Migration and Law: Governance, control and integration
Course in the EHU Module "Globalisation, the Economy and Sociology of Law" (1,5 ECTS)
Course content
This course promotes an understanding of law as a social institution, which is applied to public law (focusing on vertical relations between states and citizens, and non-citizens) as well as private law (focusing on horizontal relations between citizens, and non-citizens). Moreover, the course questions the very distinction of public and private, which developed against a certain intellectual background and has implications as to what is regarded the normal state of affairs: some matters being public and others private in nature. Therefore, the course is particularly interested in phenomena which illustrate the contingency of this distinction in the field of migration. Examples can be found in different fields, including the privatisation (deregulation) of public tasks to promote and control human mobility or the politicisation (regulation) of social organizations to counteract discrimination.
Learning Outcomes
By completing this course, students adopt an institutional perspective on migration and law. They will be able to describe the scope both of public law and private law within the governance of human mobility, distinguish their institutional features, and give examples of typical rules. They will be able to locate the public-private dichotomy in intellectual history and discuss its implications for labelling some aspects of social life as public and others as private. They will be able to point out concrete phenomena in which an institutional shift from public to private or from private to public is taking place.
Teaching methodology
Migration governance, border management and integration policies are some of the fields where we are witnessing the most relevant transformations of regulations criss-crossing lines between public and private law. The proliferation of international/transnational institutions that claim for the liberalization of human mobility, together with the increase of control devices for the purpose of containment of unwanted mobility, multilevel policies of integration, as well as bottom-up mobilization and solidarity movements are multiples faces of the same global phenomenon. The sociology of law and other complementary disciplines such as criminology or anthropology are privileged lenses to observe this phenomenon. Thus, the purpose of this course is to introduce how relevant notions about migration management regimes emerge in front of the classic sociology of migration regulation studies.
Research work in these areas is evolving both in approach and methodologies. Whether it is a master's dissertation or a financed project, it must have a section in which the techniques for obtaining information adjusted to the intended objectives and hypotheses are described. And our proposal goes through the combination of both quantitative techniques (data collection (and its problems) of human mobility, detentions/deportations, integration indicators…); as qualitative (interviews to migrants, police officers, policy makers, lawyers, judges, etc; ethnography in sites (International institutions, detention centres, courts, squares/streets…); bureaucratic documents as legal artefacts).
Finally, once completed the research, one of the main challenges that the researcher faces are the dissemination of these results, either in high-impact academic journals or in alternative publications that, due to their activist component, leave the main multinationals but have important diffusion quotas and political and social incidence. Moreover, border and control research can give rise to Alternative research outputs: documentaries, photography exhibitions, theatre plays, etc.
- The changing forms of governance of migration in a globalised world
- Transformations of the State and the return of the border(s)
- Multilevel governance of migration and integration
- Citizenship beyond the nation state, activism or transforming borders from below
- Doing fieldwork and publishing research outputs
