RESEARCH

Migration and Refugee Politics

I am currently completing my first book manuscript, Governing by Omission: Migration, Citizenship, and State Ambivalence in Brazil (working title), based on fourteen months of fieldwork and hundreds of interviews on Brazil's reception of Venezuelan migrants since 2017. The book manuscript argues that Brazil's federal government retains control over migration's high-visibility domains (documentation, security, resettlement), while offloading the costlier work of integration onto local officials, civil society, and migrants themselves. This process produces a relational mode of governance I term "Brazilian Migration Governance," in which social citizenship becomes unevenly granted, rather than uniformly guaranteed, despite progressive immigration laws.

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Manuscripts currently under review: ​

• “Street-level Bureaucrats and Venezuelan Migration to Brazil: Informal Strategies for Integration and Policymaking without Policy,” José Pérez, Under Review

• “Making Housing, Making Everyday (In)Security: Individuals, Discipline, and Shelter Policy for Venezuelan Migrants and Refugees in Brazil,” José Pérez, Under Review

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Security Studies 

My research in the vein of security studies has focused on the role of race and gender, often overlooked facets of international security, and how they impact individuals' experiences of (in)security and vulnerability. These projects have included a host of mixed methods approaches ranging from discourse analysis, text analysis, semi-structured interviews, to participant observations. For instance, I compared diplomatic performances, such as speeches and other official documents, during the Luiz Lula da Silva and Jair Bolsonaro presidential administrations in Brazil, to theorize how different diplomatic approaches can function to occlude on-going violence towards racialized populations. These findings were published in Security Studies.

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My current research in the area includes a project challenging securitization theory’s conventional emphasis on border control and sovereignty reaffirmation vis-à-vis migratory influxes and human mobility. This project instead reimagines migration securitization not as a process inherently tied to keeping people out, but rather as one which selectively screens how individuals cross international borders and are incorporated into local labor markets, despite official narratives of “border fortification." 

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Publications include: 

• “Rethinking Migration Securitization: Bureaucratic Militarization and Racial Capitalism within Brazil’s ‘Operation Welcome,’” José Pérez and Tarsis Brito, European Journal of International Relations

• “Trump Remakes the Military by Recentering Masculinity within National Security,” José Pérez, Security in Context Policy Paper 26-04 (2026).

• “Brazil’s Foreign Policy and Security Under Lula and Bolsonaro: Hierarchy, Racialization, and Diplomacy,” José Pérez, Security Studies 32.4-5 (2023): 653-679.

• “The Dilma Rousseff Presidency: From Motherly Discourse to Queer Impeachment,” José Pérez, International Feminist Journal of Politics 24.1 (2022): 40-62.

• “Lula, Dilma, and Temer: The Rise and Fall of Brazilian Foreign Policy,” André Reis da Silva and José Pérez, Latin American Perspectives 46.4 (2019): 169-185.

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Global Health Politics 

Research in global health politics includes my study on female Cuban medical professionals working in remote areas of Brazil via the "Mais Médicos" ("More Doctors") medical cooperation agreement between the two countries, and the dynamics they experiences on the ground. I have also conducted an intersectional analysis of how different social groups experienced vulnerability in diverging ways during the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil. This research was co-authored with Vinícius Mendes (Post-doc at Radboud University) and published in Security Dialogue. For this research, we drew upon the concept of “Global Health Security” to analyze how female healthcare workers, domestic employees, and informal laborers were placed in varying situations of exposure to the virus vis-à-vis other groups of workers. 

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My current research in the area includes a project examining the uneven access to (and immunological protection from) emerging HIV/AIDS prevention medications like Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), as well as the politics surrounding PrEP knowledge and awareness, and the socio-economic impacts that taking PrEP medications has on its patients. This project has received funding from the APSA Advancing Research Grants for Early Career Scholars program. 

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Publications include:

• “Liberation and Protection for Whom? PrEP, Subjectivity, and the Uneven Politics of Sexual Healthcare,” José Pérez, Under Review

• “The Intersectionality of Health (In)Security: Healthcare, Disposable Workers, and Exposure within Brazil’s Pandemic Politics,” José Pérez and Vinícius Mendes, Security Dialogue 54.2 (2023): 155-172.

• “Cuban Medical Internationalism through a Feminist Perspective,” José Pérez and André Reis da Silva, Contexto Internacional 41.1 (2019): 65-87.

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