On Friday 29th March 2019, Dr. Zuzana Uhde interrogated the global political economy of migration driven by global capitalism. Dr. Zuzana presented her study titled: Contesting Borders of Responsibility for Justice: Transnational Migration and Lived Critique of Injustice during the biweekly CHUSS seminar series at the School of Women and Gender Studies.

Her presentation focused on transnational political economy of migration by studying structural causes of transnational migration driven by global capitalism, shedding light on key shortcomings of today’s global geopolitical regime.

In her presentation, she noted that migration is a topic that resonates today in public debates. However, what is often omitted in the migration studies as well as public debates are the structural causes of migration – transnational conflicts, wars, global economic inequalities, and proposed solutions thus stay on the surface.

She argues that transnational migrants represent a structural group of people who find themselves in a similar position in relation to social structures of current global economic architecture even though they do not necessarily have a collective identity. Although migrants’ lived critique does not take the form of traditional political protest, understanding marginalized migrants as a structural group supports more ambitious claims for global justice.

The author further discussed the methodological and practical limits of the current nation state-defined framework of responsibility for global justice which does not respond to structural causes of transnational migration and reproduces the internal contradictions of the international human rights regime. Her study focuses on the possibilities of extraterritorial obligations for justice, which are partly embedded in the current international law and outlines an argument for a differentiated responsibility for global justice.

Dr. Zuzana Uhde specializes in social and feminist theory and research of global interactions. Particularly she focuses on the research of transnational migration in relation to global justice and sub-Saharan Africa, transnational care practices and geopolitical economy. Dr. Zuzana works as a researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences.