Professor Lea Ypi (FBA, FAE, FAA) is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is the author of Global Justice and Avant-Garde Political Agency, The Meaning of Partisanship (with Jonathan White), and The Architectonic of Reason, all published by Oxford University Press. Her latest book, a philosophical memoir entitled Free: Coming of Age at the End of History, published by Penguin Press in the UK and W.W. Norton & Company in North America, won the 2022 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Slightly Foxed First Biography Prize and is being translated in more than thirty-five languages. 

Irregular Migration, Historical Injustice and the Right to Exclude

In this lecture Ypi defends amnesty of irregular migrants by reflecting on the conditions under which a wrong that is done in the past can be considered superseded. It explores the relation between historical injustice and irregular migration and suggests that we should hold states to the same stringent standards of compliance with just norms that they apply to the assessment of the moral conduct of individual migrants. It concludes that those standards ought to orient migrants and citizens’ moral assessment of how their states handle questions of irregular migration and to inform political initiatives compatible with these moral requirements.

The lecture will be held from 5-7pm in the Humanities Lecture Theatre, Gilbert Scott Building. It will be followed by a drinks reception.

Attendance is free but please register interest here.