Today, illegality is the major frame through which societies discuss migration. While the existing literature has situated the emergence of the figure of the illegal migrant in the post-1945 era, I show that people were already criminalized as illegal in 1920s Germany. To target Jewish migrants fleeing the pogroms in present-day Poland and Ukraine, the German government built its first immigration detention camps and attempted to control its external borders and deport those that had been categorized as ‘nuisance foreigners’ – the poor, those without a job or a permanent abode, and those who had been found guilty of a crime. Through a historical case study of Germany, this paper therefore asks how states first came to render people on the move as illegal. Drawing on one year of archival research, I show how the making of migrant illegality is as much rooted in the domestic control of vagrants and Roma people as it was influenced by the transnational efforts to manage colonized labor. I argue that the entanglements of these local-subnational and global-colonial histories of mobility controls equipped the German state with the legal, bureaucratic, and enforcement capacities to define and categorize who can be excluded as an illegal migrant and to detain and deport those targeted.

About the Speaker

Sabrina Axster is a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University’s Migration Initiative and hold a PhD in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University.

This event is part of the Department of Government's Politics, Sandwiches, and Comments workshop series.

The Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) gives students multiple ways to engage with Southeast Asia. Affiliate with our program to be informed of all SEAP events and activities. Undergraduates who minor in Southeast Asian Studies are advised by SEAP Program Faculty advisors who collaborate with them to construct a course of study based upon their area of interest. SEAP also runs the CU in Cambodia program for students interested in international travel.

Can’t attend? Contact seap@cornell.edu.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students. To learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships, view the full calendar for spring semester sessions.

This conference brings together scholars undertaking new research on questions of democratic resistance and sources of resilience in response to global evidence of democratic backsliding.

We will work together to analyze domestic and international factors, including institutions, civil society, political parties, voters, media, and foreign policy. In an era marked by threats to democracy from within nominally democratic institutions, by elected officials, and with varying degrees of support from the voting public, we seek to understand the interactive nature of democratic threats and resistance strategies.

As democracy can be conceived of as a continued contestation over rights, responsibilities, and rules, we aim to use this critical historical moment of contestation to expand our comparative conceptions of democratic practice, strategies of endurance and deepening or weakening of democratic regimes, and the social, economic, technological, and institutional factors that contribute to varied outcomes worldwide.

Hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the conference is part of Einaudi's work on democratic threats and resilience.

Register to attend the conference

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March 22 Panels

Panel 1: Concepts and Measurement: Democracy 2.0
This panel will push beyond the measurement debates to address conceptual and ontological questions about how to measure democracy, and definitional questions at the heart of democracy’s weaknesses and promise in contemporary practice. Does the practice of a minimal definition of democracy contribute to public disenchantment, and is such practice durable?

Panel 2: Resilience Factors, Resistance Strategies, and Opposition Tactics
This panel will examine the social and economic bases of democratic resiliency, as well as various strategies, actors, and institutions that can fortify and even enhance democratic practice.

Panel 3: Stabilizing Forces? Historical Patterns and Contemporary Challenges
This panel will dissect the factors that have historically stabilized advanced industrial democracies—including party systems, modes of political representation, and patterns of capitalist development-- and their potential applicability to contemporary patterns of democratic backsliding and resistance.

March 23 Panel

Panel 4: International Actors and Regional Organizations
This panel will explore the ways in which authoritarian or democratic leaders and regimes exert influence on the regime types of other countries and the influence of regional organizations on participating countries’ regime trajectories.

Have you considered summer study abroad and are interested in studying law? Join Cornell Law School faculty and the Office of Global Learning to learn more about the Cornell Prelaw Program in Paris, a three-week academic program in international and comparative law. Study law in a uniquely international and culturally rich environment, combining the excellence of Cornell Law School faculty and the Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne. Prepare for the law school admissions process and acquire the study skills for success in law school.

Find out more about our summer public policy program in Turin. Nestled between the Alps and the Mediterranean in the magnificent Piedmont region of northern Italy, the city of Turin provides an inspiring background to explore the causes and consequences of population change, the debates unfolding in Europe around these issues, and the policies intended to address them. Population problems are central to societal change in numerous areas- inequality, immigration and diversity, race relations, family life, health and aging, and social welfare systems. This program explores the causes and consequences of population change, paying particular attention to how population processes interact with the social, economic, and political context in which they play out.

Looking to level up your Spanish? Come learn more about Cornell's intensive six-week program in Madrid. You'll immerse yourself in Spanish culture, significantly improve your language skills, and earn credits while living in Spain’s capital city. Along with a focus on improving their Spanish speaking and writing skills, many students take a course on Spanish culture and history that offers a broad introduction to Iberian cultures from the Middle Ages to the present.

What does freedom mean without, and despite, the state? In her new book, Resisting Racial Capitalism: An Antipolitical Theory of Refusal, Ida Danewid argues that state power is central to racial capitalism's violent regimes of extraction and accumulation. Tracing the global histories of four technologies of state violence: policing, bordering, wastelanding, and reproductive control, she excavates an antipolitical archive of anarchism that stretches from the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to the borderlands of Europe, the poisoned landscape of Ogoniland, and the queer lifeworlds of Delhi.

Thinking with a rich set of scholars, organisers, and otherworldy dreamers, Danewid theorises these modes of refusal as a utopian worldmaking project which seeks not just better ways of being governed, but an end to governance in its entirety. In a time where the state remains hegemonic across the Left–Right political spectrum, Resisting Racial Capitalism calls on us to dream bolder and better in order to (un)build the world anew.

Register in advance to attend!

About the Speaker

Ida Danewid is a social and political theorist based in the Department of International Relations at the University of Sussex.

About the Moderator

Oumar Ba is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University. His primary areas of research focus on law, violence, race, humanity, and world order(s) in global politics.

Host and Sponsors

This event is hosted by the Migrations initiative, part of Global Cornell.

Learn about Cornell's new Global Grand Challenge: The Future and how you can propose a research or curricular project.

Global Cornell is opening what will be The Future’s only call for proposals. Interdisciplinary teams of faculty and researchers from all Cornell colleges, schools, and departments are encouraged to identify a research issue of global importance and plan a path to a successful alternative future.

Teams may apply for research project support up to $150,000 per year for two years. Stand-alone curricular projects are eligible for up to $20,000 per year for two years.

Deadline for letters of intent to apply (1 page): February 26, 2024Deadline for full proposals (5–7 pages): May 6, 2024Register here to join the virtual info session. The session will include an opportunity to ask questions and network with others interested in finding collaborators.

The information session slides and Q&A will be posted online after the event.

Victor Moreno's The Hidden City (La cuidad oculta) is a dark, unsettling, almost hallucinogenic journey into an unknown world: the labyrinthine sewer system beneath the city of Madrid, Spain. Filmed underground over several years, the film offers unprecedented access to the vast network of tunnels, sewers, machinery, and infrastructure that at once sustainsÑand stands in stark contrast toÑthe life above it. With otherworldly cinematography and sound design reminiscent of Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and other sci-fi classics, The Hidden City is a contemporary symphony of an underground metropolis that demands to be heard in a darkened theatre and seen on the big screen.