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Militarization as Conviviality: How Women Define and Resist Gendered Everyday Violence and Discipline in Brazil

By Izadora Xavier do Monte

This article is a shortened version of the eponymous MECILA Working Paper, which was originally published by the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America in 2025 and can be read here.

“Do you think reparation for what they did to us will come from the pens of professors? It is easier – and just as widespread – to kill with a pen as with a gun.” I am downstairs at a newly opened museum space in downtown São Paulo, listening to Débora Maria da Silva, a researcher from the Forensics Anthropology Department at UNIFESP and coordinator of the Movimento Independente Mães de Maio.[1] She is speaking at a panel on racism and democracy during a literary event (Silva et al. 2022). Her talk begins with the story of how the movement she coordinates was born – when her son was killed by a police bullet while returning home after buying antibiotics for a toothache. I notice the woman in the older couple seated in front of me getting emotional, her hand clutching her partner’s arm tightly.

In Brazil, gun production and exports have increased sharply, with the Brazilian small arms company Taurus claiming to be one of the biggest producers in the world (Campaign Against Arms Trade n.d.). There has also been a significant rise in the number of Brazilians carrying firearms, which doubled in 2022 to nearly 3 million (Lisboa 2023). “But the guns that kill the most are the pens of lawmakers,” Débora Maria da Silva says. Their pens are responsible for increased military budgets and more flexible gun laws, and they are wielded to serve the dictates of the Brazilian gun industry, she denounces.[2]

“Why do you insist on researching us? Go research your own fathers and where their tax money is going.” When Débora Maria da Silva shifts from recounting her son’s death to posing pointed questions to the audience, the older couple in front of me remains still. “It is the white pen, the Largo do São Francisco pen, which is guilty. We live a militarized life”,[3] she continues. “Democracy does not exist in Brazil, because it is not accessible to Black people, women, and the working class. For now, our sons pay the price; soon enough, it will be your own because this militarization will spill over”.

Five people sitting at a table behind to banners that read "Mothers of May: Against state terrorism" and "Stop the violence against Black youth".
The Commission of Inquiry into the Murder of Young People (CPIADJ) holds an interactive public hearing with guests in order to present its findings. Photo by Marcos Oliveira/Agência Senado via Wikimedia Commons.

In this paper, I would like to reflect on killer pens and the spillover effects of militarization. This reflection builds on my PhD research, during which I interviewed and observed Brazilian military personnel in the UN’s peacekeeping mission in Haiti (Xavier do Monte 2022, 2023a, 2023b). My work engages with a growing body of literature in international political sociology that seeks to understand how the increase in humanitarian missions and the transformation of global conflict affect the military’s conception of what it means to be a soldier.[4]

It challenges conventional international relations (IR) and political science approaches to peace and conflict, which often take a top-down perspective – focusing on national strategy and interests, and geopolitical blocs. Instead, I sought to understand military missions by inquiring into the mindsets of Brazilian soldiers and exploring the meanings they attributed to their humanitarian operations. The objective was to capture the discourses, ideas, and conceptions of Brazilian soldiers engaged in peacekeeping operations in Haiti. (While this may seem elementary to sociologists and anthropologists, a brief review of IR or political science journals – searching terms like “local turn” or “sociological turn” – reveals how contested and complex the discussion remains in international politics.)

Using the same critical framework I employed to study Brazilian military personnel in Haiti, I then began to look at other Brazilian security dynamics to understand how gender intersects with Brazilian perceptions of peace, war, security, and militarization.

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 I was particularly focused on gendered approaches to Brazilian militarization. My research was inspired by a connection presented to me by the (all male) military personnel themselves during interviews: that their actions in Haiti were not fundamentally different from their actions in Brazil.[5] At that time, I came across videos, Instagram posts and YouTube livestreams about “Mothers Against State Violence” which ultimately led me to the event at the museum described earlier. As I kept going, I found an abundance of academic articles and texts about these women – predominantly Black women who had lost family to police or army violence. These women criticized the military and police presence in their communities and denounced Brazilian public security and militarization.

The work of Juliana Farias, which I will discuss in subsequent sections, offers valuable insights into this field. She identifies a growing body of research on mothers’ mobilization, tracing its roots to scholars such as Márcia Leite, Patrícia Birman and Adriana Vianna (Farias et al. 2020). In a 2020 article, Farias and her collaborators highlight how the mothers’ mobilization has been a source of reflection for Brazilian fields of urban anthropology, anthropology of the state, law, violence, sociology of health, and social assistance.

As I kept an eye on those debates, I realized that the collaboration between collectives and academia is not without its tensions. Women in mothers’ collectives are often wary of universities. Concerns abound: too much is written and said about them, too many diplomas awarded on the back of their stories, and too many academic profiles expanding with little tangible change in how police, armed forces, and the government treat their communities. There remains a glaring lack of accountability for state agents who kill those they are meant to protect.

When I met one of the coordinators from these movements in person for the first time in 2024, someone I had interviewed previously, she asked pointedly: “What came of that interview we did?” I sheepishly admitted: “Nothing yet.” This conversation occurred just a couple of weeks after the acquittal of the police officer accused of shooting her 19-year-old son as he walked to his grandmother’s house. She looked at me sternly and said, “Yes, that’s the university for you.” Perhaps she had hoped that the interview would help change the verdict, which might explain why she agreed to speak with me in the first place. It didn’t.

A few months later, I attended a Conference at Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro organized by the Instituto Memória, Direito e Justiça Racial (IMDJR). Since 2021, I have taught a short course on critical security studies at various institutions. Initially offered as a winter course at Universidade de São Paulo, it was later adapted for a group of activists from Baixada Fluminense, a region with very high levels of police, militia, and narcotraffickers’ violence. IDMJR conducts political work in this area, focusing on defunding the police and criticizing militarization and I also collaborated with them by participating in their conference.

During one of the panels, after I presented my work on gender, race and militarization, a participant took the microphone. She said she didn’t need the university to tell her what it means to be a mother who has lost a son to state violence, but she acknowledged that “That doesn’t mean what you (academics) do doesn’t have a purpose.” She spoke about how learning about laws and rights and being empowered to confront the police had changed her interactions with the state and asked those present for more of that type of output.[6]

These demands extend beyond mothers’ mobilization. As I carried on my junior research project with Mecila in São Paulo, I began to notice that militarization is a common thread connecting very different women’s groups.

It was late afternoon at Armazém do Campo in Campos Elísios. The ample, well-lit space situated in a more popular area than the dim museum where I had earlier heard Débora Maria da Silva speak, hosts a bookstore, a café and a market selling goods from the Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento Sem Terra, MST). I occasionally shop here for organic rice and beans, and produce cultivated by MST farmers. In my left-leaning progressive queer neighbourhood, MST apparel has become a symbol of coolness. But I wasn’t here to shop; I was meeting someone from the gender section of the MST.

My interest in MST women arose from my broader focus on Brazilian women resisting militarization. Each year, on 8 March, International Women’s Day, MST women organize a series of nation-wide actions. “Actions” is perhaps a more accurate term than “events”, as MST regularly engages in direct actions aimed at confronting land- grabbing and other enemies of the working class, in accordance with their Marxist-Leninist ideology. In 2024, they chose to commemorate International Women’s Day with an all-female protest outside of Taurus’s São Paulo showroom. Taurus, Brazil’s largest gun manufacturer, is blamed by Débora Maria da Silva for fuelling the militarization of Black and poor communities.

During our meeting over agroforestry-grown coffee, members of the gender and international section explained that armed violence has been a major concern for MST since the Eldorado do Carajás massacre – a rural conflict in the 1990s that saw 19 activists killed by the police in the Northern state of Pará (Amnesty International 2016). Recently, after a comrade was killed by her partner and the Brazilian Public Security Forum published data indicating increased gun violence in rural areas (and particularly against women), the Movement’s peasant women began connecting the gun industry with their struggle. These discussions culminated in the 8 March protest.

We shared a heavy, cheese-filled tapioca while discussing how militarization manifests in both rural and urban areas, and how it comes down to who holds the gun and who gets to be on the other side of the barrel. It’s not just a question of police violence; it’s about armed men everywhere – whether police, hired gunmen for landowners, or others. We marvelled at how ineffective this widespread militarization is at making women feel safe, and how vital gender is to understand what makes for that dynamic, specifically.

Five months after the MST women took to the sidewalk in front of the Taurus showroom, and about 14 kilometres away, young people gathered under São Paulo’s shy sun at Praça da República. Among them were four young women, part of the student movement Juntos, affiliated with the Socialism and Freedom Party (Partido Socialismo e Liberdade, PSOL). They spoke against what they have dubbed “school militarization”, a São Paulo government policy that follows a recent Brazilian trend: using education budgets to hire retired military police for administrative work and teaching ethics and discipline in state schools. Standing behind a banner reading, “My School is Not a Barrack”, they denounced the policy as a repressive project aimed at curbing dissent, imposing militarized control over students’ bodies and subjectivities, and ultimately replacing education with racist and heteronormative understandings of discipline, hierarchy, and authority.

These vignettes illustrate how Brazilian women – rural and urban, young and old, Black and white, mothers and those that question pre-assigned gender roles – are naming and resisting various forms of militarization. But what exactly is militarization and why does it concern Brazilian women? Queer and feminist perspectives in critical security studies have highlighted how our societies are built on the unequal distribution of violence and protection. These theoretical perspectives have much to offer – and much to gain – from Brazilian women’s mobilizations. They could help define militarization more clearly and empower movements and scholars to better organize against it.

Why and how do such diverse groups of women use the same word – militarization – to describe the problem they have come up against? What do all these understandings have in common with the existing specialized literature on the subject? And how might gender provide a lens for analysing militarization “from the bottom up”? How can the concept of conviviality (Costa 2019) help us understand militarization from gendered, sexualized and racialized perspectives, uniting the varied groups mentioned here: Black mothers in peripheral communities, rural landless women, and young urban non-conforming women in the student movement?

When I talk about militarization as conviviality, I am not suggesting that militarization might equal harmonious coexistence. Conviviality, in this context, is not about harmony but about the dynamics of “living together” and the inequalities inherent in those dynamics. Women in Brazil have insisted that militarization deeply shapes their everyday interactions, their living together with others, affecting how they carry out their roles and live their lives as women.

As we will see in the first section of the working paper, IR and political science literature usually focus on militarization as the control of the state apparatus by the military, or on the use of existential threats to a nation’s security to curtail the rule of law. Militarization usually has to do with how police is trained, or state budgets. Since Jair Bolsonaro’s rise to power, militarization has come back to the political science lexicon in this same vein, of discussing generals’ influence on politics, and the fragility of civilian control over Brazilian democracy. Brazilian urban anthropology has tried to update the concept by bringing it closer to the debates on conviviality, focusing on the ideological dimensions of militarization and how it impacts the everyday lives of peripheral Brazilians.

Militarization is then clearly a major political concern in the specialized literature. But these approaches fail to dialogue with the political practice and concerns of the movements opposing militarization and fail to understand what exactly in their experience is important to social movements opposing militarization today. Even when they focus on militarization as going beyond the State apparatus, militarization appears as recent, or exceptional and a deviance from a normal way of dealing with state violence.

That is why in the second section I will present some feminist IR ideas on militarization. I believe that these insights from feminist IR can help us to better understand women’s mobilizations in Brazil against militarization. And, conversely, by focusing on feminist IR concepts of militarization, we can perhaps also be more useful to the movements opposing it.

This is an analytical move that also converges with conviviality debates. It situates militarization as a contextual, historical process involving a series of institutions beyond formal state ones. It also allows us to think of militarization beyond the military, as everyday dispositions and logics. That is why I think conviviality raises critical questions for thinking about militarism – and helps to better grasp these women’s collectives’ contributions to talking about militarization.

But to add to the conviviality framework, I propose that we see militarization and conviviality as gendered phenomena. To do this, we not only have to be interested in the lives of women and in their political work (Enloe 2007), but also in a gendered analysis of those lives and work, especially on how these are impacted and defined in relation to the hierarchical opposition between masculine and feminine as an ordering principle of conviviality. A gendered analysis considers that the lives of women are a product of power relations defining one set of possibilities and social places for men and the masculine, and an opposite one for women and the feminine. Understanding how this happens has a bearing on undoing the hierarchies upon which society is based. Understanding this also has a bearing on our understanding of politics and militarization.

Keep reading here.


Notes

[1] In May 2006, the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), São Paulo’s largest narcotrafficking group, killed 40 police and state agents. In response, São Paulo’s military police amped up their already often repressive police operations and attacked São Paulo’s peripheries in a wave of violence that lasted five days and left between 500 and 600 dead in the Baixada Santista. Mães de Maio was created in response to what the collective has called the Crimes of May. At the head of Mães de Maio is Débora Maria da Silva whose son, Edson Rogério da Silva Santos, a 29-year-old street cleaner, was killed by police in 2016 (Laboratório de Análise da Violência 2008; International Human Rights Clinic and Justiça Global 2011; Movimento Mães de Maio 2011; Defensoria Pública do Estado de São Paulo 2015; Caramante 2016).

[2] “The recent expansion of Brazil’s defence sector was enthusiastically supported by a small clutch of politicians. Weapons companies aggressively courted members of Brazil’s national Congress and state legislatures, with 30 candidates receiving $530,000 in contributions during the most recent presidential campaign in 2014. Twenty-one of these were elected. Nearly $200,000 alone was passed on to 16 politicians from a single firm, the Brazilian Cartridge Company, the country’s premier firearms ammunition producer and one of the largest in the world. These same lawmakers are also hoping to loosen domestic gun legislation to vastly facilitate gun access to Brazilians – this in a country with about 42,000 gun deaths a year” (Muggah and Thompson 2017).

[3] Largo do São Francisco is a traditional law school in downtown São Paulo.

[4] See in particular: Olsson 2015; Daho et al. 2019; Delori 2019; Fassin and Pandolfi 2010; Bigo 2005; Ambrosetti 2012.

[5] Since 2006, the Brazilian army has participated in the “pacification” effort in neighbourhoods of Rio de Janeiro. In other words, it has been employed in “law and order guarantee operations” provided for in the 1988 Constitution (and designated in Portuguese by the acronym GLO for garantiadaleieda ordem) but never implemented before the 2000s. The army operating under the GLO mandate acts in support of police forces in reclaiming territories considered by the state to be under the control of drug-trafficking groups. Given the similarity of activities carried out in Rio de Janeiro under the GLO and in Haiti under humanitarian operations (territory reclaiming operations, patrols, checkpoints), comparisons between Rio de Janeiro and Haiti are numerous. Some specialists and policymakers speak of a “synergy” between the two spaces, given the fact that the army is employed in similar “theatres of operations” with close objectives. See: Müller and Xavier do Monte 2024; Xavier do Monte 2024.

[6] It is funny to go from studying the military to studying those who claim their lives have been militarized – I never asked myself what I owed to the military by writing about them. I figured, on the contrary, that they control enough of what is said about them for me to be free to write anything I felt was relevant. When I interviewed the military, they also considered as evident that what I would write would serve them – either I was supposed to be a military psychologist, coming to check up on how they had been, or I was sent away with words of “you tell them how hard we have been working.”


References

Amnesty International (2016): Brazil: The Eldorado dos Carajás Massacre 10 Years On, Londres, at: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/AMR19/019/2006/en/ (Last access 07/18/2025).

Campaign Against Arms Trade (n. d.): Brazil, at: https://caat.org.uk/data/countries/brazil/ (Last access 29.09.2025).

Costa, Sérgio (2019): “The Neglected Nexus between Conviviality and Inequality”, Mecila Working Paper Series, No. 17, São Paulo: Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America.

Enloe, Cynthia (2007): Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Farias, Juliana (2020): Governo de mortes: uma etnografia da gestão de populações de favelas no Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro: Papéis Selvagens.

Farias, Juliana; Lago, Natália Bouças do and Efrem Filho, Roberto (2020): “Mães e lutas por justiça: encontros entre produção de conhecimento, ativismos e democracia”, in: Sexualidad, Salud y Sociedad (Rio de Janeiro), 36, 146–180.

Lisboa, Vinicius (2023): “Número de armas particulares dobra e chega a quase 3 milhões no Brasil”, in: Agência Brasil, February 14, 2023.

Silva, Débora Maria da; Simon, Roberto and Bilenky, Thais (2022): “O Brasil foi algum dia a favor da democracia?”, 1o Festival Literário do Museu Judaico de São Paulo, August 10, 2022.

Xavier do Monte, Izadora (2022): “Masculinité et maintien de la paix: les casques bleus brésiliens en Haïti”, in: Travail, genre et sociétés, 47, 1, 73–87.

Xavier do Monte, Izadora (2023a): “(Re)Négocier la citoyenneté: Islam, immigration, mobilisations pour l’égalité”, in: Cultures & Conflits, 127-128, 123–140.

Xavier do Monte, Izadora (2023b): “‘The Thing with Sexual Exploitation’: Gender Representations and the Brazilian Military in an UN Peace Mission”, in: Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional, 66, 2, 1–22.


About the Author

Izadora Xavier do Monte was a Junior Researcher at Mecila in 2025. She earned her PhD in sociology from Université de Paris 8 and is currently a lecturer in international relations at Universidade Estadual da Paraíba. Her recent publications include “‘Quase brancos quase pretos de tão pobres?’: Nacionalidade, raça e os brasileiros na Missão das Nações Unidas de Estabilização do Haiti”, published in Passagens: Revista Internacional de História Política e Cultura Jurídica (2024).


Other Recent Articles in the TRAFO Series Conviviality and Inequality

Marcial A. G. Suarez, Transnational Organized Crimeand Hybrid Governance in Latin America. The Case of Forced Disappearance in Mexico, 16.10.2025.

Raquel Rojas, Juan I. Piovani, Laura Flamand, Sérgio Costa, and Carlos Alba, Care, Inequalities, and Conviviality. The Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Berlin, Buenos Aires and Mexico City, 25.08.2025.

Raphael Schapira, Brazilian Jiu-jitsu as a Marker of Whiteness and Anti-Blackness. Embodying Inclusive Conservative Conviviality in Rio de Janeiro, 12.08.2025.


Citation: Izadora Xavier do Monte, Militarization as Conviviality: How Women Define and Resist Gendered Everyday Violence and Discipline in Brazil, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 03.03.2026, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/64546


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (March 3, 2026). Militarization as Conviviality: How Women Define and Resist Gendered Everyday Violence and Discipline in Brazil. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved March 10, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15sor


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