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Operation shelter as humanitarian infrastructure: material and normative renderings of Venezuelan migration in Brazil

ABSTRACT This article stiches together a conceptual discussion on ‘humanitarian infrastructure’ with research amid Venezuelan migrants, asylum seekers, army personnel, governmental officers and envoys of humanitarian agencies responsible for implementing ‘Operation Shelter’ – described by the Brazilian government as a large humanitarian task force offering assistance to Venezuelans entering Brazil’s province of Roraima. The article’s goal is to explore the material and normative renderings of humanitarian infrastructure that enables migrants’ desire to move, while also governing and making sense of Venezuelan mobility. We suggest that the bureaucratic split of Venezuelans into two temporally different migration figures – asylum seeker and humanitarian migrant – is illustrative of an ambivalence of enacting control and freedom. We explore how such ambivalence is manifested in attempts to discipline migrants’ bodies and movements along built, technological and logistical humanitarian infrastructure, with consequences for engagements between border authorities and migrants.