First meeting of the Spring 2024 European History Colloquium will be with Alex Chase-Levenson of SUNY Binghamton. For a copy of the paper please email cem354@cornell.edu.

This semester's colloquium will include discussions with-

Giuliana Chamedes on March 15

Aimee Genell on April 19

The Amit Bhatia ’01 Global PhD Research Awards fund international fieldwork to help Cornell students complete their dissertations. Through a generous gift from Amit Bhatia, this funding opportunity annually supports at least six PhD students who have passed the A exam. Recipients hold the title of Amit Bhatia ’01 Global PhD Research Scholars. All disciplines and research topics are welcome. The award provides $10,000 to be used by the end of the sixth PhD year for international travel, living expenses, and research expenses.

Register for the information session. Can’t attend? Contact programs@einaudi.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.

Institute for European Studies Luigi Einaudi Distinguished Lecture

Until 2005, the number of democracies in the world kept increasing, but after that date, the number has declined. Even robust democracies are now showing signs of weakness and some have turned into hybrid regimes suspended between democracy and autocracy. What is killing off the world’s democracies - and what can be done about it?

In her forthcoming book Destroying Democracy by Law, Kim Lane Scheppele explores the countries in which aspirational autocrats have undermined democracies. With examples from Hungary, Poland, Venezuela, Ecuador, Turkey, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States and beyond, Scheppele shows how democracies no longer die with tanks in the streets. Instead, democracies die when aspirational autocrats come to power through elections and then use legal methods to undermine constraints on their power. With law as their weapon, aspirational autocrats damage the institutions that provide checks and balances, compromise the independence of the judiciary, stifle civil society, muzzle the press and use the power of the state against those who might challenge their monopoly on power. Scheppele explains how the new legal tools work, how they circulate from one budding autocracy to another and why international observers have been slow to recognize the problem. She also provides some ideas for reversing these processes through law wielded by new democratic movements.

Kim Lane Scheppele is the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is also a faculty fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Her primary field is the sociology of law, and she specializes in ethnographic and archival research on courts and public institutions. She also works in sociological theory, comparative/historical sociology, political sociology, sociology of knowledge, and human rights.

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.