International conference: Global Mobility Law: Norms, Geographies and Theory

Throughout history, human mobility has been a key precondition for development, cultural exchange and, ultimately, survival. Yet, today few other issues remain subject to such elaborate legal regulation. From national immigration rules to international regimes on e.g., aviation, human rights and labour migration, interlocking rulesets structure the circulation of individuals throughout the globe. At the same time, the role of law in these processes is neither uniform nor unidirectional. Across geographies, individuals have widely different access to global mobility depending on nationality, legal status, and risk profiles. As a result, laws related to human (im)mobility shape not only regular routes such as global air travel, but equally the clandestine routes often pursued by e.g., refugees and irregular migrants. Even similar rulesets, such as regional free movement regimes, carry significantly different meanings in different parts of the world, depending on their level of implementation, interaction with other types of law and responsiveness to real or perceived crisis.

Despite the ubiquity of law in structuring human mobility, we know surprisingly little about how different types of law related to human mobility interact, how legal interpretations are produced and evolve, and the intended and unintended effects of their enforcement in shaping broader mobility dynamics. Notwithstanding the broader “mobilities turn” in the social sciences, no common framework for studying human mobility exists within the legal discipline. This omission is all the more striking since, historically, mobility has been an integral theme for the development of transnational and international law, from its maritime and colonial origins to the subsequent formalisation of international rules pertaining to e.g. diplomacy, trade, labour, and displacement. This conference urges participants to engage mobility law more holistically, beyond the vantage point of such specialised regimes.

At this inaugural international conference of MOBILE - the Danish National Research Foundation’s Center of Excellence on Global Mobility Law – we invite scholars working on different aspects of mobility law to jointly explore:

• What might a common framework and research agenda for global mobility law look like?
• How can we empirically expand and geographically rebalance existing research on mobility law, notably towards the Global South, and what are the normative implications following from such a reorientation?

• What theoretical insights may inform the study of this field, and how may a sustained engagement with global mobility law in turn inform legal theory as well as mobilities research more generally? 

Contact:

• For questions concerning the programme, please contact Dr Sarah Scott Ford: sarah.scott.ford@jur.ku.dk.
• For practical matters contact events coordinator Michelle Goncalves Kjærulff: michelle.kjaerulff@jur.ku.dk