Paper details

Paper authors	João Guilherme Casagrande Martinelli Lima Granja Xavier
In panel on	Transitory Spaces and Insurgent Citizenship Practices: Refugee and Migrant Activists as Humanitarian and Political Actors
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Brazil has witnessed the most intense and radical migratory reform in more than a century of Republican History. In a recent years, legislators, Federal Government, Academia and social movements led by migrants and refugees debated upon and propelled the approval of a draft bill that revoked 37 years old “Estatuto do Estrangeiro” – the Foreigner’s Statute. This paper discusses how social participatory processes implemented by Brazilian Government and political strategies taken by migrant movements, amid a humanitarian crisis unleashed by the massive presence of new immigrants after the Haitian earthquake of 2010, generated the very particular conditions to a radical shift in migratory institutions and Law.
The paper draws reflections from the author’s ethnographic own field of research and professional practice. The recurrence of certain categories such as “citizenship” coexist with ambiguous moral economies about immigration decision making, framed under a core of theoretical references: (1) Didier Fassin’s research on moral economies, migrations and humanitarian reasons, applied to Brazilian state's performance in relation to its selectiveness in rights expansion’s processes; (2) The categories proposed by Brazilian Anthropologist Luís Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira on citizenship, as dialetic conceptions of differentiated and uniform treatment structuring the civic world and moral aggression, and (3) an evolving literature on the autonomy of migration and Holston contribution on insurgent citizenship.

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