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Traditional state-centric international law does not recognise local government as "subjects" of international law. But this is merely one understanding of international law, which is in itself not static. A pluralist, multistakeholder understanding recognises the increased engagement of local governments with international law and governance in the last decades. Meanwhile, even traditional international law has the tools to recognise – albeit very slowly – new actors that emerge in the field and declare them to enjoy legal personality. Legal personality is then determined by the assessment of the de facto engagement of the new actor in the international legal system. This means that local governments, deliberately or not, have been taking just the right steps by accumulating experience and demonstrating fluency and competence in implementing, negotiating and contesting international law; and accustoming other, more traditional actors of the international community to their presence in the field.

AbstractThis article classifies and theorizes the strategies of divergence that local authorities employ when confronting the discretionary spaces offered by domestic migration law. We propose a distinction between strategies that are either within or outside the perceived boundaries of the law and those that adopt an explicit or an implicit approach to positioning, thus harnessing or downplaying the communicative potential of the law. Based thereon, we introduce a fourfold typology of strategies of divergences that include defiance, dodging, deviation, and dilution. This typology was developed and refined based on field research in local authorities in Greece, Turkey, Italy, and The Netherlands. The case material also leads us into a preliminary exploration of which types of cities and conditions may lead to the adoption of one strategy over another. As such, this article draws attention to the relevance of law within multi-level migration governance and to the meaning of legal ambiguity and discretion as shaped by law and legal interpretation. The strategies of divergence that mould discretionary spaces, in turn, either mitigate or exacerbate legal uncertainty and should be considered a significant factor to account for change in migration governance.

In recent years, local authorities in Europe have increasingly developed bordering practices that hinder or further migrant rights, such as the freedom of movement. They bypass national borders by facilitating refugee resettlement, they claim local space to welcome or shun certain migrants, and they develop or break down local impediments to migrant mobility. These local practices, we argue, can best be understood from a multiscalar perspective, which considers processes of placemaking as reproductive of power dynamics. Applying such a perspective to local bordering practices in Greece, Turkey, the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany, we point out the importance of the multitude of the actors involved; legal pluralism; and the contextual role of social, economic, and spatial factors. This offers a theoretical foothold for understanding the power dynamics at play when local authorities become bastions or bulwarks, in which some migrants are welcomed, and others are not.

The human rights regime—as law, institutions and practice—has been facing criticism for decades regarding its effectiveness, particularly in terms of unsatisfactory overall implementation and the failure to protect the most vulnerable who do not enjoy the protection of their States: refugees. Turkey is the country hosting the largest refugee population, with around four million at the end of May 2020. As an administratively centralised country, Turkey's migration policy is implemented by central government agencies, but this has not proved sufficient to guarantee the human rights of refugees on the ground. Meanwhile, in connection with urbanisation, decentralisation and globalisation, local governments around the world are receiving increasing attention from migration studies, political science, law, sociology and anthropology. In human rights scholarship, the localisation of human rights and the potential role of local governments have been presented as ways to counter the shortcomings in the effectiveness of the human rights regime and discourse. While local governments may have much untapped potential, a thorough analysis of the inequalities between local governments in terms of access to resources and opportunities is essential. The Turkish local governments which form the basis of this research, operate in a context of legal ambiguity concerning their competences and obligations in the area of migration. They also have to deal with large differences when it comes to resources and workload. In practice, therefore, there is extreme divergence amongst municipalities in the extent to which they engage with refugee policies. This chapter seeks to answer the question why and how certain local governments in Turkey come to proactively engage in policy-making that improves the realisation of refugees' rights. Exploratory grounded field research among Turkish local governments reveals four main factors that enable and facilitate the engagement of local governments in refugee policies: (1) the capacity of and ...

"Increasingly, urban actors invoke human rights to address inequalities, combat privatisation, underline common aspirations. The potential and the pitfalls of these processes are conditioned by the urban, and deeply political. These urban politics of human rights are at the heart of this book. An international line up of contributors with a background in practice and theory and long-term engagement with the cities shed light on these politics in cities in four continents and eight cities, presenting a wealth of empirical detail and disciplinary theorisation. They analyse the 'city society', the urban actors involved, and the mechanisms of human rights mobilisation. In doing so, they show the commonalities in rights engagement in today's globalised and often spatially deeply inequal cities characterised by urban law, private capital but also communities that rally around concepts as the 'right to the city'. At the same time, they show how very different these dynamics play out in postcolonial contexts and specific political dispensations. Most importantly, the chapters shed light on the conditions under which this mobilisation truly contributes to social justice, be it concerning the simple right to presence, cultural rights, accessible housing or - in times of Covid - health care. Urban Politics of Human Rights provides indispensable reading for anyone with a practical or theoretical interest in the complex, deeply political, but also truly promising interrelationship between human rights and the urban"--

Human rights have been facing criticism on many fronts, including the challenges of the "enforcement gap" and the "citizenship gap", laying bare the shortcomings with regard to the implementation of human rights law as well as regarding its protection of highly vulnerable groups such as refugees. Research on the effectiveness of human rights, the "localisation" of human rights through invocations and practices on the ground, the increased engagement of local authorities with human rights, are all responses to such challenges to some degree. Based on empirical research conducted within municipalities in four countries, this chapter focuses on a missing piece of the puzzle in terms of conceptual and empirical research: the role of "individual agency". We adopt a socio-legal perspective on human rights and demonstrate that individual agency can make an important contribution to the effective implementation of human rights in the field of migration governance. Behind the black box of the state and local authorities, we find individuals who use human rights—as law, practice and discourse—in local policymaking, in circumstances where invoking human rights is not self-explanatory. Finally, we put forward the notion that reasons such as individual background, motivations, and interactions between individuals influence municipal officials' engagement with human rights, and we reflect on the conceptual and practical implications that result from this.