Acceso usuarios
Victor Villarreal Cabello
Este artículo propone articular una lectura crítica de las migraciones contemporáneas desde la perspectiva del Capitaloceno como alternativa analítica al Antropoceno. Se parte de la hipótesis de que muchas de las movilidades forzadas actuales responden a factores económicos, políticos y bélicos, además, son expresiones concretas de procesos de despojo ecológico, reorganización territorial y violencia estructural asociadas al metabolismo del capital. El objetivo de este trabajo es demostrar que las migraciones se entrelazan con ecologías del despojo y prácticas de sacrificio territorial, donde los cuerpos humanos y los ecosistemas se vuelven desechables para la acumulación.
El enfoque teórico está guiado por los aportes de Jason W. Moore, Donna Haraway y Andreas Malm en torno al Capitaloceno, también a Rob Nixon, Laura Pulido y Georgios Zografos respecto a la noción de zonas de sacrificio. Se recuperan las categorías de violencia lenta, cuerpo-territorio y producción de inmovilidad para demostrar cómo las fronteras se constituyen como estrategias ecológicas, políticas y de muerte. La metodología es cualitativa y exploratoria, se basa en el análisis documental de casos de estudio y revisión crítica de la literatura. El texto no se centra en el trabajo de campo, sino en el cruce de enfoques provenientes de la ecología política, los estudios críticos de las migraciones y las Relaciones Internacionales.
La estructura se divide en dos secciones. En primer lugar, se desarrolla un marco teórico que permite vincular el debate entre Antropoceno y Capitaloceno que atiende las diferencias para destacar el carácter colonial y capitalista del colapso ecosocial contemporáneo. Se vincula así la noción de zonas de sacrificio con las ideas de violencia lenta, producción de inmovilidad y cuerpo-territorio, bajo un giro ecosocial en el estudio de las migraciones forzadas. El segundo apartado analiza a través de algunos casos los desplazamientos situados, las ecologías del despojo y las formas en que el extractivismo, los megaproyectos y la crisis climática generan reconfiguraciones territoriales y migraciones forzadas. También se analiza el papel de las fronteras como espacios móviles de sacrificio que funcionan como estrategias de muerte política, física y ecológica. Con ejemplos de la frontera sur de México, la frontera entre Estados Unidos y México y la cuenca del Mediterráneo se propone una crítica al régimen fronterizo global a partir del lugar que ocupa el cuerpo migrante en esas arquitecturas de control.
This article explores the relationship between migration, environmental degradation, and systemic vi-olence through the lens of the Capitalocene, offering an alternative to the dominant Anthropocene framework. The core argument is that forced migration should not be understood solely in terms of eco-nomic, political, or security factors, but rather as part of a broader ecological metabolism of capital that reorganizes territories, depletes resources, and disposes of populations. The text aims to articulate how contemporary displacement processes are embedded in the logic of sacrifice, both of land and bodies, within the current planetary crisis.The study proposes a conceptual shift in the way migration is addressed in International Relations. In-stead of perceiving it as a consequence of failed states or climate misfortunes, this article positions mi-gration as an embodied and situated expression of the uneven distribution of environmental destruction and the structural dynamics of accumulation. The notion of sacrifice zones, drawn from political ecology and environmental justice studies, becomes a pivotal analytical tool. These are geographies and bodies rendered disposable to sustain the capitalist world-system.The theoretical framework builds upon the contributions of Jason W. Moore, Donna Haraway, and Andreas Malm on the Capitalocene; Rob Nixon’s notion of slow violence; Laura Pulido’s work on environmental racism and racial capitalism; and Georgios Zografos’ conceptualization of green sacrifice zones. Addi-tionally, the article incorporates feminist and decolonial perspectives on the body-territory relation to analyse how ecological damage is experienced not only geographically but somatically and emotionally.The methodological approach is qualitative, critical, and exploratory. It is based on literature review and document analysis, focusing on case studies of displacement caused by extractivism, climate change, and border enforcement. The article does not rely on fieldwork, but rather adopts a transdisciplinary and intersectional framework informed by political ecology, migration studies, and critical International Relations. The aim is to construct an analytical narrative that makes visible the convergence between environmental degradation, territorial dispossession, and migration.The article is organized into two sections. The first section develops the theoretical foundations for under-standing forced migration in the context of the Capitalocene. It contrasts the Anthropocene framework, often criticized for its universalist and dehistoricized approach, with the Capitalocene, which situates the ecological crisis in the dynamics of colonial capitalism. The Anthropocene tends to dilute responsibility and flatten differences, while the Capitalocene makes visible the historical and structural roots of the current socioecological collapse. It highlights how the global capitalist system depends on the expansion of extractive frontiers and the externalization of socioecological costs, producing both environmental degradation and mass displacement.Within this framework, the concept of metabolic rift is introduced to explain how the capitalist reorga-nization of nature creates imbalances between humans and ecosystems. The expansion of extractive industries, industrial agriculture, and fossil fuel-based development leads to ecological exhaustion and the emergence of sacrifice zones, areas (and bodies) that are systematically exposed to pollution, dis-possession, and slow violence. The idea of slow violence refers to the often invisible, accumulative, and delayed forms of harm that affect marginalized communities over time, from chronic diseases caused by toxins to long-term environmental degradation.The section also discusses the body-territory approach developed in feminist and indigenous episte-mologies. This perspective asserts that the body is not separate from the land, it is a territory in itself, vulnerable to the same dynamics of extraction and control. Displacement thus is not only a geographical movement but a corporeal experience. Migrant bodies become sites of inscription for environmental, political, and symbolic violence. Migration, in this view, is not simply the result of climate impacts but a lived response to multiple layers of structural dispossession.The second section applies this theoretical lens to concrete cases of forced displacement and border vio-lence. It discusses how megaprojects, land grabs, and ecological disasters caused by capitalist development projects in Latin America, Africa, and Asia have pushed entire communities into forced migration. The article draws on reports and critical studies to analyse how hydropower projects, monocultures, mining operations, and logistical corridors function as mechanisms of dispossession. These projects are often justified through narratives of development and modernization, yet they reproduce historical pat-terns of colonial exploitation and ecological inequity.Beyond the territories of origin, the article focuses on borders as mobile sacrifice zones. The analysis includes examples from the Mexico–Guatemala border, the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, and the Mediter-ranean basin. Borders are not merely legal lines but infrastructures of violence and control. They are designed to deter, filter, and discipline migrant flows through the use of physical obstacles, surveillance technologies, detention centres, and humanitarian aid mechanisms that obscure their coercive function. The production of immobility, through waiting, detention, or digital bureaucracy, is as relevant as phys-ical movement.In these border zones, migrants pass through camps, shelters, deserts, and administrative limbos where their bodies are subjected to various forms of deprivation. The article illustrates how places like Tapach-ula (in southern Mexico) become bottlenecks of immobilization, and how the Mediterranean has become a maritime cemetery due to border externalization policies. These are spaces of necropolitics, where life is managed, delayed, or extinguished based on geopolitical value.The section concludes with two brief case studies that illustrate the embodiment of sacrifice in migratory contexts. The first is the Darien Gap, where migrants cross a dangerous jungle with no state infrastruc-ture, facing exposure to violence, hunger, and disease. The second is the situation of Central American migrant women working in exploitative agricultural conditions in southern Mexico, whose bodies bear the traces of overwork, toxic exposure, and gender-based violence. These examples underscore how the body becomes the last territory when all others have been lost or denied.The conclusion reiterates that migration in the Capitalocene is both a symptom of and a response to planetary crisis. It proposes that we must rethink displacement not just in terms of humanitarian urgen-cy but as a political and ecological event that reveals the fractures of the current world order. The article calls for a transnational and intersectional agenda that connects climate justice and migrant justice, and proposes a cartography of care centred on the defence of the migrant body-territory as a critical site of resistance.In summary, this article seeks to intervene in critical International Relations by proposing a framework that links forced migration with ecological collapse, racial capitalism, and colonial history. It contributes to rethinking borders, territory, and mobility through a political ecology lens and challenges the domi-nant narratives that treat migration as a side effect rather than a central component of the global sys-tem. In the face of environmental collapse, the migrant journey becomes not only a trajectory of survival but a mirror of the unsustainability of the prevailing model. The question International Relations must ask is not only how to manage migration, but what kind of world produces it, and who pays the price for its continuation.
