Violence and Moral Exclusion: Legitimizing Domestic Military Operations in Brazil

• Published date: 01 July 2022
• Author: David P. Succi Junior
• Date: 01 July 2022
• DOI: 10.1177/0095327X20988106
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0095327X20988106

Armed Forces & Society

2022, Vol. 48(3) 634 –656

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/0095327X20988106

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Article

Original Manuscript

Violence and Moral

Exclusion: Legitimizing

Domestic Military

Operations in Brazil

David P. Succi Junior

1

Abstract

Many contemporary security issues entail the domestic military deployment, which

is deemed to blur the division between armed forces and police. This argument

relies on the theoretical coa lescence between territo ry, political authority, a nd

community. In contrast, I argue the military domestic deployment is largely

grounded on the process of defining and redefining the boundaries of the

community to be protected, which informs the organization of the instruments of

force and is shaped throughout the process of legitimizing a particular kind of

violence deployment. This article analyses the parliamentary minutes on three

domestic military operations in Brazil—Operation Rio (1994), Operation Arcanjo

(2010), and the Operation Rio de Janeiro (2017)—through t he moral exclusion

framework and shows that the debates about whether or not the armed forces

should be deployed are embedded in the struggle of drawing the community’s

boundaries.

Keywords

South Central America, civil military relations, defense policy, policing, international

relations

1

Graduate School of International Relations, Sa

˜o Paulo State University (UNESP), Sa

˜o Paulo, Brazil

Corresponding Author:

David P. Succi Junior, Graduate School of International Relations, Sa

˜o Paulo State University (UNESP),

San Tiago Dantas, Prac¸a da S´

e, 108—3Andar, Sa

˜o Paulo, 01001-900, Brazil.

Email: david.succi@unesp.br

Junior 635

Original Manuscript

Violence and Moral

Exclusion: Legitimizing

Domestic Military

Operations in Brazil

David P. Succi Junior

1

Abstract

Many contemporary security issues entail the domestic military deployment, which

is deemed to blur the division between armed forces and police. This argument

relies on the theoretical coa lescence between territo ry, political authority, a nd

community. In contrast, I argue the military domestic deployment is largely

grounded on the process of defining and redefining the boundaries of the

community to be protected, which informs the organization of the instruments of

force and is shaped throughout the process of legitimizing a particular kind of

violence deployment. This article analyses the parliamentary minutes on three

domestic military operations in Brazil—Operation Rio (1994), Operation Arcanjo

(2010), and the Operation Rio de Janeiro (2017)—through t he moral exclusion

framework and shows that the debates about whether or not the armed forces

should be deployed are embedded in the struggle of drawing the community’s

boundaries.

Keywords

South Central America, civil military relations, defense policy, policing, international

relations

1

Graduate School of International Relations, Sa

˜o Paulo State University (UNESP), Sa

˜o Paulo, Brazil

Corresponding Author:

David P. Succi Junior, Graduate School of International Relations, Sa

˜o Paulo State University (UNESP),

San Tiago Dantas, Prac¸a da S´

e, 108—3Andar, Sa

˜o Paulo, 01001-900, Brazil.

Email: david.succi@unesp.br

Introduction

The military domestic deployment in operations involving the use of force is

entailed in many contemporary security policies aimed to deal with different issues

such as transnational organized crime, especially drug trafficking, terrorism, control

of migratory flows, and environmental crimes. It is characterized in the literature as

a blurring of the division between internal and international security (Bigo, 2001,

2016; Eriksson & Rhinard, 2009; Lutterbeck, 2005), military forces and police

(Celi, 2016; Edmunds, 2006; Friesendorf, 2012; Ojo, 2008; Weiss, 2011), defense

and public security (Saint-Pierre, 2011), as well as crime and war (Andreas & Price,

2001; Feldman, 2006). The notion of blurring became pervasive in the literature

because this kind of military operation challenges the traditional notion, according to

which the political world is divided between domestic pacified realms in opposition

to an anarchical international system. Under this perspective, states have an instru-

ment of force aimed to enforce the domestic legal system and another responsible to

protect the existence of the political unity. Consequently, the domestic instrument of

force (i.e., the police) must act with the minimum degree of coercion while the

military is supposed to be highly lethal.

This difference is grounded on the claim that the state is constituted by a

well-defined community, within which violence is not an acceptable instrument to

solve quarrels and which must be protected from foreign aggression. In this sense, it

is surprising that the notion of community has not been a more central issue in the

debate about the domestic mobilization of armed forces. In effect, when the scholars

are not completely dismissive about the role played by the notion of community, it

has a secondary place in the analysis, often equated with the state’s territorial

borders. The physical division of a territory, however, does not have a meaning

by itself (Paasi, 2009). When scholars argue that deploying the armed forces within

this circumscription means to use the lethality instrument against its population,

it implies that the territorial delimitation is assumed to be also the delimitation of

a community. In this sense, even though it is not extensively discussed, there is a

particular notion of community implied in the literature, which is taken for granted

and must be further addressed.

In fact, the normality benchmark, upon which arguments about a process of blur-

ring are drawn, is a theoretical framework that welds together territory, political

authority, and community. However, as it has been widely discussed in the Interna-

tional Relations and International Security fields, this coalescence reifies a homoge-

neous collectivity and overlooks the historical violent construction of this

unity (Ferguson & Mansbach, 1996; Rae, 2003; Ruggie, 1993; Walker, 1993). The

deployment of military forces within its state’s territory, aimed at employing violence

against part of its population, reveals that the state’s borders do not mediate the

division between lethal violence and a downsized force designed to enforce the law.

I argue that the dispute around shaping and reshaping the boundaries of a

community (i.e., shifting forward and backward the line between those included

2Armed Forces & Society XX(X)