Crime and Justice Administration in the Portuguese Colonial War (1961- 1974)

Exploratory Analysis of the Criminal Proceedings against Combatants of the Portuguese Armed Forces in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau.

War provides a unique context of opportunities for crime and research committed to this phenomenon has indicated that the armed forces involved in these conflicts sometimes exercise violence beyond the law and war customs. Despite the ratification of the four Geneva Conventions on march 14th, 1961, the Portuguese colonial wars (1961-1974) were no exception. A preliminary investigation at the Military Historical Archive (MHA) revealed that numerous criminal proceedings were initiated during the war, after criminal complaints had been filed, which led to the initiation of the corresponding criminal investigations. Based on this repository, this project aims to investigate how these criminal facts, allegedly committed by PAF combatants, were interpreted by the Territorial Military Courts of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea during the colonial war (1961-1974). This is a documentary research, focused on the criminal proceedings available at the MHA, resorting to a mixed methodology: an interpretive sociological analysis of speeches aiming to capture the structuring foundations of the narratives that make up the various documents representing the procedural march; a descriptive and inferential statistical analysis with the purpose of organizing, synthesizing, describing and comparing the relevant aspects of the set of data.
The research is set in a complex sociopolitical context that articulates the Estado Novo dictatorship, the extreme war situation in 3 different territories defending colonial Portugal’s sovereignty and an unquestionably racialized hierarchical order, in an international context that advocated the right of peoples to self-determination and, therefore, favorable to the independence of territories under colonial rule. In empirical terms, it focuses on criminal proceedings understood as discourses that compose a structured space of power and strength relations between the different subjects and institutions that participate in it and inscribe representations supported by the sociopolitical and legal order.