Responding to ever-increasing pressures of migration, states, supranational, and subnational actors deploy complex moves and maneuvers to reconfigure borders, rights, and territory, giving rise to a changing legal cartography of international relations and international law. The purpose of this volume is to study this new reconfiguration of rights, territoriality, and jurisdiction at the empirical and normative levels and to examine its implications for the future of democratic governance within and across borders. Written by a diverse and accomplished group of scholars, the chapters in this volume employ legal, historical, philosophical, critical, discursive, and postcolonial perspectives to explore how the territoriality of the modern states – ostensibly, the most stable and unquestionable element undergirding the current international system – has been rewritten and dramatically reimagined. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

‘Borders have long been regarded as delimiting national territories and defining state sovereignties. But as Lawless Zones, Rightless Subjects convincingly demonstrates, a new geography of externalized and hardening borders has recently emerged as a result of moral panics around migration fueled by xenophobic discourses. Traveling across disciplines and continents, the authors brilliantly illuminate this historical transformation of global political landscapes.’

Didier Fassin - Professor at the Collège de France and the Institute for Advanced Study

‘Disclosing, charting, and critically engaging the reconfigurations of territory, rights, and jurisdiction that structure the global politics of migration and asylum, this volume explores their implications for contemporary political orders. Benhabib and Shachar have assembled a stellar cast of investigators who map this terrain from diverse perspectives in order to shed light over the whole. Essential reading for legal and political theorists concerned with understanding the present, and sustaining the futures, of democratic governance and of human rights.’

David Owen - Professor of Social and Political Philosophy, University of Southampton

‘This remarkable volume, examining the many modes of closing doors to the movement of people, opens wide windows for readers to understand these anxious times, as migrants bear the weight of the sense of dislocation that is experienced within and beyond the nation state.’

Judith Resnik - Arthur Liman Professor of Law, Yale Law School