01 Research
Research
Most of my work asks when, why and how states may legitimately exclude migrants from territory and political community, and interrogates the ethical and political implications of different forms of migration and border control. Currently, I am pursuing three major research projects.
Illegitimate Borders: Liberal Democracy and the Restriction of Movement
Liberal democracies in the Global North are developing increasingly harsh measures to keep unwanted migrants away from their territories or expel them after they have made it inside. At the same time, freedom of movement is widely considered an important human interest, so that compelling reasons are required to restrict it on morally sound terms. Taking these contrasting realities of movement and exclusion seriously, Illegitimate Borders reconsiders the question if states have moral rights to exclude migrants from their territories, a question that has become central to many debates in contemporary political theory. It does so by foregrounding the long-ignored but highly pertinent lens of legitimate authority, explaining that state-directed exclusion always involves authority claims, asking how such claims may principally be rendered legitimate, and investigating how the realities of exclusion affect the real legitimacy of authoritative migration control regimes in liberal democracies.
The Legitimate Authority of Migration Control (LEGITCONTROL)
States’ efforts to control migration and the moral legitimacy of these efforts are politically charged issues of intense public controversy. Political philosophers have not yet fully clarified how we should assess the claims of states to authority in the migration control domain, nor comprehensively assessed the moral significance of specific, newly emerging migration control strategies. Addressing both theory and practice in a two-step process, LEGITCONTROL aims to correct these shortcomings. On the level of theory, it first theorizes the conditions of legitimate migrant exclusion, and then the conditions under which interstate migration control agreements can develop binding moral force over the state parties involved. On the level of practice, it first analyzes whether increasingly prominent systems of digital and algorithmic migrant exclusion meet the first kind of legitimacy standard, before examining if important bilateral migration control agreements between states in the Global North and the Global South meet the second kind of legitimacy standard. Overall, LEGITCONTROL scrutinizes the legitimacy of migration control in liberal democracies by assessing some of its most salient manifestations. Full details are available on the official EU project page.
The Ethics of Migration Policy Dilemmas
The Ethics of Migration Policy Dilemmas is a joint initiative of the Migration Policy Centre at the European University Institute and the FWF-funded project “Migration as Morality Politics,” which stages structured debates on concrete dilemmas facing migration and refugee policymakers — from the regularisation of irregular migrants to search and rescue at sea — through discussion fora that pair an open-access position paper with responses from international scholars and political actors and a final rejoinder. I have co-coordinated the project since 2021 alongside Martin Ruhs, Rainer Bauböck, and Julia Mourão Permoser, and have contributed to it as an author across several of its outputs, including the roundtable on ethical dilemmas and migration policymaking published in Ethics and International Affairs and the discussion forum on responses to unauthorised immigrant residence. More on the project is available on its overview page.
Work on these and similar projects has produced a number of peer-reviewed publications, which you can find on the next page.