Sabrina Axster

Thank you for visiting my webpage. I am a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University’s Migration initiative and hold a PhD in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University. Sitting at the intersection of postcolonial theory, political economy, and international political sociology, my research uses a transnational lens to reveal the colonial histories and racial logics of contemporary state security practices such as border controls, policing, and incarceration.

My current research agenda can broadly be divided into three strands. My book project examines the entangled histories of subnational-local and global-colonial mobility controls. Through a historical case study of Germany it shows that to criminalize people as illegal, the state relies on a set of legal, bureaucratic, and enforcement capacities that are as much rooted in the policing of vagrants and Roma people at the parish level as they were influenced by the transnational efforts to control colonized subjects. A second project I am currently embarking on sheds new light on the idea of the ‘migration crisis’ by asking under what social, political, and economic conditions migration is turned into a crisis and how political actors mobilize racial stereotypes to scapegoat migrants. I also co-developed a research project that interrogates how capitalism relies on different forms of colonial violence, including policing, surveillance, migration laws, and incarceration.

My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. In 2022 I won the Edward Said Award of the International Studies Association’s Global Development Section and the 2022 Northedge Prize for the best graduate student paper sponsored by Millennium: Journal of International Studies.

Based on my research and 5+ years of professional experience working for the United Nations, I have designed and taught classes on migration in the world, the politics of border controls, global political economy from below, the United Nations, and U.S. Foreign Policy.