JUS | Public International Law Open Lecture (Hybrid)

Public International Law Taster Lecture (Hybrid)

Long-term Residency and Naturalisation in Public International Law
28 July 2026, 17:00 Vienna time

In person in L619 and online via Teams

Who belongs to a state, and when does long-term residence become more than permission to stay?

This taster lecture examines long-term residency, naturalisation, nationality, and legal belonging through the lens of public international law. It uses current debates in Austria as a local point of departure, but places them within a wider set of questions drawn from my work on Uruguay and from struggles over citizenship, residence, and legal membership around the world.

The lecture will consider the position of people who have built their lives in a state but remain legally outside the citizen body. It will ask what international law has to say about residence, family life, equality, non-discrimination, democratic participation, statelessness, access to nationality, and procedural fairness. It will also examine the limits of state discretion in naturalisation: when is citizenship simply a matter for domestic law, and when does prolonged exclusion from secure legal membership begin to raise questions under international human rights law?

The aim is not to suggest that international law gives every long-term resident an automatic right to citizenship. The question is more careful and more difficult: how should public international law understand the relationship between territory, residence, social membership, nationality, and belonging in a world where millions of people live for years, and sometimes generations, in states where they remain politically and legally incomplete members?

Lecturer: Andrew Scott Mansfield, MTS, LLM

Location:
ONLINE / SFU Faculty of Law,
Lassallestraße 3, 6th floor, Room 607, 1020 Wien Google Maps

Please register here