Humanitarian Borders Under Rebordering: Emergency, Vulnerability, and Mobility Governance in Tumbes, Peru, Amid Venezuelan Displacement, 2018–2024

This article examines the emergence and transformation of the humanitarian border in Tumbes, Peru, amid Venezuelan displacement (2018–2024). It asks how humanitarian intervention was reconfigured within Peru’s rebordering procesa in a peripheral border region marked by limited state capacity, porosity, environmental vulnerability and normalized emergency governance. Drawing on critical border theories and humanitarian border scholarship, it combines ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with humanitarian actors, and documentary analysis. The study identifies three rebordering phases–conditional facilitation, irregularization, and criminalization–each shaping the humanitarian border across institutional arrangements, aid spatialities, and intervention categories. The care–control nexus evolved from entanglement to de facto substitution and negotiated accommodation with enforcement. Vulnerability and emergency operated as cross-cutting governance technologies, revealing a reactive yet structurally precarious humanitarian border, challenging the thesis that intensified control expands humanitarian compensation: control deepened, yet the humanitarian border contracted despite survival migration, calling for recalibrating humanitarian border theory beyond the Global North.