The church helps the UPP, the UPP helps the church: pacification apparatus, religion and boundary formation in Rio de Janeiro’s urban peripheries

Abstract

This article looks to explore the analytic consequences of thinking about the urban peripheries of Rio de Janeiro not from the perspective of the city itself, capital of the State, but from the Baixada Fluminense, a cluster of cities in its Metropolitan Region. To do so, I suggest an analysis of the ‘pacification apparatus’: a set of discourses, practices and imaginations linked to the pacification policy as a public security project, but transcending the latter by articulating state, religious, cultural and media actors. The empirical material discussed in this article concerns the case of a partnership between a UPP in the city of Rio and a church from Baixada Fluminense. The conclusions reached suggest that Baixada Fluminense, despite its intrinsic relationship with the capital of Rio de Janeiro and its public problems, has its own processes, formulates specific territorial regimes, and influences the processes that take place in the Rio metropolis by producing borders with it, and through it.

Keywords

• pacification
• religion
• public security
• Baixada Fluminense
• peripheries