‘Shifting Borders’ and Shifting Responsibility? Towards a More Just Model of Global Mobility

This working paper critically examines Ayelet Shachar’s (2020) concept of the ‘shifting border’ and the solutions she proposes to tackle this recent phenomenon, pointing out potential gaps, inconsistencies and unintended consequences of letting legal responsibility follow states’ ‘shifting borders’. Instead, the paper argues for the need to deterritorialize the right to asylumin order to prevent states from retracting back from or shifting out their responsibilities for refugees and migrants, and to question and ultimately relax our current state-imposed mobility controls which have come to be largely taken for granted, even among migration and border scholars.