Monday, March 1, 2021

Ayelet Shachar

Professor Ayelet Shachar (photo credit: MPI-MMG 2020)

Professor of Law, Political Science, and Global Affairs Ayelet Shachar holds the R.F. Harney Chair in Ethnic, Immigration and Pluralism Studies, where she directs the Harney Program at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy. 

Her 2020 book, The shifting border: Legal cartographies of migration and mobility (MUP 2020), was recently reviewed by CHOICE magazine. The magazine's reviews are written by field experts and the publication is used by academics and librarians to identify the most innovative and valuable titles for collection. 

R. A. Harper, York College, writes for CHOICE: 

"Reading this essay by Shachar (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and Univ. of Toronto) with six contributed responses is like getting the dream dinner invitation to hear cutting-edge thought on borders. Shachar presents her thesis that physical/administrative/political borders have become passé: borders are not physical places but legal spaces that states can manipulate to yield desired outcomes, allowing states, for example, to capture undesirables and apply parallel legal rights regimes within those spaces, while also expanding outward beyond national borders, allowing extraterritorial inspection and exclusion from spaces within other countries' territory. This reimagination of the Westphalian system proposes that while physical borders remain in place, their meaning changes-contradicting conventional expectations of both reified national borders and global borderless territories where rights are supposedly protected through international agreements and treaties. Shachar focuses on how states exclude. Six amazing authors respond to her thesis, engaging legal geography, law, political theory, political science, sociology, and historical accounts to critique and offer alternative or complementary views. These texts Include astute discussions of technology and how it contributes to altering border spaces, as well as how we exclude migrants even after their successful border crossing. Shachar's response to critics follows, and the book ends with a fantastic bibliography."

Watch Shachar's #UofTLawOnline webinar, Shifting Borders, on YouTube.