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

August 11, 2025 APSA Annual Meeting, Theme Panels Comments Off on Theme Panel: Lawless Zones, Rightless Subjects: Migration, Asylum, and Shifting Borders

Co-sponsored by Division 52: Migration & Citizenship

In-Person Roundtable

Participants:

  • (Chair) Elizabeth F. Cohen, Boston University
  • (Presenter) Seyla Benhabib, Yale University
  • (Presenter) Ayelet Shachar, University of Toronto
  • (Presenter) Paulina Ochoa Espejo, University of Virginia
  • (Presenter) Matthew Longo, Leiden University
  • (Presenter) Anna Jurkevics, University of British Columbia

Session Description:

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. This roundtable brings into conversation 5 scholars with diverse perspectives on this new reconfiguration of rights, territoriality, and jurisdiction at the empirical and normative levels to examine its implications for the future of democratic governance within and across borders. The participants bring legal, historical, philosophical, critical, discursive, and postcolonial perspectives to bear on the subject of state territoriality – ostensibly, the most stable and unquestionable element undergirding the current international system – has been rewritten and dramatically reimagined. The discussion will be based on essays published in the volume Lawless Zones, Rightless Subjects: Migration, Asylum, and Shifting Borders published by Cambridge University Press in 2025.