The Law and Political Economy of Citizenship | November 8, 2019
What is the relationship between citizenship and taxation? This workshop was a joint collaboration of the Department of Ethics, Law and Politics at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance, and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science and Humanities (BBAW). It brought together leading scholars from the fields of law, economics and philosophy to explore how and why the cross-border mobility of labor and capital dramatically impacts the state’s ability to tax its wealthiest members and to provide public goods. Participants included: Alessandra Casella, Columbia University, Adam B. Cox, New York University, Tsilly Dagan, Bar Ilan University, Kai A. Konrad, MPI for Tax Law and Public Finance and BBAW, Liav Orgad, WZB Berlin Social Science Center, Ray Rees, University of Sydney/ Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Mathias Risse, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Ayelet Shachar, MPI for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Wolfgang Schön, MPI for Tax Law and Public Finance and BBAW, Alois Stutzer, University of Basel.
Max Planck Law. Inaugural Conference | October 21 – 23, 2019
This inaugural conference was held at the Harnack-Haus in Berlin. It marked the launching of Max Planck Law Network which represents a cooperation forum among eleven Institutes of the Max Planck Society engaged in basic research in various fields of law. The ELP Department represents the focus on citizenship, migration and human rights. The founding partners are joined together by a commitment to academic excellence, an international orientation and interdisciplinary research. The network is expected to provide a new forum for intellectual exchange among these Max Planck law-centered institutes and with international peer universities, such as Cambridge and Oxford.
Inclusive Parliaments. Representation, Mobility, Disability | September 26, 2019
This workshop, organized by Benjamin Boudou (MPI-MMG) and Marcus Häggrot (Goethe University Frankfurt), focused on the democratic representation of marginalized populations and interests. Representative democracies, even the most inclusive ones, have populations that are explicitly or implicitly excluded from the ordinary process of electoral representation. It remains poorly understood and/or controversial whether marginalized populations have a claim to representation, and whether representation itself is the right response to non- or misrecognition. The workshop brought together scholars from the Ethics, Law and Politics Department and Goethe University Frankfurt’s Normative Orders for an extensive discussion was held at the MPI-MMG, which will serve as the basis for a special-issue publication. It was co-sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Chair in Comparative Constitutionalism.
Solidarity and mutual respect in the domain of European Union citizenship | June 14, 2019
The status of European Union citizenship, conferred on all nationals of an EU Member State 25 years ago, has been at the forefront of political and legal debates ever since. While enhancing the life-opportunities of a considerable group of EU citizens by granting free movement within the EU, the limitations of EU citizenship nowadays increasingly come to the fore, especially concerns regarding mutual solidarity and respect have intensified. Shortcomings include for example the national boundaries of welfare states, extremely restrictive naturalisation requirements in many member states, and the trend towards allowing for deprivations of nationality also increasingly puts EU citizenship at risk. Finally, national policies that allow for the naturalisation of individuals with deep pockets or with particular historical, though tenuous contemporary connections to the country, are said to undermine EU citizenship and demonstrate a lack of respect for other Member States that may be affected by those policies. This conference offered critical reflections on these pressing questions including a keynote lecture, “Is it really solidarity that we Europeans need?“ delivered by Philippe Van Parijs.
Border Landscapes: Material Boundaries of Stasis and Mobility | April 12, 2019
The workshop completes the trilogy of border-focused conferences at the ELP (past events can be found here and here). It was organized in cooperation with the Lichtenberg-Kolleg. The theme motiving this event was the exploration of borders as landscapes—designed spaces that are at once architectural, infrastructural, and geophysical. The conference participants called attention to the changing shape of a global bordering regime in which the materiality of borders has been “weaponized,” the ways the heat of desert borders, the vastness of the sea, and the remote location of detention centers have been utilized as constraints on human movement. The workshop further explored the methods and strategies of representation by focusing on space, place, scale, and materiality in the study of contemporary border. It reflected on how such methods and strategies contribute to practices of border crossing, transnational solidarity, contestation, and resistance. Deborah Cowen delivered the keynote, entitled “Imprints of Empire: Border Infrastructures and the Landscape of Jurisprudence”.
The Contours of Citizenship | March 15, 2019
The Third Annual Goethe-Göttingen Critical Exchange took place in Frankfurt and was co-organized by Rainer Forst (Normative Orders, Frankfurt) and Ayelet Shachar (ELP, MPI-MMG). Bringing together a highly multidisciplinary group of scholars, the conference revolved around the three themes: “Alienation”, “Who Needs Secularism?” and “The Marketization of Citizenship”. Speakers in the conference included: Catherine Lu (McGill University), Stefan Gosepath (FU Berlin), Johannes Schulz (Universität Luzern), Cécile Laborde (Nuffield College, Oxford), Martijn van den Brink (MPI-MMG), Eva Buddeberg (Normative Orders, Frankfurt), Ayelet Shachar (MPI-MMG), Eszter Kollár (KU Leuven) and Rainer Forst (Normative Orders, Frankfurt).
Open Lecture by Hiroshi Motomura: The New Migration Law: A Roadmap for an Uncertain Future | January 17, 2019
Countries around the world are struggling with contemporary challenges of migration; the traditional approaches offered by national and international law no longer provide sufficient answers to today’s complex realities. A new migration law is required, which is more deeply intertwined with trade and economic development. You can watch and listen to the lecture here.
Public Law and Spatial Governance: New Frontiers | December 7, 2018
This conference brought together an innovative group of scholars from France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Singapore to explore the theme of “spatial statism” (add URL link to Hirschl & Shachar article), critically exploring the relationship among law, territory, cities, borders, and human rights. Lead presentations were delivered by Eyal Benvenisti (Cambridge), Derek Denman (MPI-MMG/Copenhagen), Michael Dowdle (National University of Singapore), Günter Frankenberg (Goethe University Frankfurt), Ran Hirschl (Alexander von Humboldt Chair/MPI-MMG/Toronto) Eugénie Mérieau (University of Göttingen/Harvard), Sarah Moser (McGill University), Catherine Powell (Fordham Law School), and Ayelet Shachar (MPI-MMG).
Ben Boudou published his paper “Hospitality in Sanctuary Cities” in S. M. Meagher, S. Noll, J. S. Biehl (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of the City, Routledge, and explores how sanctuary practices transform the normative ideal of the city and renew our traditional concepts of sovereignty, citizenship or hospitality towards migrants.
In a research article on “Machiavelli and the Fortress City” published in Political Theory in 2019 Derek Denman made an original contribution in offering a new interpretation of Machiavelli’s concept of the fortress. The article argues that fortresses serve to privatize civic life and turns to Machiavelli to envision durable public spaces in place of urban fortifications.
Mareike Riedel published an article “An Uneasy Encounter. Male Circumcision, Jewish Difference, and German Law” in Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, in which she analyses the role of ambivalent attitudes towards Jews and Judaism as the ‘Other’ in opposition to infant male circumcision. Drawing on insights from anthropology and Jewish cultural studies, Mareike shows how opponents of the practice used the language of secularism and children’s rights to (re)make Jewish difference.
Alexander Hudson of the Max Planck Research Fellow Group in Comparative Constitutionalism published a chapter (co-authored with Zachary Elkins) in the Elgar handbook on Comparative Constitution Making which presents the first comprehensive empirical analysis of the use of referendums to ratify new constitutions and amendments to constitutions. The chapter describes statistical analysis of a new dataset covering all constitutional referendums since 1789, especially noting the differences between referendums on new constitutions (which almost always pass) and on amendments (which fail with some regularity).
In their co-authored 2019 “Foreword: Spatial Statism,” published as a lead article in the International Journal of Constitutional Law, Ran Hirschl and Ayelet Shachar intervene in contemporary debates about global law and the resurgence of national populism by asking how considerations of space, place and density impact the conceptualization and utilization of state power in a world of growing complexity and interdependence. This article will serve as a basis for a series of commentaries and a rejoinder by the authors to appear in 2020 in I-CON.
Together with Lorenzo Piccoli and Jean-Thomas Arrighi, Samuel D. Schmid published the article “Non-universal suffrage: measuring electoral inclusion in contemporary democracies in European Political Science” in European Political Science. The article introduces and explains ELECLAW, a new set of indicators designed to measure the inclusiveness of the right to vote and the right to stand for vote across various levels of government and types of elections for three categories of voters: citizen residents, non-citizen residents, and non-resident citizens.
Martijn van den Brink published an article on “Justice, legitimacy and the authority of legislation within the European Union” in The Modern Law Review. This article argues that EU scholars must separate their theories of justice from their theories of justice. It further argues that justice-independent accounts of legitimacy weigh in favour of legislative over judicial decision-making within the EU.
Ayelet Shachar, “The Shifting Border: Legal Cartographies on Migration and Mobility.” Traditionally, we think of a border as a hard, static line, but recent bordering techniques have broken away from the lines on the map as governments have developed sophisticated legal tools to limit the rights of migrants both before and after they enter a country’s territory. The consequent detachment of state power from any fixed geographical marker has created a new paradigm: the shifting border, an adjustable legal construct untethered in space. This book proposes a new, functional approach to human mobility and access to membership in a world where borders, like people, have the capacity to move.
In the article “Social Identity and the Right to Belong” published in the Tilburg Law Review, Barbara von Rütte analyses the judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in the case of Hoti v. Croatia arguing that the Court uses the concept of social identity to grant non-citizens a right to remain, a right to be granted a legal status and under certain circumstances even a right to (?) citizenship in order to protect a person’s social ties in the host society.
During his stay at the department Stefan Salomon worked on an article “Citizenship and unauthorized migration: a dialectical relationship” (forthcoming) which will be published in Modern Law Review and in which he developed the argument that migration controls produce dilatory legal effects on the rights of citizens.
As a direct consequence of his research visit to the MPI-MMG, André Siciliano wrote the paper “The Legal Perspective of the Migration Right”, which develops a Global South perspective on migration. The paper was presented at the XXIX IVR (International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy) Congress in Luzern, Switzerland (Jul 11th, 2019).
During her visit at the department Mary Zhao published an article on “Transparency in International Commercial Arbitration: Adopting a Balanced Approach” in the Virginia Journal of International Law. Reconsidering the traditional scholarly view that public interests are limited to investor-state disputes, Mary argues that international commercial arbitration should adopt transparency standards similar to those governing investor-state arbitrations.
In her article “Social Freedom in a Global World: Axel Honneth’s and Seyla Benhabib’s Reconsiderations of a Hegelian Perspective on Justice,” published in the journal Constellations in early 2019, Dana Schmalz tackles the question what forms the basis of normative critique, especially with view to debates about global justice. She explores this question, which is of high relevance for international legal scholarship, by bringing into dialogue two contemporary scholars of critical theory, Axel Honneth and Seyla Benhabib. She argues that a conception of immanent critique is viable for global justice matters, proposing a methodological understanding that combines insights from Honneth and Benhabib.
Ran Hirschl’s new book, “City, State: Comparative Constitutionalism and the Megacity” (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2020) will be published in Spring 2020. Urban agglomeration and the rise of megacities is one of the most significant geo-political phenomena of our time. It poses considerable challenges to modern spatial governance and to the theory and practice of constitutional democracy more generally. While this phenomenon is fully appreciated by geographers, economists, and political theorists, it is largely overlooked by jurists and constitutional thinkers. The gap is even more glaring when it comes to comparative constitutionalism, where the metropolis is virtually non-existent. This is the first book to systematically address these scholarly lacunae as it explores how extensive urbanization affects the theory and practice of constitutional democracy; examines the comparative constitutional jurisprudence of megacity autonomy/dependence; and probes into the political economy of state-city constitutional relations across time and place.
Hiroshi Motomura, UCLA School of Law, January 2019
Hiroshi Motomura is one of the most influential scholars of immigration and citizenship in the United States. He is the Susan Westerberg Prager Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. Previously, he taught at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and the University of Colorado, Boulder. His books include: Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2006) winner of the Professional and Scholarly Publishing (PROSE) Award from the Association of American Publishers. The book was also chosen by the U.S. Department of State for its Suggested Reading List for Foreign Service Officers. He is a co-author of two immigration-related casebooks: Immigration and Citizenship: Process and Policy (8th ed. West 2016), and Forced Migration: Law and Policy (2d ed. West 2013). His most recent book, Immigration Outside the Law (Oxford 2014), won the Association of American Publishers’ Law and Legal Studies 2015 PROSE Award and was chosen by the Association of College and Research Libraries as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title.
Jaclyn Neo, National University of Singapore, December 2019
Jaclyn Neo is an Associate Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore (NUS) where she specializes in constitutional law, as well as law and religion. Her work aims to forefront Asian jurisdictions and mainstream them in comparative constitutional law. A graduate of NUS Faculty of Law and Yale Law School, Jaclyn is a recipient of multiple academic scholarships and competitive research grants. She has published in leading journals in her field, including the International Journal of Constitutional Law (I-CON), Human Rights Quarterly, and Oxford Journal of Law and Religion. In recognition of her research on religious freedom in Southeast Asia, she was awarded the SHAPE-SEA Research Award.
Tamar de Waal, University of Amsterdam, November – December 2019
Tamar de Waal is Assistant Professor at Amsterdam Law School (University of Amsterdam). In 2017 she defended her dissertation Conditional Belonging on the proliferation of integration requirements in EU Member States, for which she received the VWR-dissertation prize for best dissertation in legal philosophy in the Netherlands. Her research critically evaluates the relationship between the proclaimed commitment of Member States to the core liberal-democratic values of the EU and their actual integration laws and practices.
Ali Emre Benli, September 2019 – August 2020
Ali Emre studied Philosophy at Bogazici University in Istanbul and holds an M.A. in Philosophy from Erasmus University in Rotterdam. He obtained his Ph.D. in Political Theory from LUISS University in Rome (2016). His current research interests include the ethics and political theory of immigration, citizenship and democracy. His project at the MPI-MMG investigates the question: Which political rights should asylum seekers and refugees enjoy in the European Union? Two interrelated questions follow: On what grounds could political rights be extended to asylum seekers and refugees? Which novel institutions should be implemented for sustaining such rights?
Gün Güley, University of Hamburg, March – May 2019
Gün holds a PhD in Political Theory from Hamburg University. Gün is currently working on a book manuscript building on her dissertation research and further developing two key research topics. Firstly, she investigates the feasibility of a separation of legislative and constitutional demoi and how this would impact existing voting systems, immigration policies and norms and practices of political membership. Secondly, she further qualifies the normative conceptions and values of citizenship, identity, and inclusion in an attempt to develop a positive theory of stakeholder membership.
Lisa Harms, Oktober 2019 – September 2020
Lisa holds a Master’s degree in Political Sociology from the Institut d’Études Politiques (IEP) Paris. She has completed her PhD in Sociology and Political Science at the University of Göttingen and the IEP Paris. During her PhD, she was as a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Fellow Group Governance of Cultural Diversity. Her PhD included extended research stays at the Centre d’Études Relations Internationales in Paris. Before joining the AvH Chair of Comparative Constitutionalism in October 2019, she has been a postdoctoral fellow at the MPI Department Ethics, Law, and Politics.
Elena Prats, Uppsala University, June – August 2019
Elena is a PhD candidate in Philosophy of Law at the Uppsala University (Sweden). She holds Bachelor degrees in Philosophy, Asian Studies and Law, and Master degrees in Internationalization and Bioethics and Biolaw. Her research examines from a legal philosophical perspective the legitimacy of citizenship by investment programmes in the European Union which grant national (and in the EU supranational) citizenship in exchange for economic transactions.
Sam Schmid, September 2019 – September 2020
Samuel Schmid is a PhD researcher at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute in Florence. He investigates the association between the degree to which states open up entry points for immigrants to settle in a receiving country and the degree to which it is more or less easy to obtain a passport of the host state. Further research interests include democratic inclusion and franchise in an age of migration as well as attitudinal and behavioral research on immigrant integration. Sam holds a BA in Political Science, a MA in World Society and Global Governance from the University of Lucerne, Switzerland, and a MRes from the European University Institute.
Mira Seyfettinoglu, Maastricht University, September – December 2019
Mira Seyfettinoglu is a research master student in the MSc program in European Studies at Maastricht University, specializing in European External Relations and Quantitative Methods. Alongside her Master studies, she is the research assistant of Prof. Dr. Maarten Vink in the ERC-funded Migrant Life Course and Legal Status Transition research project. Mira completed her BA (Cum Laude) in European Studies at Maastricht University in 2018, including a semester abroad at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. During her time in Vancouver she also interned at the German Consulate General’s Press, Cultural and Economic Affairs Unit.
André Luiz Siciliano, University of São Paulo, January – February 2019
André Luiz Siciliano was recently hired as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Sorocaba (Top 6 private universities of Brazil), where, since August 2019, he teaches ‘Human Rights’ in the Law School and ‘International Law’ at the Faculty of International Relations. He holds a PhD in International Law at the University of São Paulo (USP) and an MSc in International Relations at the Institute of International Relations of the University of São Paulo (IRI-USP). André’s research examines the right to migration, migration policy in South America and the universalization of human rights and migration in the formation of global governance.
Barbara von Rütte, October 2019 – September 2020
Barbara von Rütte’s research focuses on the regulation of citizenship in international law, in particular international human rights law. In her PhD she examined the right to citizenship in international human rights law, applying the principle of jus nexi in order to argue for a right to citizenship in a migration context. Her research interests include questions relating to citizenship law and theory as well as statelessness, legal identity, and the administrative detention of migrants both from a constitutional law as well as a human rights perspective. She is currently also a consultant for the Council of Europe on the committee of experts on administrative detention of migrants (CJ-DAM).
Amr Ezzat, journalist-in-residence from Cairo, July – September 2019
Amr Ezzat is a Cairo based Journalist, freelance writer for an independent Egyptian online journal, a columnist at a daily newspaper and a researcher and officer of “freedom of religion and belief” program at the Egyptian initiative for personal rights. He has a Bachelor’s degree in structural engineering, and philosophy, both from Cairo University. Thematically he focuses on religious diversity and freedom of belief. His writings focusing on religious issues cover a wide range of topics: state policies towards religion, the official policies of moderating Islamic affairs and official Islamic institutions, restriction on diversity and unrecognized religious sects in Egypt, constitutional and legal developments regarding freedom of religion, and socio-political developments linked to the religious sphere.
Antonia Baraggia, University of Milan, March 2019
Antonia Baraggia is Assistant Professor of Comparative Law at University of Milan, Department of National and Supranational Public Law. She is Principal Investigator of the project CONFEDERAL on fiscal federalism and social rights, awarded by the Cariplo Foundation. She has been Visiting Fellow at Fordham University School of Law and at the Institute of Federalism (University of Fribourg). She holds a PhD in Public Law from University of Turin. She serves as one of the members of the Executive Board of the Younger Comparativists Committee (YCC), American Society of Comparative Law. Her research interests include the role of courts, economic and financial crisis, socio-economic rights, fiscal federalism considered in a comparative perspective.
Berihun Adugna Gebeye, August 2019 – August 2020
Berihun Adugna Gebeye holds an S.J.D. in Comparative Constitutional Law and an LL.M. in Human Rights (International Justice Specialization) from Central European University, an LL.M. in Human Rights Law from Addis Ababa University, and an LL.B. from Haramaya University. Previously, he was a Visiting Scholar at Columbia Law School, a Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies of the University of Oxford, a Global Teaching Fellow at the Department of Law, University of Yangon, Myanmar and a Lecturer in Law at Jigjiga University Law School, Ethiopia. Berihun uses interdisciplinary approaches and materials to study comparative constitutional law and politics, human rights, the rule of law, law and development, international law, and democratization in Africa.
Mariana Velasco Rivera, October 2019 – September 2020
Mariana Velasco Rivera holds a J.S.D. and an LL.M. from Yale Law School, and an LL.B. from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM). Mariana’s research interests include comparative constitutional law and politics as well as constitutional theory. In her doctoral dissertation, she developed a theory of constitutional change that explains the reasons for Mexico’s high formal amendment rate between 1917-2017. The thesis develops a theory of constitutional change based on the notion of the political construction of amendment difficulty. This notion’s core idea is that amendment difficulty is not institutionally determined, but that it depends on factors such as the party system, constitutional culture, and decisions by key political actors.
Julius Yam, Oxford University, January – May 2019
Julius Yam is a DPhil in Law candidate at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford. He holds an LL.B. from the University of Hong Kong and an LL.M. from the University of Chicago. He is a Research Associate at the Programme for the Foundations of Law and Constitutional Government and a part-time Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong. Julius’ main research interests are in constitutional theory, judicial politics and courts. His thesis explores the interaction between courts and politics in non-democratic regimes, with a particular focus on hybrid regimes.
The new Joint UofT/MMP-MMG Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is a cooperation between the Faculty of Arts & Science (A&S) of the University of Toronto and the MPI-MMG Ethics, Law and Politics Department. It builds on the close cooperation that already exists between these institutions, leveraging their focus on the study of how religious and ethnic diversity shapes law, public policy, and civic discourse at both intimate and global scales. These topics are a focal point across many departments in A&S, and at the heart of the work of the MPI-MMG. In Summer 2019, the first cohort of post-doctoral fellows were selected. In Spring 2020 Columba Gonzales Duarte and Eric Cheng will join the ELP department as part of this new joint program. Eric holds a PhD in political science and works on “Political friendship, patriotism, nationalism, solidarity, liberal democracy, pluralism, political enmity.” Columba’s research project focuses on the subject “Beyond Borders: Convergent Migrations of Humans and Butterflies Throughout North America.”
Public Lecture by Prof. Tamar de Waal (University of Amsterdam): Conditional Belonging | November 13, 2019
In her lecture, Tamar de Waal presented the three central claims of her doctoral dissertation “Conditional belonging” which won the VWR prize for best dissertation in legal philosophy in the Netherlands in 2019 and which she is currently revising as a monograph for Hart Publishing. Prof. de Waal argued that the recent proliferation of mandatory integration requirements from third country nationals in Europe represents first of all a shift towards “individualized” conceptions of integration which, secondly, presents counterproductive barriers to participation and inclusion. Finally, Prof. de Waal proposed the introduction of a “firewall” to separate integration from immigration policies. A video of her lecture can be found here.
Public Lecture by Prof. Jaclyn Neo (National University of Singapore):
Managing Religious Diversity: The Law of ‘Religious Harmony’ | December 4, 2019
In this lecture, Jaclyn Neo will examine laws and jurisprudence surrounding religious harmony in various Asian countries to identify distinctive conceptions of religious harmony. She further shows how the concept of religious harmony has expanded in scope such that the claims for religious harmony entail more than a vertical (state-group) relationship of control, but also a horizontal (group-group) relationship of mutual control, as well as a reverse vertical (group-state) relationship of state obligation. Lastly, Prof Neo will show that religious harmony has a mixed impact on individual rights, as it serves as a framing device for both religious majorities and minorities to advance their interests.
Refugee and Migration Law Workshop in Berkeley | December 12/13, 2019
This conference brings together leading scholars in the fields of migration and refugee law to explore new development in the fields. It is a joint initiative of the Ethics Law and Politics Department at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, the American Society of International Law (ASIL) Migration Law Interest Group, UC Berkeley Law’s Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law. It was also supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The conference features presentations by Alex Aleinikoff (New School), E. Tendayi Achiume (UCLA), Janie Chuang (American University Washington), Noora Lori (Boston), Katerina Linos (Berkeley), Ralph Wilde (UCL), Chantal Thomas (Cornell), Itamar Mann (Haifa), Sherally Munshi (Georgetown), Loren B. Landau (University of the Witwatersrand), Violeta Moreno-Lax (Queen Mary London), Jaya Ramji-Nogales (Temple), and Emily Ryo (Southern California).
Congratulations to Ayelet Shachar, who has been awarded the 2019 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for her groundbreaking work on citizenship and the legal frameworks of multicultural societies. Awarded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Leibniz Prize is Germany’s highest and most prestigious research award. Honoring researchers who have distinguished themselves with extraordinary academic achievements, it offers them impetus to continue to produce outstanding work in the future. For the institute, the prize acknowledges the excellence of the research being done by Ayelet and her department on the critical issues of citizenship, migration and societal diversity. For further information, please see the following link: https://stories.mmg.mpg.de/Leibniz_Prize_2019_Ayelet_Shachar/index.html
Congratulations to Martijn van den Brink, who was a fellow of the ELP-department from 2017 to 2019, for winning the prestigious British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. Martijn will be affiliated with the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. His research project, “Religious Equality and Employment within the European Union,” examines which employment practices affecting the freedom of religion and belief must be outlawed within the European Union.
Congratulations to Lisa Harms who was awarded her doctoral degree, summa cum laude, in September 2019. Acknowledging the rising importance of international courts as key players in conflicts about public regulation of religion, her dissertation analyses how faith-based and secular advocacy groups – through strategic litigation at the transnational level – influence the developments of the normative framework of religious liberty. She conducted her doctoral research at the University of Göttingen, the MPI-MMG’s Research Fellow Group of the Governance of Cultural Diversity and the Department of Ethics, Law and Politics, as well as Sciences Po Paris.
Congratulations to Alexander Hudson who won the Best Paper Award of the PDD section at the 2019 PSA conference in Nottingham for his paper “Potemkin Village Meetings: Public Participation in Constitution Making”. From the Award Citation: “Alexander’s paper stood out due to its innovative approach and detailed and rigorous empirical work, making a genuine contribution to the literature on constitution-making. It not only offers a careful theoretical discussion of the normative issues and political processes relevant to this area of research, it also meets the challenges of analyzing the direct and indirect impact of public participation on constitutions in Brazil and South Africa through a compelling research design.”
Congratulations to Barbara von Rütte, who has been elected by the Federal Council to the Swiss Federal Commission on Migration for the term 2020-2023. The Federal Commission on Migration is an extra-parliamentary commission which is mandated by law to address social, economic, cultural, political, demographic and legal issues that arise from the residence of foreign nationals in Switzerland. The members of the Commission determine its positions and advise the Federal Council and the public administration on questions of migration.
Imprint:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity
Hermann-Föge-Weg 11
37073 Göttingen