This lecture is co-sponsored by the Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy and Law and the Transnational Law Institute.

Until recently, migrants and refugees relied on family networks and word of mouth to make critical decisions about destination countries, formal versus informal travel routes, and applications for legal status. However, in an internet era, when many refugees consider Wi-Fi more important than food and shelter, social media, phone, and other internet-based communications are critical to refugee and migrant decision-making. At the same time, governments are employing new powerful identification and surveillance technologies. I will revisit basic questions in refugee law in light of these technological transformations. Refugee lawyers have long debated who deserves protection, who has a duty to protect, and how to ensure travel and ultimately integration in a safe country.  I will argue that core compromises in the refugee regime, such as the sharp distinction between deserving refugees and undeserving economic migrations, or the much heavier burden placed on proximate safe countries as compared to distant safe countries, become entirely unsustainable in light of technological transformations.

Speaker

Katerina Linos is Professor at Berkeley Law, and Co-Director of the Miller Center for Global Challenges and the Law.  She works on international law, comparative law, European Union law, employment law and migration law. Her work combines legal analysis with diverse empirical techniques, including interviews, ethnography, historical research, statistical data analysis, representative surveys, and experiments.  Her research appears in top law, political science, and sociology journals, including the American Journal of International Law, the American Journal of Political Science, the California Law Review, the Chicago Law Review, Comparative Political Studies, the European Sociological Review,International Organization, and the Journal of Legal Studies. Her book, the Democratic Foundations of Policy Diffusion, won three major awards: the 2014 Chadwick Alger prize as the best book on international organization and multilateralism, the 2014 Peter Katzenstein prize for an outstanding first book in international relations, and the 2014 Giovanni Sartori prize as the best book on qualitative and multi-method research. She holds a J.D. and Ph.D. from Harvard, and was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.

Commentators

Dr Sarah Fine, Department of Philosophy, King's College London

Dr Philippa Webb, Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London

Chair

Professor John Tasioulas, Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London and Director of the YTL Centre for Politics, Philosophy and Law.