BETWEEN THE GUNSIGHT AND OBLIVION – NECROPOLITICS IN POLICE OPERATIONS IN RIO DE JANEIRO: STATE VIOLENCE, HUMAN RIGHTS, AND THE “POLITICS OF DEATH” FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF ACHILLE MBEMBE

Abstract

In recent decades, Rio de Janeiro has been the scene of police operations marked by extreme lethality, particularly in popular territories that are historically racialized and precarious. Recent episodes of massacres –which, taken together, exceed one hundred people killed in state actions – expose the normalization of death as a technique of government and reveal the penal selectivity that defines who may live and who must die. In this context, police violence ceases to be an exception and becomes a continuous policy of territorial control, producing fear, silencing, and the social erasure of victims. The recurrence of these actions, often justified by the discourse of the “war on drugs,” reveals a state rationality that suspends rights, relativizes constitutional guarantees, and transforms death into a legitimate instrument for managing populations deemed disposable. In light of this context, this article takes necropolitics in police operations in Rio de Janeiro as its object of analysis, understood as a dispositif of power that administers life through the systematic production of death. Anchored in the theoretical framework of Achille Mbembe (2012; 2017; 2019; 2021), the study investigates how necropolitical logic materializes in police practices, institutional narratives, and the invisibilization of victims, articulating state violence, structural racism, and violations of human rights. It seeks to demonstrate that such operations are not isolated deviations, but rather expressions of a security policy that operates through permanent exception and the dehumanization of specific bodies and territories. As a guiding question, the article asks: in what ways can police operations in Rio de Janeiro be understood as expressions of necropolitics, insofar as they produce the systematic death of specific populations, normalize state violence, and strain the limits of human rights within the Brazilian democratic context? Theoretically, the study draws centrally on Mbembe (2012; 2017; 2019; 2021), with support from Almeida (2019), Carneiro (2005; 2011), Batista (2003; 2010; 2011), Foucault (1999; 2014; 2020), Butler (2004; 2009), Agamben (2004; 2014; 2015), Fanon (1969; 2008; 2022), Wacquant (1999; 2002; 2018), Gilroy (2012), Abramovay and Batista (2010), Nascimento (1980), Davis (2016; 2018), Santos (2007), Franco (2014). The study adopts a qualitative approach (Minayo, 2007), is descriptive and bibliographic (Gil, 2008), and follows a comprehensive analytical perspective (Weber, 1949). The findings indicate that police operations in Rio de Janeiro constitute systematic practices of death management directed at racialized territories and populations, in which exception becomes the rule. It was observed that police lethality operates selectively, articulating structural racism, the criminalization of poverty, and the dehumanization of victims, while simultaneously normalizing state violence in the public sphere. It was also found that the media and legal invisibilization of these deaths contributes to the erosion of human rights, weakening democratic mechanisms of accountability. Finally, the results indicate that necropolitics has become a central rationality of public security, profoundly straining the ethical, political, and legal limits of Brazilian democracy.