Description
In Latin America, Indigenous and Black communities promote relational ways of living through a harmonic relationship between humans and nature. These relations sustain human life and maintain the existence of non-human life, but have been threatened since the beginning of the colonial project, with its more recent expressions translated into the language of development and progress. Considering the many situations all around Brazil where indigenous and quilombola territories were damaged to promote development, this paper questions ‘how can development projects promote insecurity, death, and dispossession in racially marginalized communities?’. Thinking of necrodevelopment as necropolitics through development projects, some cases will be presented as examples about how some people’s relations with their territory were disrupted by projects in the name of progress and modernity, provoking insecurity, deaths, and epistemicide. The examples mobilized for the analysis are the impact of dam collapses in Brumadinho and Mariana (State of Minas Gerais) affecting the Pataxó, Pataxó Hã Hã Hãe, and the Krenak peoples; and the Alcântara Space Center installed in quilombola territory (State of Maranhão). Mobilizing a relational, decolonial, and pluriversal IR theoretical literature, this paper can bring a contribution to the critical security studies, offering the idea of necrodevelopment as a conceptual tool to study the security dimension of development projects while also considering the importance of the worldviews/cosmovisions of Indigenous and Black/quilomobola communities.
