Derecho ( Law School)

This article introduces the notion of ‘illegality regimes’ and argues that the creation, enhancement, and strengthening of these regimes has a transformative, and perhaps even corrosive effect on the meaning and value of citizenship itself. The notion of illegality regimes refers to the complex normative and policy framework that is either intended to, or otherwise has the effect of marginalizing or otherwise excluding irregular migrants, and to assist the authorities in the process of localizing and deporting them. Much of the political and scholarly attention in the context of illegality is focused on how illegality regimes affect migrants and refugees, how these regimes weaken their human rights, and generally run contrary to liberal principles such as equality before the law and non-discrimination. However, the objective here is to explore how it is not just the undocumented migrant that is directly or indirectly affected by the illegality regimes, but also regular migrants, asylum seekers, and finally full citizens themselves. The ways in which this happens is by a progressive transformation of what it means to be a citizen, and by means of a re-accommodation of the relation between the citizen and the state. As globalization unleashes migratory processes, the state adapts. Citizenship adapts along.

This article investigates how a recent report by the ILO works hard to make migration a global phenomenon. The analysis reminds us that reality is never immediately legible; it is always construed discursively and migration is therefore neither inherently local nor global. It is precisely the function of IGOs like ILO to transform a social process into a global reality, for example through the collection of (supposedly) comparable data from all countries, or through what this article calls 'totalizing tendencies,' i.e. different patterns of argumentation that all view migration as a global phenomenon and that produce a coherent story out of the multiple manifestations of cross-border mobility.

A key materiality of international law is the knowledge that bares that name, the types of knowledge that are produced in the name of international law, or in plainer words: international legal research. These types of knowledge are the bread and butter of international legal scholars, and their setting is primarily the academic institutions that harbour them. This type of materiality has changed significantly in the last five or so decades: the number of periodicals has grown exponentially; the internet has made networks and research much more expansive; quantitative multiplication and qualitative proliferation have blurred, and hidden, the predominance of old establishments and centres, while creating new opportunities, and challenges too, for the peripheries.

This contemporaneousness is the setting for a fresh inquiry into place and non-place when doing international law research. For international law is the law of the 'everywhere' and the 'everyone', the law that is not-local, while the material practices of international legal research are tenaciously localized, even when epistemically and socially connected along global grids and networks. The purpose of this paper is to explore this potentially maddening self-reflexivity of place and non-place, as well as its necessary unconscious dimensions. Is locality an obstacle or a channel by which international law research is performed? Is 'globality', the lack of locality, an actual place? Is it doomed to be a non-place? Or is international law, or 'the international', perhaps the means by which our place and non-place acquires shape, the means by which tension becomes shape, and shape becomes action?

ABSTRACT: The year 1991 saw the publication of Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin, and Shelley Wright's ‘Feminist Approaches to International Law’ in the American Journal of International Law. This event was by no means the first feminist engagement with the field, but it marked feminism's entrance through the front door of the international legal academic establishment.
Since then, feminist approaches have become a permanent feature of the discipline, with references in textbooks, panels and groups in ASIL and ESIL meetings, and even some book length treatises. Beyond academia, gender and women’s issues have remained a regular item on the international political and judicial agenda. Though the feminist program is by no means exhausted, it would seem that the history of feminist engagements with international law constitutes a veritable success story, as well as a story in which a theoretical intervention has had an enormous practical impact; think of the role of gender in international human rights, international criminal law, and in normative discourses about good governance, among others.
This presentation interrogates this apparent success, but also goes beyond the oft made observation that feminism has in fact remained a marginal or ‘ghettoized’ feature in international legal scholarship. Rather, he wants to approach this story of the simultaneous success and marginalization of feminism as a way to understand some of the more general features of international legal scholarship and practice in the last 20 years.

This article proposes that international legal scholarship may, in its encounter with the phenomenon of migration, benefit from acquiring a sensitivity to the political economy of the distinction between crisis and the mundane. It does so by looking at two particular fields of international migration: refugee law and the law of irregular migration. The first enjoys a large degree of attention from international lawyers, while the other enjoys almost none. Moreover, within these two categories of migrants, international legal scholars tend to ‘see’ some subjects, such as refugee crises and human trafficking, and ‘not see’ others, such as the legal limbo of the ‘temporary’ refugee camp and the daily life of the irregular migrant. This chapter argues that the difference in attention international legal scholars give to one or the other category of persons is the product not of the jurisdiction or the reach of international law, but rather of ideological and epistemological biases. These biases cause international lawyers to ‘see’ crisis, and to ‘not see’ that which is not crisis – that which is quotidian, mundane, or ‘normal’, in the ‘everyday’ sense of the word. By focusing on the crisis/mundane distinction and the privileging of ‘crisis’, this chapter helps to identify the specific focus and boundaries of the epistemic bias of international migration law scholarship.

The role of law in migration control involves primarily, though not exclusively, questions of access to the national territory. As such, the law of migration control is a law of border and territorial control. In this general perspective "territory" is a neatly demarcated piece of land, of which the border marks the difference between inside and outside. The territoriality of the state is generally considered to be an essential element of statehood, both as fact and in terms of the sovereign prerogative for control that it entails. This article first highlights the historical contingency of this state of affairs, how it is deeply embedded in the project of colonization and centralization that was part of the creation of the modern state, and how cartography, statistics, and other technologies of legibility and identification are part of this. In particular, it explains how control of domestic, not international, mobility was at the origins of national identification documents, which only relatively recently has morphed into the international system of passports. Subsequently, the article analyses the geographical dimensions of contemporary migration law, how it aims to control the decisions of potential migrants long before they even approach the border. Immigration states seek to push the territorial border away, and preferably in ways that do not involve an extension of their formal jurisdiction; geographic control without (territorial) jurisdiction is a common feature of extra-territorial migration control. If one then looks to the "inside" of the territory, the law of migration control seeks to weed out irregular migrants by means of illegality regimes that make border control and identity verification ubiquitous. Seen from these perspectives geography becomes a malleable thing, rather than a static terrain over which to rule. Finally, the article briefly explores the geographical dimensions of a couple of ongoing important developments in technology and governmentality, and reflects on their significance for the law of migration control.

In this short post on EJIL: Talk! I argue that international migration law offers states a license to discriminate among people for reasons of economic worth, and that this is problematic in view of how many international lawyers see their project in humanist-egalitarian terms. This is the opening piece in a short Symposium organised by the ESIL Interest Group on Migration and Refugee Law.

The symposium started with a piece by me: http://www.ejiltalk.org/international-migration-law-license-to-discriminate/ which elicited two responses: http://www.ejiltalk.org/why-international-migration-law-does-not-give-a-license-to-discriminate/ and http://www.ejiltalk.org/the-human-rights-of-migrants-as-limitations-on-states-control-over-entry-and-stay-in-their-territory/ and has ended with a response by me: http://www.ejiltalk.org/a-brief-response-to-pizzutelli-and-sitaropoulos/​

This chapter explores the proposition that international law (or law in general) is both everywhere, in the sense that it is 'the law of the land', applicable everywhere (within its spatial jurisdiction), while at the same time being also, and always only, 'somewhere', in a specific context, in a particular interaction, attached to specific beings. The way that international law can be both these things is by means of its invocation, by agents in contexts. This chapter focuses on one specific site of invocation: the international law classroom.

Citation:
Juan M. Amaya-Castro, Teaching International Law: Both Everywhere and Somewhere,
in Liber Amicorum in Honour of a Modern Renaissance Man Gudmundur Eiríksson (Juan Carlos Saínz-Borgo, et al. (eds.)), 2017, pp 521-536.

This chapter examines the development of a global regime of social differentiation as a consequence of migration control. It discusses the main features of migration control, focusing on nationality and visa policies, and conceptualizes migration control as pursuing selection or social sorting. It concludes that the main factors in the differentiation of international mobility capacity are first nationality, where citizens from wealthier countries have more mobility capacity, and second economic worth, with a bias toward 'higher skills'. These two combine to be one of the ways in which globalization cuts right through national citizenship, enhancing the differentials in economic worth.

This chapter examines the development of a global regime of social differentiation as a consequence of migration control. It discusses the main features of migration control, focusing on nationality and visa policies, and conceptualizes migration control as pursuing selection or social sorting. It concludes that the main factors in the differentiation of international mobility capacity are first nationality, where citizens from wealthier countries have more mobility capacity, and second economic worth, with a bias toward 'higher skills'. These two combine to be one of the ways in which globalization cuts right through national citizenship, enhancing the differentials in economic worth.

You can cite it as: Juan M. Amaya-Castro, 'In Its Majestic Inequality’: Migration Control and Differentiated Citizenship, The Transformation of Citizenship - Vol. 2: Boundaries of Inclusion and Exclusion (Jürgen Mackert & Bryan S. Turner (eds.)), 2017, pp 84-100.

Este curso analiza cuales son las dimensiones espaciales del derecho, y cuales las dimensiones jurídicas de los espacios. La intersección entre el derecho y la geografía se aproximará de dos formas. Primero se examinará la relación entre la teoría jurídica y la geografía crítica y política, con sus diversas interdisciplinaridades, mediante lo cual se explicarán algunas relaciones epistemológicas y metodológicas entre el derecho y la geografía.

Este marco teórico servirá entonces para analizar una serie de casos concretos desde una perspectiva jurídico-espacial. Desde la noción de la propiedad (suelo, subsuelo, etc.) y el ordenamiento territorial, pasando por el caso de las disputas por la actualización del catastro, la estratificación de los suelos, la migración y el desplazamiento, las dimensiones geográficas del Acuerdo de La Habana, hasta las dimensiones jurídico-espaciales de la educación jurídica, entre otros temas. De esta forma los participantes en el curso desarrollaran una sensibilidad espacial, aprenderán a utilizar las perspectivas particulares de los análisis jurídico-espaciales, y su aplicación en diversos contextos, así como a formular innovadoras estrategias jurídico-políticas en diferentes situaciones