CCPL Seminar: Global Citizenship Apartheid
7 February 2025
5pm-6pm (HKT)
Room 723, 7/F, Cheng Yu Tung Tower, Centennial Campus, The University of Hong Kong
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.
Bio of the speakers:
Professor Dimitry V. Kochenov heads the Rule of Law research at CEU Democracy Institute in Budapest, where he also founded the Rule of Law Clinic, and teaches at CEU Department of Legal Studies in Vienna. He is also a recurrent visiting professor at LUISS Guido Carli in Rome. Dimitry’s main focus is on 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 National Autonomous University of Mexico. His last monograph, Citizenship (MIT Press, 2019) has been translated into several languages and reviewed in The New York Review of Books. Dimitry consults governments and international organizations on the subjects of his interest.
Chair: Sau Kong Lee (Principal Lecturer and CCPL Fellow, Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong)
Prior registration is required for this in-person event: https://bit.ly/4h503G2