The War Machine

The concluding chapter of this book provides a brief biography of Jair Bolsonaro and examines the political turmoil leading up to his victory in the Presidential elections in 2018, focusing on the parliamentary coup against Dilma Rousseff, the expansion of the militias in Rio’s western region, and the assassination of Marielle Franco. By examining the war machine dynamics of policing in Rio’s favelas, it shows how the political project implemented by the Brazilian far-right during Bolsonaro’s time in office can be understood as the expansion and multiplication of colonial spaces, zones of exception and (dis)order where war became a permanent logic of governance. By tracing the genealogies of colonial and cultural war, we can understand the material and ideational dimensions of competing and seemingly contradictory political projects within the Brazilian state apparatus, and how capitalist expansion in Brazil relies on the continued production of a state at war with a part of its own population.