Lawless Zones, Rightless Subjects : Migration, Asylum, and Shifting Borders

Responding to ever-increasing pressures of migration, states, supranational, and subnational actors deploy complex moves and maneuvers to reconfigure borders, rights, and territory, giving rise to a changing legal cartography of international relations and international law. The purpose of this volume is to study this new reconfiguration of rights, territoriality, and jurisdiction at the empirical and normative levels and to examine its implications for the future of democratic governance within and across borders. Written by a diverse and accomplished group of scholars, the chapters in this volume employ legal, historical, philosophical, critical, discursive, and postcolonial perspectives to explore how the territoriality of the modern states – ostensibly, the most stable and unquestionable element undergirding the current international system – has been rewritten and dramatically reimagined. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Seyla Benhabib is Senior Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, and Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy Emerita at Yale University. She is an internationally recognized political philosopher whose work on critical theory, Hannah Arendt, democracy, and feminist theory has been translated into fourteen languages. Her book The Rights of Others: Aliens, Citizens and Residents (Cambridge, 2004) won the Ralph Bunche Award of the American Political Science Association. She is the recipient of the Erst Bloch, Leopold Lucas, and Meister Eckhart prizes, as well as being a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science and the British Academy. Her latest book is, Exile, Statelessness and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin (2018).

Ayelet Shachar is the Irving Tragen Chair in Comparative Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and former Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. She is the author of field-defining books on citizenship theory, migration law, cultural diversity and women's rights, and new border regimes including, most recently, The Shifting Border: Legal Cartographies of Migration and Mobility (2020). Her research has influenced law and policymakers and she has provided pro-bono consultation to judges, non-governmental organizations, the European Parliamentary Research Services, and the World Bank. The recipient of numerous excellence awards, Shachar is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and winner of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize.