Governing Migration and Mobility: Military-Humanitarianism at Brazil’s Northern Frontier

RSC Public Seminar Series, Trinity term 2025

Series convened by Professor Tom Scott-Smith and Professor Catherine Briddick

About the seminar

To provide care is to enact control. Securitization practices are exceedingly difficult to disentangle from humanitarian intervention. Modes of governing the migration and mobility of people on the move, who are at once ‘at-risk’ and ‘risky’, reveal operations beyond the biopolitical and necropolitical binary. This book offers a new conceptual framework to understand the logics and practices of this governance: debilitating mobilities. Emerging from the relationship between militarism and humanitarianism, this approach captures the ways in which mobilities are restricted and controlled under the guise of care. Set across the humanitarian landscape of northern Brazil, this results in the (re)production of exclusion and precarity for people from Venezuela seeking refuge. While the 1984 Cartagena Declaration enables their protection, this materialises within a context imbued with histories and continuities of militarized violence. Journeying across interlocking scales and the spaces and times of mobility governance, this book reveals that from the border to the city, and within spaces of institutional care, the body and everyday life are always implicated in military-humanitarian intervention.