Dr Tugba Basaran

Dr Tugba Basaran (re)joined the University of Cambridge in 2018, where she currently serves as the Director of the Centre on the Study of Global Human Movement. She holds a PhD in International Studies from the University of Cambridge, held visiting positions at Harvard Law, Princeton, Sciences-Po as well as the Institute for Advanced Studies, and tenure at the University of Kent.

Her scholarship engages with global practices of governance focusing on the circulation of legal power, violence and the production of difference. Her works draw on political and social thought in relation to empirically rich socio-legal studies incorporating refugee law, human rights law, law of the sea, and more broadly, international law. In her research, she seeks to extrapolate past and present formations of governance, prompting queries on law’s subjectivities, space and time, in an effort to reimagine politics, the way we govern and are governed, and to question established political, legal and social theories.

Dr Basaran’s research is, amongst others, on legal borders and geographies, claims to extra-territoriality and the production of indifference, law’s distinctions between liberal and illiberal and tensions between state and empire. She is author of the monograph ‘Security, Law and Borders: At the Limit of Liberties’ and a variety of articles such as ‘The Saved and the Drowned: Governing Indifference in the Name of Security’, ‘Becoming International: On Symbolic Capital, Conversion and Privilege’, ‘A Journey Through Law’s Landscapes: Close Encounters of the Scalar Kind’.