Description
This article proposes thinking through a human rights´ perspective on the rights that we lost with the decision of staying to stop the corona virus from spreading. This decision, to stay home, was mostly imposed by States throughout the world. By saving lives with the restrictions imposed by States, some individuals have lost human rights such right to asylum, right to family reunification and even the right to pursue a project of life with a next to kind. Resembling times of war and conflict, the pandemic has conjectured a new model of life for human beings and this article does not propose to criticize the strict and necessary measures imposed by States to contain the spread of the COVID-19. Notwithstanding, beyond the widespread idea of “stay home and save lives”, there are several minorities group that did not benefit from the material means of obeying the new norms imposed by States. This article explores an anthropological view of individuals – especially migrants – from different countries in the world, to expose the new struggles and human rights´ violations that these individuals suffered during the pandemic crises during 2019. Through the use of narratives, it links together individual human rights´ violations in different contexts with the restrictions that several states imposed to its citizens and immigrants. This empirical analysis is assembled with the theoretical inputs that a new state-centric order has merged due to the severe restriction imposed by states, which should be pushing scholars to investigate these new phenomena rather than forgetting about IR theories.
