This project advances three distinct arguments to demonstrate that people committed to basic liberal-democratic value commitments cannot coherently think that much currently existing migration control possesses legitimate authority.
A paper on how dominant understandings of sovereignty are incompatible with robust respect for migrants' basic human rights. Read it here.
A paper on how states can perpetrate colonial norms and how this amounts to a violation of many migrants' moral equality. Read it here.
An advanced draft on how the authority of 'border externalization' agreements should be in doubt in cases where they function to undermine the sovereign equality principle. Happy to share upon request.
Using my dissertation - including paper #1 and #2 above - as a basis, I am currently preparing a book manuscript on the question of the state's legitimate authority to exclude (im-)migrants. In this book, I argue that the very values best suited to legitimizing such authority - liberty and equality - are robustly undermined by the way in which exclusion proceeds, for reasons deep-seated in the international state system and extant notions of self-governance. Watch this space for upcoming news.
Together with Rainer Bauböck, Julia Mourão Permoser and Martin Ruhs, I co-coordinate a public-facing research collaboration called "The Ethics of Migration Policy Dilemmas". "Dilemmas" aims to bring together normative and empirical scholars, policymakers, and civil society representatives to locate and critically discuss the navigation of ethical dilemmas in migration policymaking. Read more about our work here. Up until now, the project has produced two special journal issues, one in Migration Studies and one in Comparative Migration Studies. A third symposium in Ethics & International Affairs is in preparation.
For a special "dilemmas" journal issue in Comparative Migration Studies, I wrote about a tension that arises between regularization and firewall policies when liberal-democratic policymakers want to address unauthorized immigrant residence in an inclusive, evidence-based manner. Read the paper here. This paper has been critically discussed by renowned migration scholars Antje Ellermann, Adam Omar Hosein and Cecilia Menjívar in the context of a Dilemmas discussion forum. Read the resulting working paper, which includes my rejoinder to these critical interventions, here.
This project aims to explore causal, normative, and historical questions about the interplay of progressive, "anti-ideological" politics and the practice of tinkering with socially shared and politically salient conceptual repertoires.
A paper that argues that lasting transformations in the dominant meanings of political concepts and large-scale sociopolitical change go together. Read it here.
An early draft exploring good and bad reasons why anti-ideological political forces should exercise caution in their efforts to engineer social and political concepts. Draft soon to be ready for sharing.
To be developed into a draft.
A collection of short essays I have written.
This is a contribution to a symposium on Gillian Brock's "Justice for People on the Move". Read it here.
An essay reviewing Serena Parekh's "No Refuge" and Amy Reed-Sandoval's "Socially Undocumented". Read it here.
A short essay for an American Journal of International Law "Unbound" symposium on sovereignty and the right to exclude. Read it here.