Lukas Schmid is a postdoctoral research fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt and a member of the Leibniz research group Transformations of Citizenship. He is a political theorist and mainly interested in the normative legitimation of inter- and transnational authority, with a particular focus on state authority over migration and immigration. He also has side interests in the ethical dilemmas involved in real-world migration policymaking and the ethics and politics of conceptual engineering. Before joining Transformations of Citizenship, he completed a PhD at the European University Institute and a MSc at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Contact: L.Schmid@jur.uni-frankfurt.de
Personal website: https://sites.google.com/view/lukas-schmid
Research Project
Illegitimate Borders: A Critical Theory of Immigration Control Authority
As my main postdoctoral project, I am currently preparing a book manuscript on the question of the state’s legitimate authority to exclude immigrants. In this book, I argue that the very values best suited to legitimizing such authority – liberty and equality – are robustly undermined by the way in which exclusion proceeds, for reasons deep-seated in the international state system and extant notions of self-governance.
The Ethics of Migration Policy Dilemmas
A secondary project explores fundamental ethical dilemmas in policymaking on migration and refugee protection. It hopes to expand the focus of existing normative research on migration and border control by adopting a ‘bottom-up’ approach that identifies specific ethical dilemmas that migration policymakers and civil society actors in the migration field face but that have not yet been considered by mainstream political philosophy. This project aims to overcome blockages in current debates about migration policy that result from academic scholars’ and policymakers’ commitment to partisan goals and values and their unwillingness to reflect on conflicting ones. This is a collaborative project pursued in tandem with scholars at other institutions, namely Rainer Bauböck, Julia Mourão Permoser, and Martin Ruhs. More information can be found at https://migrationpolicycentre.eu/projects/dilemmas-project/#overview.
Selected publications
2024. Lukas Schmid, Responding to unauthorized residence: on a dilemma between ‘firewalls’ and ‘regularizations’, Comparative Migration Studies, https://doi.org/10.1186/s40878-024-00380-5.
2023. Colonial injustice, legitimate authority, and immigration control. European Journal of Political Theory, Early View, https://doi.org/10.1177/14748851231201469.
2022. Saving Migrants’ Basic Human Rights from Sovereign Rule. American Political Science Review, 116 (3), pp. 954-967, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055422000028.
2021. Deportation, harms, and human rights. Ethics & Global Politics, 14 (2), pp. 98-109, https://doi.org/10.1080/16544951.2021.1926083.