Infrastructuring mobility law - An analysis of the legal regimes that regulate human movement in South America

PhD defence by Andrea Belén Jiménez Laurence

Assessment Committee

Associate professor Nora Stappert, University of Copenhagen (Chairperson)
Professor of Law Diego Acosta, University of Bristol
Professor of Law Vincent Chetail, Geneva Graduate Institute

Supervisor

Professor Thomas Graae Gammeltoft-Hansen

Place

Building: KUA3, Faculty of Law, Room: 8B.3.19, Njalsgade 76, 2300 Copenhagen S

Email address to gain access to the thesis: phd-forsvar@jur.ku.dk.
You will either receive a copy of the thesis or be informed where you can read a physical copy.

Recipients of copies of the thesis are not allowed to share or distribute it due to copyright compliance.

Short description of the thesis

Human movement is as intricate as the rules that govern it. In South America overlapping international, regional, and national legal regimes shape how, and under what conditions, people cross borders. Building on the emerging field of mobility law, this PhD thesis examines how these laws are structured and how they operate in practice.
Combining doctrinal analysis of legal instruments from all twelve South American countries with fieldwork in Brazil, Chile, and Colombia, the thesis conceptualises these regimes as a legal infrastructure of mobility. It organises the region’s laws around the types of movement they regulate, from permanent settlement and temporary stays to the daily crossings of border residents, in what it terms “mobility pathways”, and traces how law distributes access to these pathways and how actors use it to facilitate or restrict movement.
In practice, law and movement stand in a recursive relationship, in which law shapes movement and movement shapes laws. This entails that even when movement deviates from the system’s habitual functioning, the legal infrastructure adapts rather than breaks down.
The thesis shows that law cannot be understood separately from the socio-material reality it seeks to regulate, while also offering a way to approach empirical legal questions and mobility law in other regions.