We are looking for a PhD candidate in Philosophy of Law in the area of the philosophical foundations of international migration law. As a PhD candidate, you will be expected to write your own research proposal in this field, and complete a doctoral thesis within four years.

The phenomenon of migration and the experience and perspective of the migrant prompt critical reflection on the fundamental principles of liberal democracy. The rights granted and protected by states are in important respects limited to their own citizens. At the same time, fundamental rights, understood as human rights, are considered universal. Pointing to the tension between state sovereignty and human rights, Hannah Arendt spoke of the ’paradox’ of human rights, which became particularly manifest in a world dominated by nation-states striving for the identity of state, people (or nation), and territory.

In contemporary philosophy of law, the theme of migration is often addressed in a normative manner, presupposing the perspective of the ’receiving’ state or political community. This approach carries the risk of tacitly reproducing the conceptual assumptions of the existing legal and policy consensus rather than making these assumptions explicit and examining them in a critical fashion.

As a PhD candidate, you are invited to develop a critical reconstruction and evaluation of these conceptual assumptions. In your research, you may focus on, for example:

  • The conceptions of human life and humans living together on and in relation to a particular territory as they underlie and are disseminated by the contemporary legal-political (international) migration regime.
  • The ways in which state sovereignty, popular sovereignty and/or territorial sovereignty are conceived in relation to each other and to human rights.
  • The ways in which current conceptual distinctions, such as that between ’native’ citizens and migrants, voluntary and involuntary migration, regular and irregular migration, etc., are established and have an effect.
  • The role of the idea of the nation-state and national identity in the regulation of migration in liberal democracies.

You will be encouraged not to limit your research to contemporary legal philosophy, but to also include the work of thinkers who reflected on this subject in other legal-political constellations than ours today. This may include thinkers from the history of Western legal philosophy, from Greek and Roman antiquity to the present, such as Hannah Arendt, as well as non-Western and/or decolonial perspectives.

More information can be found here.