Leila Kawar

This article explores migration governance training programs as a point of
entry into the contemporary politics of migration and development. Leveraging a comparative ethnographic lens, it examines the curricular content offered in three different such capacity building settings. Its analysis also considers how this content is received and contextualized by program participants. The study finds migration governance assumed distinct forms, with differing priorities, across the training programs offered by international organisations. In addition, it shows how the participants’ prior experiences and their positionality within
the professional field of those working on international migration contribute to shaping how they make sense of program content. By revealing how the meaning of migration governance shifts across the settings in which such knowledge is practically communicated and received, these findings open space for a more explicitly political approach to this domain of international law making.

The research process of authoring a review paper constitutes a uniquely important context for interrogating tacit premises and presuppositions, especially when the review aspires to synthesize a methodologically diverse field of research. This article presents a reflexive recounting of a research experience with mixed methods team-based review paper authorship, showing how the function of a review paper may be differently conceptualized by scholars situated in methodological traditions that place their emphasis on drawing-together knowledge about the social world versus those situated in methodological traditions whose primary aim is to unpack accepted categories. The analysis thus offers insights into dimensions of methodological difference as they operate in practice, while underscoring the significance of reflexivity in the review paper context for purposes of advancing meaningfully inclusive maps of an intellectual community's self-understanding(s).

This article applies a history of knowledge perspective to interwar ILO efforts to produce generalized international instruments for governing migrant labor. The historical analysis explores what it meant in the interwar context to devise "an international common law of the emigrant." It focuses particular attention on the process through which juridical techniques formalized a distinction between "migration for employment" and "migratory movements of indigenous workers." Foregrounding the constructed nature of these categories highlights the underlying race-based notions that informed interwar ILO standard-setting frameworks. More broadly, tracing the knowledge making processes through which seemingly objective categorical distinctions have been constructed and reconstructed opens space for questioning and potentially rethinking the functionally differentiated normative frameworks through which global policymaking approaches human mobility today.

Legal mobilization is increasingly recognized as an important setting in which to study the governance and politics of migration. Yet traditional studies of immigration policymaking have failed to consider how the process of engaging with law and courts may construct legal subjects in politically important ways. The theory of legal mobilization advanced here embraces a constructivist approach that conceptualizes activity in court as potentially symbolically potent apart from any rules or outcomes produced in judicial decisions. Drawing on recent socio-legal scholarship, the chapter elucidates the political dynamics of contesting migration policy issues in court by offering an overview of the context and conditions of contemporary legal mobilizations (Section II), the process by which these legal claims are framed (Section III), and the political stakes of the juridified migration politics to which legal mobilizations contribute (Section IV).

In September 2013, the International Labour Organization (ILO)
Convention concerning decent work for domestic workers entered into force, thereby bringing domestic workers into the mainstream of labor law. This article explores how the interests of the ILO’s constituents were shaken up and reconfigured to build support for new labor protections amidst the shifting global context of deregulation. I argue that technocratic devices—charts, questionnaires, and paragraph formatting—wielded by ILO insiders contributed to this development by creating epistemic space for this new category of employees to be recognized and for consensus to be secured on appropriate labor standards for this group. I draw on a pragmatist ethnographic approach to show how the ILO's lawmaking apparatus melded technical law and
grassroots activism so as to make domestic worker rights became a legal reality.

The emergence of constitutional review in France has attracted substantial attention from scholars of public law. Yet little has been written about the political implications of the expansion of rights-based review on the part of France’s highest administrative jurisdiction, the Conseil d’Etat. The argument is made in this article that repeat litigation by French lawyers defending the cause of immigrants is an important site for observing the symbolic power of legal forms. The analysis focuses on cases challenging immigration-related administrative regulations and shows how the process of repeatedly adjudicating these issues has focused attention away from litigants and their claims at the same time that it has reinforced the centrality of the Conseil d’Etat and its formalist jurisprudence in administrative governance. This detailed examination of the practical operation of France’s highest administrative jurisdiction leads to the surprising conclusion that this distinctly nonadversarial form of adjudication has contributed over the
long term to institutionalizing a juridification of immigration-related administrative policy making.

This study reexamines the engagement of U.S. and French courts with immigration politics, aiming to provide a fuller accounting of how law and immigration politics shape one another. Jurisprudential principles are placed in national and historical context, elucidating the role of rights-oriented legal networks in formulating these arguments during the 1970s and early 1980s. The analysis traces how these judicial constructions of immigrants subsequently contributed to catalyzing a transformation of immigration politics in both countries. Immigrant rights jurisprudence is shown to be produced by, as well as productive of, broader political values, agendas, and identities.

This article examines how international human rights law is shaping the politics of immigration. It argues that migrant human rights are neither conceptually nor practically incompatible with an international order premised upon state territorial sovereignty, and that the specific aesthetics of the contemporary international human rights system, namely its formalistic and legalistic tendencies, has facilitated its integration with a realm of policymaking traditionally reserved to state discretion. An exploration of two areas in the emerging field of migrant human rights traces the multi-scalar transnational legal processes through which these norms are formulated and internalized.

Scholarship on law and social movements has focused attention primarily on the United States, and secondarily on movement lawyering in countries that share the Anglo-American legal tradition. The politics of law and social movements in other national legal contexts remains under-examined. The analysis in this paper draws on comparative fieldwork to delineate and contrast the politics of legal mobilization in the area of immigrant rights in two distinct national contexts, France and the United States. In these paradigmatically different national legal settings, immigrant rights lawyering presents a window for exploring the relations between national fields of power relations and legal practice. I argue that divergent organizational forms and litigation strategies adopted by bureaucratic or “professionalized” movement organizations in these countries can be understood as reflecting the dynamics of the nationally-distinct fields of power relations within which law reform has been conducted. In particular, I link the material and symbolic resources available to law reformers to the relative authority of private and public juridical actors in each State.

This essay seeks to show that liberal law continues to justify and legitimize displacements of minority populations, even in an age of universal human rights. As demonstrated by the Israeli court’s 1988 decision legitimating the deportation of Mubarak Awad, it is citizenship and immigration laws that provide juridical justifications for contemporary ethno-national settler projects. In the aftermath of a territorial conflict that defines or redefines the bounds of the state, native minority populations are vulnerable to being legally recast as “aliens” or “virtual immigrants.” National conflict may thus be transformed by legal formalism into a question of immigration law, allowing the power relations that produce state sovereignty to slip into the background.

Promoting methodological pluralism has been a major theme of discussion across multiple political science subfields. But, notably, qualitative methodologists have set forth meaningfully different visions of how this disciplinary norm should be implemented in practice, differing on whether emphasis should be placed on institutional-level representation or on a more bottom-up variety of pluralism. In this paper I focus on the latter and elucidate how a reflexive dialogic approach holds the potential to enhance sensitivity to methodological diversity as a necessary step towards realizing ecumenical pluralism within the discipline. I illustrate this approach through an autoethnographic recounting of my prior research experience with mixed methods team-based review article authorship. The analysis offers insights into dimensions of methodological difference as they operate in practice, while underscoring the significance of reflexive dialogue for advancing more fully inclusive pluralism within the discipline of political science.

This paper resulted from a three-way research collaboration that began at the 2014 APSA Annual Meeting. The three co-authors jointly constructed an outline for what we envisioned as an essay reviewing the Political Science scholarship on judicialization. The thematic groupings of scholarship in this paper were jointly identified and the organization of sections evolved significantly as the result of group feedback over the course of the collaboration.
Leila Kawar contributed initial drafts for the following sections:
1. The origin of the term "judicialization" within Political Science
2. Examining the impact of judicialization on legislative and administrative governance
3. Distinguishing between the processes variously identified as judicialization, juridification, legalization, & constitutionalization