Steffi Colao

Doktorandin

Anschrift

Universität Hamburg

Institut für Ethnologie

Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, Flügelbau West (ESA W)

20146 Hamburg

Kontakt

E-Mail: stephanie.colao"AT"studium.uni-hamburg.de

My research focuses on the role of lawyers in contesting anti-migration policies, border violence, and other violent forms of state security. I combine legal, geographic, and anthropological perspectives to U.S. and European migration and national security policies, analyzing how ideas about risk affect legal regimes. While primarily studying developments in the past decade, I draw from historical, decolonial, and critical racial contexts to better understand the development of laws governing borders, population, and militarization. Through this research, I identify ways lawyers and advocates working within these systems may respond to state practices or rethink legal strategies, as well as their experience of working through these questions.

My publications include “Loathsome and Dangerous” (UCLA Law Review 2024), “Back Again” (Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs 2024), and most recently “No Right to Exclude” (American University Law Review 2026).

Wissenschaftlicher Werdegang

Positionen

2023 J.D. in Critical Race Studies and International & Comparative Law, UCLA School of Law, 2023

2019 B.A. in Geography, Dartmouth College

Fellowships

2024 Dartmouth College Postgraduate Project Grant

2024 Arthur C. Helton Fellowship, American Society of International Law

2023–2024 Promise Institute for Human Rights Postgraduate Fellow

2019–2020 Lombard Public Service Fellowship

Forschungsschwerpunkte

Rechtsanthropologie, Rechtsgeographie
Risiko und Sicherheit
Migration, Grenzen, Gesundheit und Terrorismusbekämpfung
Kolonialismus, (militärischer) Imperialismus
Vereinigte Staaten, Deutschland/EU

Publikationen

Aufsätze

Colao, Steffi. 2025. ‘No Right to Exclude: The European Union’s Reparative Migration Obligations’. American University International Law Review 41 (1). https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/auilr/vol41/iss1/1/

Colao, Steffi. 2025. ‘No Right to Exclude: Reparative Migration and the EU’s Decolonial Obligations’. Border Criminologies. https://blogs.law.ox.ac.uk/border-criminologies-blog/blog-post/2025/02/no-right-exclude-reparative-migration-and-eus-colonial

Colao, Steffi. 2024. ‘How Airborne Strikes in Somalia Further U.S. Imperialist Interests’. UCLA Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs 28 (1). https://escholarship.org/uc/item/71f479bk

Colao, Steffi. 2024. ‘Loathsome and Dangerous: Removing Syphilis and Gonorrhea as Grounds for Inadmissibility’. UCLA Law Review 71:424. https://www.uclalawreview.org/loathsome-and-dangerous-time-to-remove-syphilis-and-gonorrhea-as-grounds-for-inadmissibility/

Colao, Steffi. 2019. ‘(Re)Producing the State: Calculating and Excluding Sexual Risk through the Public Health Service Act’. Undergraduate thesis, high honors.