Chandni Desai, Heather Sykes

Abstract

It was at the 2016 Rio Olympic Games that, for the first time, activists mobilised against the Israeli securitisation of sport. Brazilian-Palestinian solidarity action, calling for Rio to be an ‘Olympics without Apartheid’, led the then Brazilian government to distance itself from a $2 billion agreement with an Israeli security company. The authors discuss the way in which the solidarity movement emerged and how Israeli companies use Gaza as a ‘lab’ to develop weapons, policing techniques and security technologies for sale on the world market. They point to the parallels between Israel’s securocratic war of pacification and Brazil’s immense security measures against the favelas during a decade of sport mega-events. They trace the flow of securitisation between Israel and Brazil in terms of racial apartheid and settler colonialism to show the impacts on people in occupied Palestine and the favelas of Rio.

Keywords

Brazil, favelas, Gaza, Israel, Olympics without Apartheid, pacification, Palestine, securitisation, sport

From: Race & Class 60 (4)

Editor: Wang Yi