Coalition, Memory, and Legacy: Describing an Attempt to Control Militarization in Rio de Janeiro

How does the control of militarization work? The increasing deployment of soldiers to prevent crime, and the violence by soldiers and police during these deployments, threaten to undermine human rights in Latin America. The conventional wisdom suggests that civilians have little willingness and ability to monitor these deployments. This study aims to complicate the conventional wisdom by examining the 2018 Federal Intervention in Rio de Janeiro, when the Brazilian Army took over local security. The study argues that a coalition of 10 organizations formed to monitor this deployment, that memory was a main motivation for this monitoring, and that, although it failed to constrain government violence in 2018, the coalition led to important, more expansive attempts at controlling militarization. These findings imply that, to understand and enhance how the control of militarization works, scholars and practitioners must attend to local coordination, histories, and legacies more than the conventional wisdom suggests.