Violent Becomings

This chapter explores how violence is reproduced and legitimized through processes of subjective formation that are shaped by the Military Police’s institutional hierarchy as well as the logic of war that characterizes policing in Rio’s favelas. The analysis focuses on how an ethics of individual responsibility and feelings of moral superiority associated with military identity shape the police officers' attribution of poverty to the moral shortcomings of favela residents, precisely because of the sociological proximity between the officers and the people living in the communities that they are set to patrol. It shows how the Christian-conservative moral order that the police officers try to install in the favelas is built around respect for police authority, family values, and religion, and how patriarchal authority in Brazil is exercised through practices of care as well as of force.