This thesis argues that law and order enforcement operations (Op GLO) in Brazil are internal sovereign practices based on a convergence of domestic and national security which enables the deployment of the Armed Forces for public security. This study sustains that these operations reinforce sovereign authority in violent ways as the military exercises its constitutional prerogative of guaranteeing order within the public space by performing policing roles or engaging in domestic pacification. Pacification in Rio de Janeiro is aimed at certain marginalized areas of the city located within the national territory, yet that the Brazilian state considers to be outside of its control and subject to the rule of parallel authorities, mainly organized crime. Since the state regards these outsides as threats to effective governance and to national integrity, it aims to forcefully reintegrate them by deploying violence. By assuming Michel Foucault s notion that the state cannot be understood apart from the practices that constitute it, a conception of borders as excluding procedures that represent power thresholds of sovereign violence will be adopted to understand how sovereignty as a practice is reinforced when the Armed Forces are deployed domestically to pacify the inside/outsides of the state and tackle a certain enemy within. The thesis theoretical framework will draw from the practice theory and from Foucault s concept of biopolitics as a methodology.