Abstract
The article engages with the death landscapes of the Americas’ two largest democracies - Brazil and the United States - during the Covid-19 crisis, offering a conceptual tool entitled vulnerability-death binomial to consider the extent to which a politics of tragedy is a turning point in the ways institutional politics addresses vulnerability and death, emphasizing the work of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). When analyzing the normative responses of IACHR, no articulation was found between vulnerability and death but, instead, a bifurcation of each. Although it reveals that there is not a normative interplay between vulnerability and death, the bifurcation does not mean a choice between binary paths. While the two democracies have raised institutional challenges, the IACHR deepened certain senses of vulnerability and a normative movement towards death: issues historically absent from the international basic structure and capable of challenging the international justice theory.
Keywords:
Death Landscapes; Vulnerability-Death Binomial; Inter-American Commission of Human Rights; Normative Response; International Basic Structure