Sovereignty and Autonomy at the Border

Fourteenth Session of The Complex Dynamics of International Migration Interdisciplinary Seminar on the Conceptualization of the Migration Phenomenon

2005 2006 Scientific Seminar of the Canada Research Chair on International Migration Law

Lors de la quatorzième session de séminaire trandisciplinaire de la CDIM, Audrey Macklin a présenté les interdépendances entre autonomie et souveraineté, ou plus exactement, les modes par lesquels les conceptions relatives à l’autonomie des individus sont reprises par la souveraineté étatique induisant dès lors les interactions entre États et migrants.

Résumé:One might posit that sovereignty is to states as autonomy is to individuals: a capacity and entitlement to function in accordance with one’s values and objectives free of coercion, subject to the similar entitlement of all other sovereign states or autonomous actors. Scholars have long struggled over another aspect of the relationship between autonomy and sovereignty, namely the normative justification for the exercise of state coercion of autonomous citizens. I am interested in exploring yet another site of interaction between autonomy and sovereignty, namely the ways in which conceptions of individual autonomy are projected through state sovereignty onto the interaction of state and individual migrant. I suggest that complex and sometimes contradictory invocations of consent and coercion, choice and compulsion, agency and subjugation, operate in giving social meaning to both formal (legal) and informal categorizations of the migrant.

Audrey Macklin is Associate Professor of Law at University of Toronto. Her areas of research include migration and citizenship, the intersection of law, culture and gender, and human rights and she has published widely on these topics. Prof. Macklin is formerly a Member of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board.