Jill Alpes

External affiliated members

Dr. Maybritt Jill Alpes (she/her) is a legal anthropologist of migration and former human rights practitioner. Her research explores how law, state power, and mobility aspirations intersect – notably by examining migration risks from the perspective of people in places of departure, tracing what happens after return and deportation, and scrutinizing how courts evaluate evidence of border violence. Jill has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Cameroon, Lebanon, West Africa, and Southern Europe, combining legal and anthropological approaches with creative and participatory methods, such as “future literacy labs.”[1] Her monograph "Abroad at Any Cost: Brokering High-Risk Migration and Illegality in West Africa" [2] (Routledge) examines migration brokerage beyond smuggling and trafficking narratives, theorizing mobility control as state-making. She currently holds two grants from the Gerda Henkel Foundation research for the project “REMOVED: Removal Infrastructures for Syrians in Lebanon and Turkey”[3] (2026), as well as for “Justice Horizons: Co-creating futures in Syria’s year zero” (SYRIZON).[4] Amid recent geopolitical shifts, she is at the moment co-authoring research on mobility control amidst regime change in Syria and Afghanistan, as well as on making migrants the researchers of their own lives.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/jrs/article/36/3/383/7174246

[2] https://www.routledge.com/Brokering-High-Risk-Migration-and-Illegality-in-West-Africa-Abroad-at-any-cost/Alpes/p/book/9780367229818

[3] https://jillalpescom.wordpress.com/removed/

[4] https://jillalpescom.wordpress.com/research-projects/syrizon/

Email: m.j.alpes@gmail.com

https://jillalpescom.wordpress.com/