In recent years, Evangelical groups have become increasingly involved with police forces in Brazil (Machado and Oosterbaan, 2024). This can be seen in initiatives like promoting religious conversion among officers and organising prayer campaigns with crime-affected communities through policing partnerships. However, this type of activism has also engaged the police in a process of radicalisation, with important consequences for democracy. The aim of this project is to investigate the impact of Evangelical activism with military police forces in Brazil and its relationship to far-right politics. During my PhD, I conducted extensive fieldwork with three major Evangelical chaplaincy organisations operating across the country, addressing how de-democratisation operates from ‘below’, through informal solidarity networks and their interactions with security structures, and how it informs broader issues of policing in marginalised urban areas.

This project combines a qualitative historical analysis and an idiographic case study. The research design incorporates a mix of analytical and data collection techniques, including thematic analysis, document analysis, and semi-structured interviews, which were conducted both online and during a two-month fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

As an increasingly prominent yet under-studied phenomenon, this project contributes to shedding light on the social and political dynamics of Evangelical activism in the security sector and its consequences for marginalised social groups. The relevance of this project extends beyond Brazil as similar patterns have been observed in places like the US, South Africa and Kenya (Griffith, 2021).

The project provides an innovative framework to understand the far-right in the Global South, addressing a major gap in the literature, which remains largely Western-Centric (Pinheiro-Machado and Vargas-Maia, 2023). By advancing an interdisciplinary inquiry drawing from international politics and sociology, this project advances ISRF's objective of promoting critical knowledge to solve contemporary problems, of which de-democratisation and far-right politics are pressing themes.