This article aims to offer indepth considerations to non governmental organizations and other civil society agents engaged in the discursive construction of messages for campaigns in favor of the reception of refugees as an issue of increasing relevance for the promotion of human rights both in Brazil and internationally. To this end, it will present perspectives on two hegemonic narratives widely used by global organizations and institutions to identify their conceptual premises and possible connections with the establishment of practices of International Relations. The first one refers to humanitarianism, guided mainly by the mobilization of an affective logic and moral imperatives of solidarity to legitimize the urgent protection of groups under extreme vulnerability; the second one uses the language of development and its essentially neoliberal premises to project an image of adaptivity and resilience on individuals hosted by national communities, discursively converting them into potential human capital designed for market economies of the Global South. Official news articles published by the Brazilian website of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the United Nations Global Compact on Refugees will be reviewed to argue that a common discursive meaning emerges from both in the present time.