Myriam Fotou

Dr. Myriam Fotou is a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Leicester. Her research sits at the intersection of political theory and migration and is fundamentally concerned with ethics of hospitality.  Her doctoral thesis (2016) titled “Ethics of Autoimmunitary Hospitality: Envisaging the Stranger in the Contemporary World” focused on questions of otherness and border-crossing and developed a critique of securitisation, global justice and human rights’ approaches, counterposing a poststructuralist conceptualisation of responsibility. Since then, she has published research on the political philosophy of pessimism, and the theorisation of ‘crisis’ as constitutive of identity formation, all in the context of migration.  Currently, her research engages primarily with the criminalisation of border-crossing (crimmigration), the decriminalisation of migrant smuggling, the intersectional and postcolonial questioning of current migration scholarship and policies, and liminality and death. Her most recent publication is the article Racial and colonial aphasia in EU border security. The case of the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics (2026).