Sabrina Axster

Thank you for visiting my webpage. I am currently the postdoctoral fellow for Cornell University’s Migration Program and hold a PhD in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University. Sitting at the intersection of postcolonial theory, political economy, and international political sociology, my research uses a transnational lens to reveal the colonial and racial logics of contemporary state security practices such as border controls, policing, and incarceration.

My book project examines the entangled histories of subnational-local and global-colonial mobility controls and develops a multi-scalar framework to analyze the making of contemporary border controls. Through a case study of Germany it shows that to be able to control people as migrants, the German state relies on a set of legal, bureaucratic, and enforcement capacities that are as much rooted in the policing of vagrants and Roma people at the parish level as they were influenced by the transnational efforts to control colonized subjects.

A second project I am currently co-developing, and which is supported through a joint Cornell University and King’s College seed grant, seeks to broaden the geographic scope of the post-colonial social science literature by thinking about the legacies of colonialism beyond the Anglosphere.

Thirdly, I co-authored multiple articles focused on the political economy of international security. Often treated in isolation, these articles instead examine how contemporary security practices are central to the functioning of our global economy.

My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and has won multiple best paper awards as well as an Honorable Mention for the 2024 APSA Migration and Citizenship section best dissertation award. For my work at Cornell University, I was awarded the 2024 Cornell University Postdoc Achievement Award for Excellence in Leadership.

Besides my academic background, I have 5+ years in policy analysis and multi-stakeholder engagement at the United Nations. I have designed and taught classes on migration in the world, the politics of border controls, global political economy from below, the United Nations, and U.S. Foreign Policy.