International Journal of Migration and Border Studies (7 papers in press)

Special Issue on: OA Global Mobility Law Rethinking the Role of Law in Movement Across Borders

• Open Access

  Reconciling the tensions of the European deportation regime: how the law shapes compulsory mobility across borders ( Free Full-text Access )

  by Anouk Lamé 
  Abstract: This contribution explores the role played by European, human rights and national law in contemporary deportation practices. Different forms of deportation, such as returns, Dublin transfers and expulsions, are built upon a broad set of rules and practices. Taken together these rules enable states to lawfully and compulsorily displace hundreds of thousands of individuals across European borders every year. Drawing on insights from different legal frameworks of deportation and on a large-scale dataset of deportation judgments in French lower courts, this article shows that deportation is regulated in the European Union by an overarching and complex European deportation regime. The nature of deportation as a form of compulsory mobility enforced through individual orders which can be challenged in courts, positions national judges as key actors in this regime. This article contributes to existing scholarship on law and human mobility by documenting how the law and judicial practices shape compulsory mobility.
  Keywords: deportation; deportability; compulsory mobility; European migration law; French administrative law; border control; expulsion; Dublin transfer; refusal of entry; empirical legal studies; France.
  DOI: 10.1504/IJMBS.2026.10079949
   
  

• Open Access

  Freedom of movement, sovereignty, and the Third World in postwar international law (1948-1968) ( Free Full-text Access )

  by Sara Cosemans 
  Abstract: This article examines how actors from the decolonised periphery - including delegates from Latin America, India, Lebanon, and the Philippines - helped articulate and defend freedom of movement in international law between 1948 and 1968. Drawing on travaux preparatoires, UN debates, and legal commentary, it traces the contested codification of internal movement, exit, and return in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. While postcolonial advocacy proved decisive in shaping the formulation of these rights, their scope was constrained by limitations, uneven ratification, and interpretive practices that enabled selective enforcement. The article argues that freedom of movement emerged as a qualified achievement: a norm forged through negotiation and entanglement, yet structurally vulnerable to geopolitical instrumentalisation and postcolonial migration control. Adopting a TWAILinformed lens, it highlights how sovereignty arguments operated as techniques for preserving imperial discretion within a formally universal human rights order.
  Keywords: freedom of movement; sovereignty; Third World; international law; TWAIL; Universal Declaration of Human Rights; UDHR; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; ICCPR; Latin America; Middle East; South(east) Asia; Cold War; decolonisation; postcolonial advocacy.
  DOI: 10.1504/IJMBS.2026.10079950
   
  

• Open Access

  Infrastructuring pathways: traversing the legal infrastructure of mobility in South America ( Free Full-text Access )

  by Andrea Jiménez Laurence 
  Abstract: Human mobility is as complex as the legal regimes that govern it. This requires an approach that goes beyond migration and refugee law to incorporate the temporary, pendular and extra-legal dynamics of movement. Adopting an infrastructural perspective, this paper analyses the processes surrounding mobility law in South America. Using doctrinal and empirical methods, it maps the variety of legal sources across distinct 'mobility pathways' and examines how opportunities, obstacles, and practices shape them. Based on fieldwork conducted in Brazil, Chile and Colombia between 2023 and 2024, involving interviews and observations of border crossings and legal aid sessions, three key mobility pathways are examined: residence as permanence, tourism as entry, and cross-border pendularity. The analysis reveals that the interaction of multiple regimes with movement continuously (re)configures a legal infrastructure that both enables and constrains mobility. This demonstrates how law shapes mobility, and how mobility reshapes law in turn.
  Keywords: human mobility; legal infrastructures; South America; migration studies; intra-regional mobility; borders; pendular movement; Venezuelan displacement; Mercosur; mobility law.
  DOI: 10.1504/IJMBS.2026.10080072
   
  

• Open Access

  An international human rights law of migration? Reflections on the place of a right to immigrate ( Free Full-text Access )

  by Frederic Megret 
  Abstract: This article argues that there is such a thing as an international human rights law of migration, but that it is essentially truncated. Human rights have been conceived as accompanying the trajectory of migrants as humans but have historically had little to say about migration itself. This has left international human rights law strangely disarmed and quiescent when faced with assertions of a broad right to exclude by states. By contrast, the article contends that placing the idea of a right to immigrate at the centre of an international human rights law of migration makes better sense of the predicament of mobile persons. Such a right may not currently be recognised in positive international law, but it is coherent within the overall economy of human rights as a universal project whose vocation is to compensate for some of the constraints imposed on liberties by the international legal system itself. Encompassing a right to immigrate within international human rights law maximises the fundamental aspiration to selfdetermine through human mobility, aligns the regimes of domestic and crossborder freedom of movement, and makes it possible to conceptualise legally permissible limitations to immigration.
  Keywords: human rights; international law; sovereignty; right to exclude; right to immigrate; right to emigrate; mobility rights; rights limitations; borders.
  DOI: 10.1504/IJMBS.2026.10080258
   
  

• Open Access

  Global commerce and global mobility law ( Free Full-text Access )

  by Francesco Corradini 
  Abstract: Foregrounding an understanding of global mobility as the movement of legal norms across borders, this article argues that a focus on legal interactions provides a distinctive perspective on how this movement unfolds. Building on global mobility law scholarship, it analyses the movement of legal norms by examining historical and contemporary contexts of global commerce characterised by extraterritoriality and territorial extension. First, it considers capitulation agreements in Western-Ottoman relations, conceptualised as a case of semicolonial entanglement. Secondly, it examines developments within the European Union in the area of corporate accountability around global value chains. These examples reveal that a focus on legal interactions is crucial for understanding how legal norms move across borders. Zooming in on how this mobility of norms unfolds, the article identifies both continuities and change. Legal interactions in contemporary global commerce tend to be organised around the concepts of due diligence and human rights.
  Keywords: global mobility law; global commerce; global value chains; legal interactions; corporate accountability; entanglements; capitulations; extraterritoriality; sustainability; semi colonial.
  DOI: 10.1504/IJMBS.2026.10080259
   
  

• Open Access

  Authoritarian borders? Turning authoritarian international law inside-out ( Free Full-text Access )

  by Christopher Szabla 
  Abstract: Can border control practices be understood as forms of authoritarianism? This paper employs Tom Ginsburgs theory of authoritarian international law to ask whether liberal and/or democratic states may be embracing and contributing to authoritarian norms in their treatment of outsiders and citizens alike in the process of managing presence in their territories. Ginsburgs concept focuses on states championing sovereignty over rights and cooperating to further authoritarian acts. Recent years have witnessed liberal democracies deploy controversial border and immigration control techniques, championing sovereign prerogative over rights-based understandings of their international obligations. Liberal and democratic states have also embraced cooperation to manage or deter migration, including with authoritarian states. Are these states helping to construct an authoritarian international law through border control? Whether they are may hold new answers for the question of whether a liberal society must embrace its principles at or beyond its borders rather than merely within.
  Keywords: authoritarianism; borders; international law; liberal democracies; migration; immigration; mobility; mobilities; borders; border control; rights; human rights.
  DOI: 10.1504/IJMBS.2026.10080552
   
  

Regular Issues

• Borders of belonging: Syrian refugees, Lebanese returnees, and south Lebanese displacement in Beiruts southern suburbs  
  by Hucen Sleiman 
  Abstract: This article examines how Syrian refugees, Lebanese returnees from the 2023 Hezbollah-Israel war, and internally displaced South Lebanese from the 2024-2025 border conflict coexist in Beiruts southern suburbs under precarious conditions. Drawing on 2023-2025 semi-structured interviews, policy reports, NGO documents, and humanitarian assessments, it traces how these groups - displaced under distinct circumstances - are simultaneously integrated into urban life yet excluded from durable support. Syrian refugees appear as outsiders with greater humanitarian visibility; returnees as neglected citizens awaiting reintegration; and southern IDPs as temporary victims expected to return post-conflict. Their juxtaposition produces contested cohabitation: a fragile coexistence shaped by competition over housing, employment, and assistance, yet marked by everyday interdependence. By showing how refugee, returnee, and IDP categories construct shifting borders of belonging, the article contributes to debates on migration governance, ambivalent citizenship, and urban displacement.
  Keywords: Syrian refugees; Lebanese returnees; internally displaced persons; South Lebanese displacement; borders of belonging; contested cohabitation; ambivalent citizenship; displacement governance; migration governance; Beirut’s southern suburbs; Syria; Lebanon.
  DOI: 10.1504/IJMBS.2026.10080476