The Shifting Border: Legal Cartographies of Migration and Mobility Seminar

Abstract 

The refugee crisis in Europe has brought to the fore some of the most pressing dilemmas of our times, exposing profound tensions between “people out of place,” their right to international protection, and the sovereign authority of states to control and regulate migration. It also reveals the failure of current legal approaches to resolve this inherent tension, between the right to exclude and the duty to protect. The discussion highlights the key gatekeeping role played by law in facilitating the dramatic expansion—both spatial and conceptual—of the reach of border control, which no longer adheres to fixed territorial markers. This mobility-inhibiting “shifting border” is compared with a more traditionalist interpretation of legal spatiality that reemerges when we turn our gaze to the conditions for seeking asylum in affluent states, which hinge dramatically on the act of “touching base” in the territory of the very same states doing everything in their power to avert such uninvited arrival. In order to break the current deadlock, the paper envisions a new paradigm for reversing the evasive logic of the shifting border, turning its erstwhile rights-restricting tendencies into opportunities in the service of securing protection for those who need it most.