MOBILE – Mobility Law Open Lab with Neha Jain

Refugee chokepoints: Smugglers, Brokers, and Guardians in Migration Governance

Guest presenter: A specialist in international law and human rights law, Neha Jain is Professor of Law at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and the Deputy Director of Northwestern University's Buffett Institute for Global Affairs. She was recruited to Northwestern in 2023 from the European University Institute, where she served as Professor of Public International Law and Co-Director of the Academy of European Law. She is also a permanent visiting professor at MOBILE, the Danish National Research Foundation’s Center for Excellence for Global Mobility Law at the University of Copenhagen. Jain has served international law societies in a variety of roles, including as a member of the American Society of International Law’s Executive Council and Executive Committee and as the former Vice-President of the European Society of International Law. She sits on the editorial boards of the American Journal of International Law and European Journal of International Law. 

Presentation: Migrant movement takes the form of chokepoints, namely, zones that configure the circulation of persons, services, goods, and information in ways that are both unique and highly prone to disruption. Chokepoints, following anthropologists, are worlds where movement and constriction, flow and blockage, acceleration and slowing down, are integral to how the movement of people, objects, and ideas is channeled and controlled. What is more, though chokepoints are tied to and embedded in specific sites and geographies, they ripple out to impact global patterns of movement and immobility. The particular ecology of networks, processes and mechanisms that these sites enable can thus subvert conventional power structures and hierarchies, opening up the space for and empowering otherwise marginal actors. 

People on the move–both refugees and migrants–encounter any number of chokepoints, whether geographic such as transit corridors in the dessert or the sea, spatiotemporal such as processing centers and refugee camps, or legal, such as the laws and policies that funnel and divert who gets to stay where and for how long. This talk centers non-legal actors that sustain or mold the legal infrastructure of refugee chokepoints and thereby shape migration governance.

Time: 31 October 2024 14:00-15:15

Place: MOBILE – 6B-2-22 Southern Campus + Online

Online participation

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