Photo: Younès Klouche
Kiri Santer is a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Social Anthropology. She researches how the European Union regulates its relation to the rest of the world with a special focus on its political and economic relations to the Global South.
One strand of her research is on trasnational law, migration and accountability. Her first book ‘The Borders of Responsibility’ (2026 Duke University Press) describes the tensions between the sovereign power to exclude non-nationals and the constraining legalities which attempt to fetter it that manifest across the EU border assemblage. It is an empirically grounded account of the governance of one of the most contentious political issues of our time: South-North migration and the politics of international protection.
Her current research on the regulation of trade for the green transition, tracks the implementations of reforms being carried out on the European Union's emissions trading system, with a focus on the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). She is interested in practices and logics of carbon pricing, the normative tensions created by carbon-based trade regulations and the effects of carbon taxation along metal value chains.
She received her PhD Summa cum Laude from the University of Bern in 2022. Her PhD won the Phil-Hist Faculty Award at the University of Bern for the best dissertation of 2021/2022, the Swiss Network for International Studies (SNIS) 2023 Award and the 2023 IMISCOE Maria Ioannis Baganha Dissertation Award. For her doctoral research she was awarded a Doc.ch grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation and conducted field work in Tunisia, Brussels, Rome and the Central Mediterranean. She was a 2019/2020 research fellow at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome and a visiting researcher at the Institut de recherche sur le Maghreb contemporain (IRMC) in Tunis in 2018 and at the Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung in 2025.
She has an MA in Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS, University of London. Previously, she studied Anthropology, Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern Studies at the universities of Geneva, Neuchâtel and Toronto.
Kiri Santer is co-editor of the journal Anthropological Theory
