Imperial boomerangs and the militarization of human rights: From Port-au-Prince to Rio de Janeiro

This article examines the connections between Brazil's participation in the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), and the consolidation of militarized approaches to human rights in domestic security in Brazil. Drawing on the concept of the “boomerang effect,” it argues that the Brazilian involvement in Haiti played a central role in updating practices of counterinsurgency and militarized social control that would later be employed domestically. The article draws on the methodology proposed by Go J (2024) Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US . Oxford University Press]. for analyzing the transnational travels of policing practices, which focus on sites, practices, importers, and relations. It is based on a review of official documents produced by the Brazilian government and an analysis of discourse by Brazilian authorities. The article analyses the MINUSTAH experience, as well as three internal security policies in Brazil. It argues that a militarized approach to human rights was consolidated from these experiences, through which violent police and army incursions came to be framed as actions intended to guarantee the rights of populations living in impoverished urban territories, even as they generated massive violations of those very rights. In doing so, it helped legitimize, under a democratic banner, the use of state violence as a means of controlling marginalized populations.