Refugees of Development’ and ‘Sacrifice Zones’: Humanitarian crisis in the Amazon, capitalist expansion and state intervention

Photo by Callum Blacoe on Unsplash

In this Humanitarian Governance webinar, Professor Marcel Hazeu (Federal University of Para, Brazil) for a discussion on various humanitarian crises unfolding in the Brazilian Amazon.

Santiago del Hierro Kennedy (PhD Researcher, ETH Zurich)will follow the presentation with a reflection on how development initiatives interact with resource extraction, widescale agriculture and encroachment on Indigenous territory in the Northern Andean Amazon.

The Amazon is central to international debates on climate change, framed both as a vital carbon sink (‘lungs of the world’) and a contested space for green capitalism. Global and local policies have turned the region into a site of financial speculation, greenwashing and geopolitical negotiation.

However, these discourses often obscure the severe humanitarian crises unfolding in the region, where environmental degradation intersects with systemic violence and displacement. It is a zone of ‘necropolitics’, environmental racism and sacrifice zones. Yet it is also a space of resistance.

Within this presentation, Professor Hazeu will consider cases including:

• The Indigenous Refugee Crisis and Displacement of Venezuelan Indigenous migrants (Warao)
• Forced displacement and sacrifice of local communities due to large-scale economic projects including the industrial harbour-mining complex in Barcarena
• The Yanomami Genocide  and state neglect and violence against Indigenous peoples
• Carbon markets and the loss of livelihood security for traditional communities
• Deforestation, Fire, Drought and Ecological collapse that threatens the socio-ecosystem.

These crises reveal patterns of omission, neglect and denial by local and international actors, contrasted with grassroots resistance.