Bope como projeto: design, guerra e cidade

Abstract

The Special Operations Battalion (Bope) of Rio de Janeiro’s city is an actor of its urban war, commonly understood as a “war against drugs” or a “war against organized crime”. It is a Military Police unity specialized in what is considered high risk operations. Bope has received visibility because of events like televised drug dealer chasing, executions inside communities, occupations and rescues. The present research has the objective of investigating this group as a project: something that can be understood as processual and undetermined. We will work along the Actor-network theory and the idea of ontological designing as theoric tools to analyze its action as relational and collective. By emphasizing its group formation and non-human beings, we hope that this research will help deepen the understanding of its controversial acting. We will investigate Bope’s visual identity, its social media, the movie Elite’s Troop launched in 2007, and the polemics surrounding their equipments.