CRS Annual Howard Adelman Lecture: Coloniality, settler colonialism and international migration law
Channel: Centre for Refugee Studies
Date: 07/07/2021

Guest Speaker: Thomas Spijkerboer, Professor of Migration Law, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

International migration law results in a system that allows Europeans and their descendants in settler colonies such as Canada to travel across the globe, while not allowing people from the global South to do the same. This legal system has been shaped by colonialism and continues to have a colonial structure. Legal doctrine in formerly colonised parts of the world does not necessarily share the normative assumptions underlying this European system, while indigenous peoples in Canada have also expressed alternative normative concepts. How can legal academics confront this pluralist and contested character of the field they are working in?

Bio: Thomas Spijkerboer is professor of migration law at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Amsterdam Centre for Migration and Refugee Law). He has been Raoul Wallenberg Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law and Lund University (2017-2020), and International Franqui Professor at Ghent University (2020-2021). His research addresses gender and sexuality in asylum law, migration and asylum procedure, and global inequality in human movement.

Discussants:

Idil Atak, Associate Professor, Department of Criminology and Faculty of Law, Ryerson University

Amar Bhatia, Associate Professor, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University