Dr Catherine Briddick and Dr Uttara Shahani helped organise a successful colloquium on Race, Refuge, and Repair, which brought together empirical work currently organised under the banner of ‘border criminologies’ with critical legal analysis, including Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and related work at the intersections of refugee law, race, decolonisation and criminalisation.
The colloquium, which was held on 29-30 May at the University of Cape Town, sought to advance scholarship on the imbrication of law and colonisation and the legal, political, economic and ecological relationships embedded in Empire, displacement, mobility and refugee protection.
Professor Tendayi Achiume gave the keynote lecture on ‘Corporate Border Imperialism’.
Dr Briddick spoke on ‘When Treaties are Forbidden: Jus Cogens, Norm-Conflict, and Refugee Protection’ and Dr Shahani spoke on the ‘Colonial legacies of the management of im(mobility)’.
Speakers at the colloquium came from 14 countries – South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, India, England, Ireland, Germany, Belgium, Poland, Sweden and the United States – and presented on two regions (the Sahel and the European Union) as well as ten countries: Palestine, Rwanda, South Africa, Tunisia, Egypt, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Libya, the UK, and Italy.
The colloquium was co-organised by the RSC, the Centre for Criminology and the Refugee Rights Unit at the University of Cape Town, and Border Criminologies at the Centre for Criminology at the University of Oxford, alongside the Centre for International Governance and Dispute Resolution at King’s College London.