ABSTRACT.
From the problematic of violence that ‘assaults us’ in contemporary times, we offer a reflection on the Brazilian context, taking as a theoretical instrument the analysis of power relations addressed by Michel Foucault in his lecture Em defesa da sociedade, at the Collège de France, in 1976. The present study aimed to advocate the hypothesis that the public security policies adopted by the Rio de Janeiro State are not uniform, and that the forces used in the name of peace, the pacification process, are unequally distributed across the population. This premise throws us into a question that we understand to be fundamental to the understanding of the present, namely, what are the mechanisms, tactics and techniques that ensure state power to use force and violence against its own citizens?
Keywords:
Foucault; war; power