This article classifies and theorizes the strategies of divergence that local authorities employ when confronting the discretionary spaces offered by domestic migration law. We propose a distinction between strategies that are either within or outside the perceived boundaries of the law and those that adopt an explicit or an implicit approach to positioning, thus harnessing or downplaying the communicative potential of the law. Based thereon, we introduce a fourfold typology of strategies of divergences that include defiance, dodging, deviation, and dilution. This typology was developed and refined based on field research in local authorities in Greece, Turkey, Italy, and The Netherlands. The case material also leads us into a preliminary exploration of which types of cities and conditions may lead to the adoption of one strategy over another. As such, this article draws attention to the relevance of law within multi-level migration governance and to the meaning of legal ambiguity and discretion as shaped by law and legal interpretation. The strategies of divergence that mould discretionary spaces, in turn, either mitigate or exacerbate legal uncertainty and should be considered a significant factor to account for change in migration governance.
Local governments around the world have been engaging with international law and policy at an exponential intensity, with prominent engagement in climate change, migration and more recently human rights. This engagement cannot be adequately understood within the terms and framework of positive international law alone. This contribution aims to map and create a grounded typology of local government engagement with human rights, encompassing both activities within their localities and outside - at national, international or transnational scales. The article introduces local governments’ engagement in the Formation of Human Rights, Implementation of Human Rights, Defence of Human Rights, Coordination of Human Rights, Dissemination of Human Rights and the Contestation of Human Rights as empirical ideal types that have emerged from data through grounded theory. Analysing this engagement from the perspectives of both positive international law as well as legal pluralism, with specific focus on the New Haven School of Law, the article argues that local governments are now at the core of a newly formed norm-generating community. Local governments engage with local and international actors and processes both within the rules of inclusion of contemporary international law-making - seeking to expand these norms to include local governments themselves - but they also contest and challenge the very rules of the game in the first place, and resort to creating “human rights in the city” as a body of norms parallel to international human rights law. Whether we accept a pluralist understanding of international law to include local governments and their human rights engagement, or whether we consider these developments to be outside international law, forming a parallel normative order in the legal pluralist sense, local government engagement with human rights has already succeeded in reaching and influencing many established international actors and has already infiltrated recent instruments of positive international law.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.