"Unequal Mobility and the Grand Transformation of Citizenship"

Speaker: 

Ayelet Shachar

William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University; Visiting Professor of Law, Harvard Law School.

Chair: 

Michèle Lamont 

Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies; Professor of Sociology and of African and African American
Studies, Harvard University.

Abstract: Significant attention has been given in scholarly and public debates to restrictive closure, the proliferation of border control measures in the early 21st century. However, far less heed has been paid to complementary processes of selective openness that allow governments to fast-track those deemed desirable on account of their talent, international acclaim, human capital, and, increasingly, deep pockets as well. This lecture will address pressing questions of citizenship and migration, asking why and how governments are adopting new methods to expand or contract membership boundaries, depending on the target populations. The discussion will further explore what the rise of competitive immigration regimes that focus on “picking winners” and the surge in “golden visas” and “golden passports” programs worldwide might tell us about the future of citizenship, the blurred lines between states and markets, and the stratification not only of mobility but also of legally sanctioned modes of belonging. 

Bio: Ayelet Shachar (FRSC) is the 2025-2026 William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Law and Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She has published extensively on citizenship theory, immigration law, highly skilled migration and global inequality, transnational law and the international mobility of world-class athletes and scientists, cultural diversity and women’s rights, and the fraught relations between human rights law and territorial conceptions of territory. 

Shachar is the author of more than 100 articles and several major books, including Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women’s Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2001)—winner of the American Political Science Association Foundations of Political Theory Best First Book Award; The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2009), named International Ethics Notable Book in recognition of its “superior scholarship and contribution to the field of international ethics;” and The Shifting Border: Legal Cartographies of Migration and Mobility (Manchester University Press, 2020)—shortlisted for the C.B. Macpherson Prize. She is also the lead editor of the field-defining Oxford Handbook of Citizenship (Oxford University Press, 2017 & 2020). Together with Seyla Benhabib, she convened a series of interdisciplinary workshops culminating in the publication of Lawless Zones, Rightless Subjects: Migration, Asylum, and Shifting Borders (Cambridge University Press, 2025). 

Shachar has provided pro-bono consultation to various non-governmental organizations, the European Parliamentary Research Service, and the World Bank. National and international research excellence awards have recognized her research. In 2014, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. In 2019, she received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, Germany’s most prestigious research award. In 2024, Shachar was awarded the American Political Science Association Migration & Citizenship Section Career Achievement Award; she is the first woman and youngest scholar to have earned this accolade.