Human Rights, Migration, and Social Conflict―Toward a Decolonized Global Justice

Social conflict involving migrants, which includes terrorism, migrant trafficking and kidnappings, and riots and the occupation of public places, is a direct result of the systematic refusal of receiving countries to recognize that migrants have universal human rights. Analysis of this causal relationship indicates that certain elements of migration policy in Europe and North America—such as the securitization of border controls and development cooperation policies, the use of foreigner internment camps as part of a tougher asylum policy, the criminalization of irregular migration, and social exclusion resulting from widespread discrimination—lead to violent social conflict. These violent conflicts of potentially global impact could be prevented were countries that receive migrants to adopt a system of justice—a decolonized global justice—that recognizes the human rights of migrants.

Ariadna Estevez has a PhD in Human Rights (University of Sussex, UK), an MA in Political Sociology (City University London), and a first degree in Journalism and Mass Media (National Autonomous University of Mexico). She currently works as a full time researcher at the Centre for Research on North America of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and is a tutor for the MA in Human Rights and Democracy at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO). She is a member of Mexico's National Researchers System (Level 1) and a member of the International Studies Association and the International Sociological Association. Her current research interests are the use of human rights discourses as the basis for a decolonized global justice in the context of international migration, human rights in Mexico and the biopolitics of asylum in the USA and Canada, and the construction of a sociopolitical theory of human rights.

She is the author of several academic articles, including "Taking The Human Rights of Migrants Seriously: Towards a Decolonized Global Justice" (International Journal of Human Rights, 2010), "A Latin American Sociopolitical Conceptualization of Human Rights" (The Journal of Human Rights, 2008), and "La relacion estructural entre globalizacion y la migracion: implicaciones para una ciudadania universal" (Foro Internacional, 2009). She is also the author of the book Human Rights and Free Trade in Mexico: A Sociopolitical and Discursive Perspective (2008) and co-editor of the book Los derechos humanos en las ciencias sociales: construyendo una agenda de investigacion multidisciplinaria (2010).