Migration

For Department ‘Law and Anthropology’ , migration is a major research area, and those mentioned above are just two of several researchers engaging in the topic there. For example, this year, Dr Luc LeBoeuf and others published Between Protection and Harm, a book that emerged from the VULNER project at the Institute, and that investigates how vulnerability is used in asylum and migration systems. Based on fieldwork across Europe, Canada, Lebanon, and Uganda, the collected essays reveal that while vulnerability is intended as a criterion for granting protection, in practice it often acts as a filter—prioritizing some migrants while excluding others.

The research highlights how bureaucratic and legal actors apply narrow, decontextualized definitions of vulnerability that fail to reflect migrants’ complex lived experiences. As a result, asylum processes risk reinforcing inequality and harm. By combining legal analysis with ethnographic insights, the volume calls for a ‘situated’ and empirically grounded approach to protection. It argues that only through transparent, equitable, and context-sensitive policies can migration governance respond meaningfully to the realities of displacement.

Professor Anuscheh Farahat, Max Planck Fellow and Senior Research Affiliate , is the author of an article entitled ‘Human Rights and the Political: Assessing the Allegation of Human Rights Overreach in Migration Matters’. In it, she explores human rights struggles at Europe’s external borders, where states increasingly adopt strategies to deflect responsibility for migrant protection. Amid rising populism and xenophobia, expansive interpretations of human rights in favour of migrants are increasingly dismissed as ‘human rights overreach’—an encroachment on state sovereignty.

Farahat critically assesses whether this is indeed a case of human rights overreach or rather a necessary ‘outreach’—an adaptation of human rights in the face of evolving border practices. She argues for a more explicitly political understanding of human rights, one that ‘defends the idea of human rights as a concrete utopia’. The article suggests how ‘courts and migration law scholars should deal with the challenges of human rights struggles regarding migration’.

Last year, Johanna Bücker, Doctoral Researcher , was among 22 academics—including Anuscheh Farahat (see above)—who submitted a joint third-party intervention to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in three pending cases concerning pushbacks by Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania at the Belarusian border. The submission, later published in a 2025 Bonavero Report, was followed by oral hearings in Strasbourg, which Bücker attended alongside members of the drafting team. This formed the basis of a blog entitled ‘The Claim of Hybrid Attacks: Balancing State Sovereignty and Migrants’ Rights at the European Court of Human Rights’.

The blog lays out the respondent states’ argument that Belarus orchestrated a ‘hybrid attack’ by instrumentalizing migrants, justifying their own emergency responses—including pushbacks and denied asylum procedures—as necessary for national security. The core legal issue is whether such a geopolitical context can create unwritten exceptions to the relevant legal regimes of international and EU law, including the prohibition of refoulement and collective expulsion. Governments urged the Court to accept a balancing approach; human rights actors warned of ‘human rights exceptionalism’, where states sidestep obligations under the guise of crisis. At stake is the integrity of the European human rights regime itself: whether security rhetoric can erode core guarantees without formal derogation.

Dr Dana Schmalz, Senior Researcher , has published an important monograph on Refugees, Democracy and the Law. The abstract offers a clear summary of the book’s contents and underlying arguments:

The work introduces readers to the evolution of refugee law and its core issues today, as well as central lines in the debate about democracy and migration. Bringing together these fields, the book links theoretical considerations and legal analysis. Based on its specific understanding of the refugee concept, it offers a reconstruction of refugee law as constantly confronted with the question of how to secure rights to those who have no voice in the democratic process. In this reconstruction, the book highlights, on the one hand, the need to look beyond the legal regulations for understanding the challenges and gaps in refugee protection. It is also the structural lack of political voice, the book argues, which shapes the refugee’s situation. On the other hand, the book opposes a view of law as mere expression of power and points out the dynamics within the law which reflect endeavours towards mitigating exclusion.

A review of Schmalz’s book in the Journal of Refugee Studies affirms that her analysis ‘makes valuable contributions to understanding both the normative grounds for recognizing refugees’ entitlements to some robust set of political rights, and the varied legal and policy instruments through which such political rights might be realized within contemporary international practice’.