A exceção como sistema: democracia neoliberal, direitos humanos e a gestão jurídica da migração venezuelana no Brasil

Abstract

This dissertation emerges from the concerning and continuous manipulation of the human rights framework and democratic legality under the veil of juridical protection grounded in a system of colonial reproduction. The research seeks to reveal how law, far from representing a neutral instance of guarantee, operates as a central instrument in the administration of a permanent state of exception — selective, institutionalized, and normalized. Drawing on a critical theoretical foundation that brings together authors from different fields and traditions, such as Agamben, Brown, Quijano, and Marini, the study engages with the theory of international human rights law to address the concepts of the state of exception, the erosion of neoliberal democracy, the coloniality of power, and the dependency of countries in the Global South. The objective is to show that exclusion is not a malfunction of the system, but rather a key mechanism for sustaining the operation of the global market. In this context, I unmask how law — while presenting itself as protective — is captured by neoliberal rationalities and global coloniality, sustaining policies of precarization, invisibilization, and selectivity. By exposing the limits of the current international protection model, I argue for the urgent need to rethink the normative foundations that uphold both the idea of human dignity and the practices of contemporary exclusion. The Venezuelan migration over the past decade is approached not merely as a “case,” but as an acute symptom of the contradictions that structure neoliberal democracies in the Global South. Based on an analysis of Brazilian migration law — with emphasis on Laws No. 9,474/97 and 13,445/17 — and on the empirical experience of the municipality of Juiz de Fora, I argue that Venezuelan migration is embedded in a neoliberal logic of life management, in which human rights serve more as a legitimizing discourse of control than as an effective guarantee of protection. In this context, the migrant is constructed as a modern homo sacer: a life on the margins of full citizenship, governed by the law but excluded from its most basic effects — a façade of citizenship, maintained under legal surveillance to ensure that protection never fully materializes.