In recent years Brazil has deployed a military takeover of dozens of favelas. Presenting data collected from 2012 to 2014 in one of the favelas, I argue that the process of ‘pacification’ is an attempt at passive revolution, which depends more on manufacturing spatial hegemony through non-military strategies than on the war of manoeuvre that is currently being undertaken. This is developed through an articulation of Gramsci’s theoretical framework with Lefebvre’s perspective of the production of space, which exposes the failure to overcome the fragile presence of state in the territory through everyday state formation.