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

Analyzes reconfigurations of territory, rights, and jurisdiction and its implications for the future of democratic governance within and across borders.

Seyla Benhabib (Edited by), Ayelet Shachar (Edited by)

9781009512817, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 January 2025

374 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.7 cm, 0.68 kg

'This remarkable volume, examining the many modes of closing doors to the movement of people, opens wide windows for readers to understand these anxious times, as migrants bear the weight of the sense of dislocation that is experienced within and beyond the nation state.' Judith Resnik, Arthur Liman Professor of Law, Yale Law School

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.

Introduction. Lawless zones, rightless subjects Ayelet Shachar and Seyla Benhabib
Part I. Territoriality and Rights Protection: 1. Moving borders, refugee protection, and immigration policy Hiroshi Motomura
2. Cease fires: temporality, bordering, and climate mobilities Elizabeth F. Cohen
3. Safe third country: democratic responsibility and the ends of international human rights Paul Linden-Retek
4. The role of proximity for states' obligations toward persons seeking protection Dana Schmalz
5. The border within: Mobility, stereotypes, and the case for asylum seekers as migrants Frédéric Mégret
Part II. New Geographies of Borders: Territory, Land, and Water: 6. The border as accordion: linear borders, territoriality, and the problem of naturalness Matthew Longo
7. The materiality of territory Nishin Nathwani
8. Territoriality from the sea: political action in a world of vanishing exteriority Itamar Mann
9. Forced migrants, human rights, and climate refugees Michael W. Doyle
Part III. Public Territories and Private Borders: tracing Transnational Power Relations: 10. From the colony to the border: the lawful lawlessness of racial violence Ayten Gündoğdu
11. Private borders, hidden territories Anna Jurkevics
12. Cycles of (im)mobility: floating populations in the case of Turkey Sibel Karadağ
13. UNHCR and biometrics: refugees' rights in a legal no-man's land? Marie-Eve Loiselle
Part IV. Democratizing Shifting Borders: 14. Three responses to shifting borders: sovereigntism, democratic cosmopolitanism, and the watershed model Paulina Ochoa Espejo
15. Shifting borders, shifting political representation Svenja Ahlhaus
16. Justice and democracy in migration: a demoi-cratic bridge towards just migration governance Eva-Maria Schäfferle
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Political science & theory [JPA]