Coloniality Academic – Page 2 – Thomas Spijkerboer

Ik zie ik zie wat ik niet zie: Etnisch profileren en structurele rassendiscriminatie in het migratierecht (met Karin de Vries, 2022)

Hoewel de KMar inmiddels heeft laten weten niet door te zullen gaan met etnisch profileren in het kader van MTV-controles, is zulk profileren volgens de Nederlandse rechter niet in strijd met internationale discriminatieverboden. Dat strookt echter niet met de rechtspraak van het EHRM: als huidskleur, ook al is dat in een optelsom van criteria, beslissend is voor de vraag of iemand wordt staande gehouden is er steeds sprake van een onderscheid in strijd met artikel 1 Protocol 12 EVRM. Tegelijkertijd valt niet te ontkennen dat ras historisch steeds in grote mate bepalend is geweest, en nog steeds is, voor het antwoord op de vraag wie zich relatief vrij over de wereld kan bewegen, en wie niet. Die ongelijke toegang tot legale migratie komt voort uit het koloniale verleden en heeft tot gevolg dat mensen zonder rechtmatig verblijf vooral mensen van kleur zijn. Het verbod om expliciet onderscheid te maken op grond van ras maakt het echter onmogelijk om het structurele verband tussen huidskleur en verblijfsstatus juridisch te erkennen

Ik zie ik zie wat ik niet zie: Etnisch profileren en structurele rassendiscriminatie in het migratierecht, Nederlands Juristenblad 25 februari 2022, 549-555

Migration management clientelism: Europe’s migration funds as a global political project (2022)

In response to the 2015 migration ‘crisis’, the European Union intensified the externalisation of its migration policies, in particular through the EU Trust Funds for Syria and Africa, and the Facility for Refugees in Turkey. The legal construction of these financial measures is such that in many projects, normal implementation and public procurement procedures are not applied. This creates opportunities for clientelism. A limited number of actors (Europe’s ‘clients’) has emerged to implement European policies in third countries. This way of implementing externalisation projects will first be analysed in functionalist terms and in terms of path dependency. The paper will conclude by arguing that, in addition to such analyses, this way of implementing externalisation is to be understood as (a) expanding the scope of legitimate action of European states outside their territory; and (b) setting norms for international actors such as non-European states, international organisations and corporations.

Migration Management Clientelism. Europe’s migration funds as a global political project, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 48(2022)12, 2892-2907

Race and the regulation of international migration. The ongoing impact of colonialism in the case law of The European Court of Human Rights (with Karin de Vries, 2021)

In the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) the right of States to control migration is firmly established despite strong indications that the effects of migration control are not racially neutral. In this article we attempt to understand how it is possible that the doctrine of sovereign migration control is not considered to breach the prohibition of racial discrimination. We argue that the ECtHR’s approach to migration and racial discrimination fits a pattern in the historical development of migration law whereby the right to travel, and the power of States to restrict this right, have been consistently defined in such a way as to protect the interests of the predominantly white population of today’s global North. Hence, the ease with which the racialised impact of migration control is accepted as normal and compatible with the prohibition of racial discrimination is consistent with migration law’s long history as part of colonial and postcolonial relations.

Race and the regulation of international migration. The ongoing impact of colonialism in the case law of The European Court of Human Rights, Netherlands Quarterly of Human Rights 39(2021)4, 291-307

Migration Emergencies in the European Postcolony (2021)

This interview, by Lea Espinoza Garrido, Sylvia Mieszkowski, Birgit Spengler and Julia Wewior, focuses on the legal concept of emergency in current European migration law. In its interest in colonial legacies, this conversation overlaps with some of the double issue’s articles – most notably those by Eichinger, Espinoza Garrido, Sarkowsky, Wewior and Wilton. Yet the interview also offers a unique focus on the colonial legacy of European case law. The interviewee, Thomas Spijkerboer, critiques the European legal tradition’s thinking about the state of exception (Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben). He argues that merely building on this tradition runs the risk of erasing the racial specificity which may be hidden, but is, in fact, crucial to the legal concept of emergency, especially in the context of discussing current migrant emergencies. In order to avoid this erasure, Spijkerboer draws on Achille Mbembe, one of the most prominent contemporary thinkers of (and from) the postcolony, to foreground that which is so easily lost in current discussions of European migration law: the role that race plays in the organisation of freedom within liberalism and the insight that modern techniques of legal pluralism are deeply rooted in the history of colonial rule.

Migration Emergencies in the European Postcolony: an Interview with Thomas Spijkerboer, Parallax 2021(27)2, 223-239

The geopolitics of knowledge production in international migration law (2021)

This chapter addresses the involvement of academic research on international migration law in the political project of the global North to impose its view concerning international migration law on the global South. The purportedly well-established principle of international law that states have the right exclude foreigners has its origins in the US Supreme Court’s Chinese Exclusion case law. The doctrine holding that the right of exclusion is inherent in state sovereignty developed there has been adopted and transformed by the European Court of Human Rights. In order to show the continuing relevance of the Chinese Exclusion doctrine, I will analyse a rather everyday judgment of the European Court about boat people (J.R. et autres v Grèce 2018). This will be contrasted with a judgment about boat people from the global South, issued by the Papua New Guinea (PNG) Supreme Court of Justice (Namah v Pato 2016). I will then show how the PNG judgment, and law from the global South more generally, is sidelined in academic work, while Strasbourg judgments are treated as embodying the state of international law (even when they are being criticised). I will analyse this as an act of power erasing sources of international migration law from the global South. As an example, I include bibliometrics on the International Journal of Refugee Law. I will close by showing that this erasure can be, and actually is being resisted within the discipline of international law.

The geopolitics of knowledge production in international migration law,
in Catherine Dauvergne (ed), Research Handbook on the Law and Politics of Migration, Cheltenham/Northampton: Edward Elgar 2021, p. 172-188 Download

Confronting the Colonial Structure of International Migration Law (lecture, 2021)

Inaugural lecture of the International Franqui Professor Chair 2020-2021, Ghent University, 20 January 2021

A version of this talk with a specific focus on settler colonies is Coloniality, Settler Colonialism, and International Migration Law (Annual Howard Adelman Lecture, Centre for Refugee Studies, York University, 17 June 2021), Youtube

Anonymous (1617): Hugo de Groot (Collection Haags Museum)

The New Borders of Empire. European migration policy and domestic passenger transport in Niger (2019)

Niger has implemented the UN Smuggling Protocol in such a manner that it introduced carrier sanctions on domestic bus travels. This implementation undermines free movement in the ECOWAS zone. The implementation has been sponsored by the EU through legal expertise, training and materials. This constitutes a continuation of European imperial history in Africa.

The New Borders of Empire. European migration policy and domestic passenger transport in Niger, in Paul Minderhoud, Sandra Mantu & Karin Zwaan (eds): Caught in Between Borders: Citizens, migrants and humans. Liber Amicorum in Honour of prof. dr. Elspeth Guild, Wolf Legal Publishers, Tilburg 2019, p. 49-57

The New Borders of Empire Download

Alexandre Roubtzoff: *Fez Novembre 1921* (Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Tunis; Collection of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs)

The Global Mobility Infrastructure: Reconceptualising the Externalisation of Migration Control (2018)

Constant: New Babylon (photo Sylvia Korving)

Since the end of the Cold War, migration law and policy of the global North has been characterised by externalisation, privatisation and securitisation. These developments
have been conceptualised as denying access to migrants and as politics of non-entrée. This article proposes to broaden the analysis, and to analyse unwanted migration as merely one form of international human mobility by relying on the concept of the global mobility infrastructure. The global mobility infrastructure consists of the physical structures, services and laws that enable some people to move across the globe with high speed, low risk, and at low cost. People who have no access to it travel slowly, with high risk and at high cost. Within the global mobility infrastructure, travellers benefit from advanced forms of international law. For the excluded, international law reflects and embodies their exclusion before, during and after their travel to the global North. Exclusion is based on nationality, race, class and gender. The notion of the global mobility infrastructure allows for questioning the way in which international law reproduces these forms of stratification.

The Global Mobility Infrastructure: Reconceptualising the Externalisation of Migration Control, European Journal of Migration and Law 20(2018), 452-469

Legitimatie van ontruimingen in het hedendaagse Europa en Zuid-Afrika onder Apartheid (2018)

Onder het Zuid-Afrikaanse Apartheidsregime werd, net als nu in Europa, een situatie geschapen waarin grote aantallen mensen als illegale vreemdelingen werden aangemerkt. Dit artikel brengt in kaart hoe, op basis van de status van illegale vreemdeling, mensen uit hun huizen konden en kunnen worden gezet omdat ze niet mogen wonen waar ze wonen. De hiervoor gegeven rechtvaardigingen worden gegroepeerd in enerzijds binnenlands ruimtelijk beleid (ruimtelijke ordening in het geval van Zuid-Afrika, openbare orde in het hedendaagse Europa), en anderzijds buitenlands ruimtelijk beleid, dat will zeggen migratierecht. Een laatste deel bespreekt waar de vergelijking tussen Zuid-Afrika onder Apartheid en het hedendaagse Europa zinvol is, en waar de parallel haar grenzen bereikt.

Legitimatie van ontruimingen in het hedendaagse Europa en Zuid-Afrika onder Apartheid, Nederlands Juristenblad 2018, p. 856-864

Legitimizing Evictions in Contemporary Europe and Apartheid South Africa (2017)

This paper undertakes to investigate parallels between evictions of irregularized persons in Apartheid South Africa and contemporary Europe. In both cases, people were denied the right to a home (or at least: to the home they were occupying at that moment) because they were considered to be illegal aliens. But how did this situation come about? How did these people become illegal aliens? And while it seems obvious that illegal aliens can be deported from the territory, how did their alien status come to justify the destruction of their homes? Pursuing the association means we will not only identify similarities, but also try to establish where the association meets it limits. The aim of pursuing a visual association across time and space is not primarily to draw exact parallels. In contemporary Europe, the use of violence of a “white” state in order to destroy the housing of “non-whites” is accepted as a normal element in the regulation of “non-white” populations. The association with Apartheid seeks to problematize this normality by pointing to the uneasy pedigree of such practices.

Legitimizing Evictions in Contemporary Europe and Apartheid South Africa , 14 Ameriquests (2017) 1, p. 6-22