Can border control practices be understood as forms of authoritarianism? This paper employs Tom Ginsburg’s theory of ‘authoritarian international law’ to ask whether liberal and/or democratic states may be embracing and contributing to ‘authoritarian’ norms in their treatment of outsiders and citizens alike in the process of managing presence in their territories. Ginsburg’s concept focuses on states championing sovereignty over rights and cooperating to further authoritarian acts. Recent years have witnessed liberal democracies deploy controversial border and immigration control techniques, championing sovereign prerogative over rights-based understandings of their international obligations. Liberal and democratic states have also embraced cooperation to manage or deter migration, including with authoritarian states. Are these states helping to construct an authoritarian international law through border control? Whether they are may hold new answers for the question of whether a liberal society must embrace its principles at or beyond its borders rather than merely within.
Human mobility is as complex as the legal regimes that govern it, demanding an approach that extends beyond migration and refugee law to include temporary, pendular, and extralegal dynamics of movement. This paper adopts the lens of legal infrastructures to analyse how law and mobility co-constitute each other in South America’s diverse mobility pathways. Using doctrinal and empirical methods, it maps the plurality of legal sources around distinct pathways, while examining how opportunities, obstacles, and practices shape them. Fieldwork in Brazil, Chile, and Colombia (2023–2024), involving interviews and observations of border crossings and legal aid, highlights three key pathways: residence as permanence, tourism as entry, and cross-border pendularity. The analysis shows that movement and the interaction of multiple regimes continuously (re)configure a legal infrastructure that both enables and constrains mobility, capturing how law shapes mobility, and how mobility, in turn, reshapes law.
