grateful for the comments of editors Ronaldo Munck,

Pablo Pozzi, and Richard Potter and for the work on this issue of the editorial collective of Latin

American Perspectives. This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento

de Pessoal de Nível Superior–Brazil, Finance Code 001.

835523LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X19835523Latin American PerspectivesHuberman and Nasser

research-article2019

132 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

What the residents of the favelas of Maré, located in the north zone of Rio de

Janeiro, Brazil, experienced during the World Cup is not very different from

what the Palestinians undergo in their dwellings today. Just as it is there, the

militarization of life is constant and frightening. In Palestine, daily hunts are

part of their lives. Here, aerial armored vehicles also fly daily over favelas as

part of their lives. . . .

Thus there is no alternative but to resist and report each step of this interna-

tional militarization that is killing the life of a population that has been impov-

erished over time. Free Palestine! Hurray for the favela!

A few months later she launched, together with other Brazilian and interna-

tional social movements, the No Armored Cars: Favelas for Life and against

Operations campaign, demanding the end of the pacification program of mili-

tary and police occupation of the favelas (Miranda, 2017). Some of the armored

cars used by the Rio de Janeiro military police, purchased for the 2014 World

Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, were manufactured by the Israeli company

Global Shield (Estadão, 2013).

In March 2018, the Rio de Janeiro councilwoman and activist Marielle Franco,

also a resident of the Maré favela, was shot dead in an ambush in the city center.

There were demonstrations of solidarity with Marielle all over the world, from

the European Parliament to the U.S. Black Lives Matter movement, and mes-

sages from Palestinians saying, “Together we face injustice.” The Palestinian

National Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Committee wrote the following

(BNC, 2018):

Our struggles are deeply connected. This is especially true because, both

locally and nationally, Brazilian governments have deep military and security

relations with the Israeli regime focused on occupation and apartheid. They

are importing technologies and training “field-tested” methods to attack our

bodies, to repress Brazilian social movements, and to kill the poor black popu-

lation. We will continue to internationalize our popular resistance and link our

struggles to end the militarization and racist oppression of favelas from Rio to

Palestine.

Many connections can be established between the spatial context in which

occupation takes place in Palestinian territories and that of some Brazilian cities

in which militarization, violent daily life, and social injustice are basic compo-

nents of capitalist accumulation and social exclusion. However, more than ele-

ments of a social situation of extreme violence, which exist in many urban

areas, the transnational connections between Palestinian and Brazilian social

movements show a similarity of urban sociopolitical structures in Palestine/

Israel and Brazil. This is not just a matter of these processes’ arising from the

transition to the contemporary capitalist context and their links with the mili-

tarization of social life and urban spaces for the accumulation of capital, as has

been argued up to now by researchers seeking to bring the two contexts together

(Mendonça, 2018; Valente, 2015). It could also be argued that this daily milita-

rization is associated with a rationalist transfer of policies aimed at resolving

the governance challenges that operate in such contexts1 (Machold, 2015). The

knowledge developed by the Israelis to control Palestinians has become a