Subjection and Subjectivation: Migrants Navigating Legal Regimes

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Abstract

Migrants move in an environment of overlapping and fragmented legal borderlands, with European states largely seeking to use this fragmented landscape to keep migrants away. What could a fundamental and transformative critique look like? While an ontological critique of legal regimes is well suited to identify implicit repressive logics, it obscures the agency of migrant subjects. We therefore propose an agenda for a critique that reflects on both the dimension of subjection and of subjectivation. Looking at the ways in which migrants are subjected to legal regimes reveals the complexity of regime interplays, institutional practices, and implicit ontologies of law that marginalize migrants and lead to “legal black holes” and zones of rightlessness, or a-legality. Turning to the process of subjectivation, it can be seen that migrants shape their legal environment through individual and collective practices of negotiation, dissent and contestation that invoke and transcend legal regimes. This allows us to examine how through their practices, non-state actors can co-construct the political and social reality of the law, strategically navigate legal regimes, and negotiate the terms of their legal subjectivation.

Speakers from the University of Münster

Endemann, Fabian	Professor of International Public Law and International Human Rights Law
Markard, Nora	Professor of International Public Law and International Human Rights Law