AP/HREQ 4772 6.00
Migration and Refugee Protection
This course uses a critical human rights approach to analyze the politics of migration and refugee protection. It develops an interdisciplinary and multicultural understanding of the nature and evolution of national and international refugee regimes, with emphasis on the different types of actors, structures, processes, and norms that organize and control borders.
It analyses the post September 11, 2001 era that legitimized a radical reconceptualization of the legitimacy of international migration and the potential and challenges of the UN Global Compact for Migration. The course evaluates the fact that migration will remain largely uncontrollable, unless democratic states become police states and the urgency and necessity to understand that a foreigner is a holder of fundamental rights. In a new conceptualization of citizenship, security and human rights must be reconciled to ensure the protection of migrants as required by their vulnerable conditions.
The methodological approach of the course is multidimensional and dialectical. It is a quest for a synthesis or reconciliation of the various aspects of international migration and refugee law in a context of a progressive humanization international legal order and a constant securitization of immigration. Emphasis is on the dialectical relations between sovereignty, human right and the movement of people, the state and the market, nationalism and technology in the evolution of the theory and practice of international migration law. By clarifying the historical and philosophical foundations of the international protection regime, the course hopes to deconstruct the mythologies that shaped the encrusted dogmas related to immigration and asylum.
Course credit exclusions: AP/PPAS 4111 3.00, AP/PPAS 4112 3.00
Prerequisites: 78 credits, or permission from the undergraduate program director.