Lawless Zones, Rightless Subjects

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. The purpose of this volume is to study this new reconfiguration of rights, territoriality, and jurisdiction at the empirical and normative levels and to examine its implications for the future of democratic governance within and across borders. Written by a diverse and accomplished group of scholars, the chapters in this volume employ legal, historical, philosophical, critical, discursive, and postcolonial perspectives to explore how the territoriality of the modern states – ostensibly, the most stable and unquestionable element undergirding the current international system – has been rewritten and dramatically reimagined. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Seyla Benhabib is Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy Emerita at Yale University and Senior Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. She is an internationally recognized political philosopher whose work on critical theory, Hannah Arendt, democracy, feminist theory and the rights of migrants and refugees has been translated into fourteen languages. She is the recipient of the Ernst Bloch, Leopold Lucas, Meister Eckhart, and most recently, Theodor W. Adorno Prize of the City of Frankfurt. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of the British Academy and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2024. Her new book, At the Margins of the Modern State: Critical Theory and Law, is forthcoming (Polity Press, 2025).

Ayelet Shachar is the R. F. Harney Chair in Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies at the University of Toronto and Distinguished Visiting Professor in Comparative Law at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of field-defining books on citizenship theory, immigration law, cultural diversity and women’s rights, and the fraught relations between human rights law and territorial conceptions of sovereignty, including The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2009) and The Shifting Border: Legal Cartographies of Migration and Mobility (Manchester University Press, 2020). Her research has influenced law and policymakers worldwide and she has also provided pro bono consultation to judges, non-governmental organizations, the European Parliamentary Research Service, and the World Bank. Shachar is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and winner of the Leibniz Prize – one of Europe’s most prestigious research awards. In 2024, she was awarded the APSA Migration & Citizenship Career Achievement Award – she is the youngest scholar to have earned this accolade.