Since October 2003, the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) honours the best thesis in politics with the annual Jean Blondel PhD Prize, broadly conceived to include international relations, political theory, and public administration.
Lukas Schmid, alumnus of the Department of Political and Social Sciences, received the 2024 prize for his thesis, Three essays on the legitimate authority of immigration control, defended in October 2023 at the EUI, which challenged assumptions about the legitimacy of border controls across a range of different scenarios.
Political theorists have often maintained that the pursuits of justice, freedom, or democracy give states moral rights to exclude would-be immigrants. But it is not clear if such general considerations can decisively answer the question if states can generate morally legitimate authority over the particular subjects of their migration control regimes, that is, hold an enforceable right to their compliance with such regimes’ directives. Schmid’s thesis provides three essays to argue that such authority is often absent. All three essays contend that a liberal conception of legitimate authority in migration control requires that states treat those whose compliance they seek according to certain moral principles, and that entrenched features of states’ migration control regimes habitually stand in the way of the realization of these principles.
The jury for the Jean Blondel prize shared that "Lukas’ work represents a groundbreaking contribution to contemporary political theory. The dissertation is a significant achievement that challenges us to rethink the foundations of state authority in the context of immigration."
Andrea Sangiovanni, Lukas’ supervisor at the EUI, and Rainer Bauböck, one of the examiners during the thesis defence, commented that "The thesis makes a very important contribution to the booming literature on the ‘ethics of immigration’ in normative political theory. In contrast to the mainstream of this field, it proposes a novel contextualized approach and methodology. This consists in moving from a dominant question about justice in migration control to one about legitimate authority. It addresses this latter question by asking not whether states can ever have the authority to control immigration, but under which conditions they can claim (or forfeit a claim) to do so legitimately."
The prestigious award received by Lukas is named after Jean Blondel (1929–2022), an Emeritus Professor at the European University Institute and Visiting Professor at the University of Siena. A founding member of the ECPR, which he directed in 1970–1980, Blondel is particularly noted for his contributions to the theory of party systems, the comparative study of cabinets, and the relations between parties and governments.
While being a researcher at the EUI, Lukas also published the article ‘Saving migrants' basic human rights from sovereign rule’ in the American Political Science Review.
Lukas Schmid is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Goethe University Frankfurt and a member of the Leibniz research group Transformations of Citizenship.