Doctoral Projects
The Centre for European Research (CERGU) is a network-based European research environment at the University of Gothenburg, which means that researchers are connected to CERGU, but employed at their own home departments. PhD students, who are financed by CERGU, are active within the CERGU network and at their home departments.
Legal Channels for Asylum Seekers into the European Union - A Balance between Protection and Security?
PhD candidate: Kristina Wejstål
Funding: CERGU
Project period: 2016 -2020
Outcome: dissertation/doctorate in Law
Project Description: My dissertation focuses on the EU border regime and the externalization of border control, and how the border is constructed and organized in relation to the right to seek asylum and the principle of non-refoulement as stated in the European Convention and the EU Charter. In doing so, the study identifies how the EU border regime through external action maintains, constructs and operates in spaces of exclusion, and how law diverges and puts bodies at risk, organize human mobility and state responsibility (as of the right to seek asylum and the principle of non-refoulement), as well as access to EU territory and subsequent asylum procedures.
The study further explores the spatialities of the EU border regime, and uses perspectives from legal geography and spatial theories. From such perspectives, I understand the EU border regime as a co-producer of space, a borderscape, in which the laws of the EU border regime exist almost everywhere – being highly visible as in visa or boarding refusals but also existing in the shape of natural landscape, such as in the water of the Mediterranean Sea, irregularized protection seekers have to survive in order to reach the EU.