Derechos en crisis: Central American asylum claims in the age of authoritarian neoliberalism

ABSTRACTDrawing upon the insights of Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Gramsci coupled with ethnographic research conducted in Texas, this paper discusses how the Obama Administration sought to impose a state of exceptionon Central American refugees by attempting to suspend substantive refugee protections enshrined in international law, in the name of responding to a refugee crisis. The paper also illustrates how these efforts to create a state of exception have been challenged and contested by subaltern actors, in this case, a group of women and children hunger strikers and their activist allies in Texas. The article makes the case that these hunger strikers are part of an emergent Mesoamerican refugee movement that has formed within the interstices of the homeland security state. This speaks not to a “refugee crisis,” as many have posited, but rather to the crisis of rights regimes of liberal democratic states writ large in the wake of massive displacements of people from Central America, a region racked by almost 40 years of neoliberal policies, US militarism, and failed zero-tolerance security paradigms.