Lecture at the International Summer School on Refugee Law and Migration

On September 3, 2025, Viki Mladenova gave an invited lecture entitled “Securitization, Externalization, and the Future of Solidarity in EU Asylum Policy,” as part of the 6^th International Summer School on Refugee Law (1-5 September 2025). The International Summer School is organized as collaboration between the Refugee Law and Migration Center based in Skopje, UNHCR-Skopje and the International Institute of Humanitarian Law of Sanremo, Italy.  This year the topic of the school was “Asylum in the Anthropocene: Reimagining Hospitality in Europe.”

Viki’s lecture drew on the theorizations of Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito, among others. She argued that asylum policies are shaped less by international standards of protection than by paradigms of immunization and exclusion (from the nation-state) within politics. Relatedly, the lecture discussed the ways in which borders of contemporary Western states are framed as protecting those “within,”  but are used to create externality in order to regulate power relations vis à vis the communities “within.”