"Normative (B)Orders. Migration and Citizenship in a Time of Crisis" - 9th International Annual Conference

Thursday, November 24th 2016, 5 pm - 7 pm

Prof. Dr. Ayelet Shachar (Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen)

The recent wave of migrants desperately seeking European shores provokes some of today’s most urgent, profound, and arduous questions: Is it legitimate for states to exclude non-members? If so, on what basis? Which normative orders and sources of law can be invoked in protectionseeking claims against governments jealously guarding citizenship and immigration laws as the “last bastions of sovereignty?” Rather than rehearse the contentious binaries of familiar debates — sovereignty and human rights, security and freedom, national interests and transnational obligations — Ayelet Shachar turns to investigate the simultaneous expansion and contraction, both spatial and conceptual, of shifting borders. By  contorting admission requirements, governments selectively manage migration by “stretching outward” or “bleeding inward,” making entry smoother and faster for a few, while increasingly restrictive and regulated for the many. Against this  backdrop, Shachar traces the contours of Olympic Citizenship, the emergent regime of governing access to membership which defies the predictions of both globalists and statists. Relating to the current situation in Europe, she argues, a new paradigm through which to re-conceptualize territoriality, sovereignty, and the spatial reach of human rights protections must be adopted in order to resist the perplexing power held by the everywhere-and-nowhere logic of the shifting  border of migration regulation.

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Ayelet Shachar is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, where she heads the Ethics, Law, and Politics Department. Previously, she held the Canada Research Chair in Citizenship and  Multiculturalism at the University of Toronto Faculty Law, and was also the Leah Kaplan Visiting Professor in Human Rights at Stanford Law School and the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. Her research focuses on  citizenship theory, immigration law, cultural diversity, and new regimes of human mobility and inequality. Shachar is the author of Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women’s Rights (Cambridge); The Birthright Lottery:  Citizenship and Global Inequality (Harvard); and Olympic Citizenship: International Migration and the Global Race for Talent, to be published by Oxford. She is the recipient of scholarly excellence awards in three different countries (Canada,  Israel, and the United States). In 2014, Shachar was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2015, she joined the Max Planck Society.

Video:

Audio:

Billdergalerie:

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, Campus Westend
Max-Horkheimer-Str. 2
Gebäude "Normative Ordnungen", EG 01 und EG 02

Presented by:
Cluster of Excellence "The Formation of Normative Orders"