Lukas Schmid wins our 2024 Jean Blondel PhD Prize

The 2024 Jean Blondel PhD Prize for the best thesis in politics has been awarded to Lukas Schmid (Goethe University Frankfurt) for Three Essays on the Legitimate Authority of Immigration Control.

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.

The winning thesis, which Lukas defended in 2023 at the European University Institute, offers three essays to argue that such authority is often absent. The 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 realisation of these principles. 

The Jean Blondel PhD Prize is awarded annually for the best thesis in politics (broadly conceived to include International Relations, Political Theory and Public Administration) nominated by a member institution that, with revision, could be published as a monograph. 

Watch our short video celebrating Lukas's achievement and sharing his work with Jury Chair Hana Kubátová and Andrea Sangiovanni. Read the full laudation here.

Our winner 

Lukas Schmid is a normative political theorist whose work focuses on understanding and assessing the legitimacy of transboundary authority, such as the authority states assert over migrants and immigrants. Having completed his PhD at the European University Institute, he is now a postdoctoral research fellow at the Leibniz Project 'Transformations of Citizenship' at Normative Orders, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. 

His two most recent publications are Is legitimate exclusion incompatible with the sovereign right to exclude? in AJIL Unbound, Volume 118, 2024 and Responding to unauthorized residence: on a dilemma between ‘firewalls’ and ‘regularizations’ in Comparative Migration Studies, 12(22), 2024.

@Lukas__Schmid

In his own words

I am happy and grateful to receive this award, and especially pleased that the jury recognises the importance of softening normative/empirical divides in the study of political phenomena. My dissertation hopes to show that doing so can help us develop new insights about the legitimate authority of state migration control, but the imperative of thinking across and beyond subdisciplinary boundaries generalises beyond this particular topic. 

Jury members

• Hana Kubátová, Charles University, ECPR Executive Committee Member (2019–2024)
• Silja Häusermann, University of Zurich
• Verena Wisthaler, Eurac Research
• Fernando Casal Bertoa, Nottingham University

Keywords: Political Theory