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This term's series is co-convened by Dr Cathryn Costello and Dr Alexander Betts

Syrian refugees are rescued in the Mediterranean Sea by crew of the Italian ship, Grecale © UNHCR / A D'Amato
Syrian refugees are rescued in the Mediterranean Sea by crew of the Italian ship, Grecale

Although refugee protection is heavily regulated by international, regional and domestic law, this is not uniformly or exhaustively so. In many regions of the world, refugee protection remains principally a matter of the state's political prerogatives. Moreover, even where states are parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention, refugee protection does not escape politics. Politics permeates legal protection, and legal protections structure political contestation.

The series will examine the politics and law of refugee protection, looking at the hosting of refugees in the Middle East; the politics of refugee crises; the political and legal construction of detention of asylum seekers and refugees; and how refugee law responds to those fleeing extreme poverty, a predicament often erroneously assumed to fall outside the legal notion of persecution. It will also examine the politics of the gaps in the refugee regime, in particular the lack of responsibility-sharing mechanisms, and how states construct barriers to access to asylum.

Trinity term seminars

30 April 2014
Refugee identity and protection in the Middle East: legal lacuna or political pragmatism?
Dr Dallal Stevens (Warwick Law School)

7 May 2014
Weapons of mass migration: forced displacement, coercion and foreign policy
Professor Kelly M Greenhill (Tufts University)

14 May 2014
Solidarity and responsibility-sharing for refugee protection in the EU’s Common European Asylum System
Madeline Garlick (Radboud University)

21 May 2014
Refuge from deprivation: socio-economic harm and non-refoulement in international law
Dr Michelle Foster (Melbourne Law School)

28 May 2014
Arbitrary detention of asylum-seekers: a comparison of some recent practice from Italy and the UK
Dr Daniel Wilsher (City University London) and Francesca Cancellaro (University of Bologna)

4 June 2014
The law and politics of non-entrée
Dr Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen (The Danish Institute for Human Rights)

11 June 2014
ANNUAL ELIZABETH COLSON LECTURE
Impossible situations: affective impasses and their afterlives in humanitarian and ethnographic fieldwork
Professor Liisa Malkki (Stanford University) 

Related content

Cathryn Costello People

Alexander Betts People

Public Seminar Series Events