Crossing Borders: Migration and the Shaping of Global Political Theory is a research project dedicated to rethinking the normative foundations of migration justice from the standpoint of global political theory.
The project investigates how contemporary border regimes produce and reproduce unequal forms of vulnerability, exclusion, and belonging in a world still shaped by colonial legacies, slavery, racial hierarchies, and persistent global asymmetries.
Concern
Its central concern is not only whether states may control borders, but how such control can be normatively evaluated when it operates within historically constituted structures of domination.
By placing the movement of migrants rendered undesirable at the center of analysis, the project examines the moral and political tensions between sovereign border control, reparative justice, humanitarian protection, racial and social exclusion, and the claims of those displaced by labor, climate, and geopolitical inequalities.
Goals & Contribution
Grounded in the Brazilian and Latin American experience, Crossing Borders seeks to develop a contextual and critical theory of migration capable of expanding the canonical frameworks of migration ethics.
In doing so, it contributes to the formation of a global political theory attentive to experiences, conflicts, and normative demands that have often remained marginal in dominant debates on borders, mobility, and justice.
Crossing Borders is organized around three interconnected research themes.
1. Reparative Justice and Global North Border Regimes
Examines the normative obligations generated by colonial legacies in border regimes of the Global North, with particular attention to Brazilian migration to the European Union.
Image: Varvara Shavrova – “Migrant Crisis 7”, series of 37 drawings (2015-2016). Courtesy of Patrick Heide Contemporary Art. All rights reserved.
2. Racialized Exclusion and Migration Governance in the Global South
Investigates how migration policies in countries such as Brazil produce social and racial exclusion, and what these dynamics imply for the legitimacy of border control.
Image: Taller Yonke (Alberto Morackis & Guadalupe Serrano) – “Border Dynamics”. On permanent display at the University of Arizona. All rights reserved.
3. Latin American Migration Ethics and Global Political Theory
Develops a contextual and critical account of migration justice grounded in Latin American experiences and in the historical effects of colonialism and slavery.
Image: Jacob Lawrence – “And the migrants kept coming” (1940-1941), part of the “The Migration Series”. Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). All rights reserved.