Citizenship apartheid is the central feature of the world’s population management, mobilizing law, politics and international relations at the service of the blood-based aristocracy principle underpinning the distribution of resources and opportunities in the world today. Retracing the former divide between the white citizens of the imperial centres and the racialized colonial subjects in the peripheries by deploying citizenship as the main sorting mechanism in order to make the boundaries between the ‘West’ and the formerly colonized under-privileged spaces impenetrable, global citizenship apartheid is a very efficient proxy for race-based sorting of populations, whitewashing the formally outlawed practice. The global order built to privilege the former imperial centres repudiates the majority of the world’s population, producing the racialized ‘victims of citizenship’. Upgrading the inequitable victim of citizenship status received at birth is a harshly punished crime in our world order and thousands die trying. The aristocracy principle at the heart of the passport apartheid underpinning global citizenship and migration law today would not be tolerated internally by any of the liberal democracies practicing it internationally, revealing citizenship’s main function in contemporary context.

For more background reading, visit https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3975851

Professor Dimitry V. Kochenov heads the Rule of Law research at CEU Democracy Institute in Budapest and teaches at CEU Department of Legal Studies in Vienna. Dimitry's main focus is on the principles of EU law, comparative citizenship, migration, and the Rule of Law most broadly conceived. He taught Citizenship inter many alia at Princeton, Oxford, the College of Europe (Natolin) and UNAM. His last monograph, Citizenship (MIT Press, 2019) has been translated into several languages and reviewed in NYRB and the two edited volumes on the Rule of Law were cited by the Advocates General in front of the Court of Justice of the EU. Dimitry consults governments and international organizations on the subjects of his interest. https://people.ceu.edu/dimitry-vladimirovich_kochenov

This event is sponsored by the University of Chicago Law School's International Programs, The Malyi Center for the Study of Institutional and Legal Integrity, International Law Society, and the University of Chicago Pozen Family Center for Human Rights.

Lunch will be provided. Please submit dietary requests eight business days prior to the program to Aican Nguyen at aican@uchicago.edu. Although we will try to accommodate dietary needs, it is not guaranteed.