Precarious Lives: the law of states versus the law of peoples

As the relations of power in which states' sovereignty and people's rights are entrenched have changed historically, and as they also continue to vary geographically, sovereignty as an empirical phenomenon and the repertoire of rights still appear in different forms. A major contemporary source of this variation is the tension between the rights categories that are held as universally valid and states' particularistic right to free reign in the constitution of social, cultural, political and economic relations. The ethical force of the law of peoples have now for decades defined, not only new rules of conduct for states about how to treat their own citizens, but also a new set of rights for aliens, resulting in a new legal and political context for interactions between states and individual aliens. This thematic area explores the tension between people's universal rights and states' sovereignty rights. The papers are expected to cover a wide span of the problems associated with this tension and its consequences - ranging from normative and legal analyses of UN and state practices to ethnographic accounts of daily-life experiences of this tension by aliens, native citizens, and immigration and aid workers. Questions to consider may include, among others: How does immigration status affect the allocation of rights, and what are the social, cultural and legal consequences that follow from a lack of formal status? For the individual? For families? For different groups? For men and women? For the sending and receiving states? Do existing categories address the needs of migrants whose lives are destabilized by climate change and natural disasters?