Acknowledgments
This book is based on a doctoral research project supervised at the Faculty of Law of Dresden University, Germany. The thesis was submitted for examination in February 2017, examined by October 2018 and defended on 20 November 2018. While the manuscript has been substantially revised and includes several new legal developments, it does not systematically incorporate subsequent law from the various jurisprudences of focus in the research. Thus, the law in this book remains current as of December 2016.
There have been many individuals who have accompanied me for the research and to whom I remain grateful. At the University of Dresden, I wish to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Thilo Rensmann, who instilled confidence in me to embark on the journey of PhD research, and to Dominik Steiger for the comments that were very helpful in the revision of the manuscript. For that revision, I am also grateful to the anonymous peer reviewer at Brill. At the University of Michigan, where I spent four months as a Grotius Research Fellow, Jim Hathaway set me on the right track with his unparalleled enthusiasm for refugee law and offered the best research environment a visiting scholar could wish for. Gregor Noll, then at the University of Lund, welcomed me as a visiting scholar to the productive quietude of that University. The Evangelisches Studienwerk Villigst funded research with a stipend and has been as flexible and unbureaucratic as a funder could possibly be. My colleagues at the GPPi in Berlin, in particular Katrin Kinzelbach, made sure I did not lose sight of the murkier grounds of policy and politics as a result of my legal academic endeavours. Dermot Cudmore assisted with the editing of the footnotes.
On numerous occasions, I have been privileged to be able to present pieces of work and receive or exchange feedback with dedicated scholars and practitioners, including David James Cantor, Eleni Karageorgiou, Emanuela Parisciani, Jens Vested-Hansen, Jessica Schultz, Jürgen Bast, Marten den Heijer, Matthew Scott, Nora Markard, Samo Bardutzky, Tino Hruschka, Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen and Violetta Moreno-Lax.
Finally, I am indebted to my loved ones: Elli, Marlene, Immo, Jonas, Tine, Lila, and also Michael.