Research seminar: "Ports, Deportation and the Uneasy Politics of Human Trafficking"

The Department of Cultures, Politics and Society of the University of Turin is organising a research seminar on "Ports, Deportation and the Uneasy Politics of Human Trafficking".

The event will take place online on 12th April 2021 within the course International Cooperation for Development: Practices and Project Design (AGIC) and it will be held by Sallie Yea (Department of Social Inquiry - La Trobe University AW Campus).

In the contemporary era illegitimate and unwelcome forms of transnational mobility are increasingly met by receiving states with exclusionary practices centred on deflection and removal. Central to this goal is the state practice of creating exceptions and remaking legal territory in order to circumvent (human rights) obligations under international law. Much of the existing literature examining this process focuses on securitisation of asylum seekers (for example, Mountz 2008). In contrast, this paper examines how states attempt to remove human trafficking responsibilities from their jurisdiction, focusing specifically on the securitisation of ports. Ports occupy a somewhat ambiguous space in terms of international law and jurisdiction. While they are classified as part of a state’s internal waters under international maritime law and subject to territorial sovereignty, they are also subject to ‘jurisdictional exceptionalism’, which I define as ‘practices that invoke particular demarcations of sovereignty to avoid protection responsibilities’.

Discussants:  

• Tiziana Caponio (Department of Cultures, Politics and Society) 
• Valeria Ferraris (Department of Law)
• Paola Minoia (Department of Cultures, Politics and Society).

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