The first lecture of this year’s Knut Ipsen Lecture Series will feature Dr. Mariana Gkliati, presenting on “Digitalisation, Externalisation and Shared Administration: Towards a New Spatial Constitutionalism” on 28 April 2026 at 9:00 a.m. (CET). 

Digitalisation, Externalisation and Shared Administration: Towards a New Spatial Constitutionalism

EU border and migration governance, increasingly shaped by digitalisation, externalisation, and shared administration, is reconfiguring legal space, territoriality, and accountability. Dr. Mariana Gkliati, Assistant Professor of Migration and Asylum Law at Tilburg University, argues that these developments render existing public law doctrines, which are grounded in territorially bounded and state-controlled authority, along with linear accountability chains, increasingly ill-suited to constrain power exercised through externalised infrastructures, code, and shared operational arrangements.

Mariana Gkliati is an Assistant Professor of Migration and Asylum Law at Tilburg University. She is Associate Editor for the International Migration Review, and Editor-in-Chief of the Externalising Asylum blog. She was recently awarded the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW) Award for Early Career Scholars. She researches questions of human rights, the Rule of Law, legality, and accountability, with a particular focus on forced migration and EU agencies. She further regularly serves as a legal analyst for various national and international organisations, law firms, journalists, the Council of Europe, the United Nations, and the European Parliament.

Knut Ipsen Lecture Series

The Knut Ipsen Lecture Series commemorates the fundamental contribution of the IFHV's founding director, Professor Knut Ipsen, to shaping the international law of peace and armed conflict. Lectures by leading scholars will discuss current developments in these and related fields.

Location and Time

When: 28th April 2026, 9:00 a.m. (CET) 
Where: Bochumer Fenster (6th Floor), Massenbergstraße 11, Bochum City – Seminar Room