We are very happy to announce that former student of our IMRL Master program Lydia Leibbrandt has won the Hanneke Steenbergen thesis award for the best migration law thesis written at one of the Dutch universities.

Lydia wrote a remarkable thesis about the German Ausbildungsduldung, a technical legal instrument in Germany to regularize the status of unlawfully residing migrants. The Duldung not only suspends their deportation, but also offers the prospect of a right of residence. Lydia has done an exceptionally clever interdisciplinary analysis of this inherently complex legal instrument. Not only did she thoroughly scrutinize the Ausbildungsduldung and place it in a broader legal framework, she also investigated whether the Ausbildungsduldung can rightfully be seen as a form of ‘citizenship’. She did this through a thorough and comprehensive review of the abundant politico-theoretical ‘citizenship literature’. If this was not enough, she subsequently conducted her own qualitative sociological research by interviewing people who currently use the Ausbildungsduldung. The thesis excels in clarity, originality, ambition and depth, it is interdisciplinary research in its finest form. The thesis was supervised by Martijn Stronks and Lieneke Slingenberg.

Congratulations to Lydia with the recognition of the fine thesis she wrote!