Legal security and white supremacy: defending agribusiness interests as State self-preservation

Abstract

This paper discusses how the notion of legal security has operated as a mediator in different controversies in which rural elite sectors have been engaged. Through a mapping of the ways in which the term was mobilized in the main communication channels linked to agribusiness between 2015 and 2023, we identify the different associations that stabilize legal security and their effects on the way rural elite sectors sought to influence land and labor policy. We observe that the notion of legal security, as it is stabilized, has the effect of normalizing the defense of rural landowners in all their interests and in an absolute manner. As a mediator, legal security produces racializing assemblages insofar as it positions the white landowner as an agent of progress and civilization and constructs the racialized other as an agent of insecurity, liable to be evacuated from the land in the name of the self-preservation of the State and progress. Therefore, we argue that the way in which legal security appears stabilized in disputes involving agribusiness updates the process of racialization and racial subjugation that was necessary for capitalist accumulation and land concentration in Brazil.