Human right to immigrate? Dissolving borders in the Mediterranean Sea margins

Supervisor/s: José Manuel Pureza and Elsa Lechner

Doctoral Programme: Human Rights in Contemporary Societies

Funding: Não tem

This project focus on deconstructing the institutional, historical, and racial barriers migrants departing from the Mediterranean Sea southern coasts face upon arrival to European northern shores. A critical legal analysis - of international human rights law and the Portuguese legal framework, appreciation of requests for international protection, grounds for its dismissal, and court decisions - will be undertaken, committed to approach the reciprocal stratification of legal and social structures and their impact in human mobility between margins.

I will rely upon arrivals to the South of Portugal documented between 2019 and 2021, at the peak of the Covid-19 public health crisis and corresponding restrictions to circulation and border crossing, as case study. Relying on critical human rights theory and on an interdisciplinary lens, this investigation approaches how the imbrications of theoretical debates, normativity, and social integration impacts the conceptualization of migration experiences.

Exploring the binomial hospitality-hostility, human rights conceptual limits will be hypothesized towards its substantive operationalization relying on the acknowledgement of the autonomy of migration as a social movement. Following this thread, hosting dynamics will be analyzed, both in the legal and social sphere tackling migrants experience regardless of their documentation situation. To this end, ethnographic research will be conducted within the arrival community and with those who arrived in Portugal in the designated timeframe, biographizing their life stories.

Contesting narratives on illegal migration, this investigation aims to elaborate a critical prepositive intake the right to migrate in contemporary societies.