The architecture of entrapment

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Event description

As part of the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction’s UCL200 event series, Professor Sonja Ayeb-Karlsson’s inaugural lecture brings together environmental humanities, critical socio-legal studies and intersectional justice to rethink how we understand systemic violence, crisis, and humanitarianism.

Challenging dominant narratives that view displacement and justice as separate crises, the lecture exposes a quiet, global reality: the deliberate structures that keep people stuck. From environmental degradation to institutional failures, it asks a provocative question, ‘How do the very systems designed to protect the marginalised become the tools that trap them?’

Drawing on empirical research spanning climate-induced ‘trapped’ populations and the weaponisation of law within family as well as criminal courts, Professor Ayeb-Karlsson examines how power operates to restrict human movement and sovereignty.

She introduces the concept of an “architecture of entrapment”, showing how environmental or infrastructural collapse strips away the option to move. Meanwhile, modern “lawfare” weaponises legal and administrative frameworks against asylum-seeking children and marginalised families in the context of domestic and child abuse.

Crucially, the Professor Ayeb-Karlsson introduces how unseen forms of violence – such as Reproductive Coercion and Abuse (RCA) – intersect with systemic legal entrapment, creating inescapable barriers to health, safety, and physical mobility for mothers and children.

By focusing on deeply personal field narratives and structural violence, this lecture offers a vital perspective on what entrapment means for the future of global human rights and intersectional justice.

Professor Sonja Ayeb-Karlsson

An internationally recognised researcher, Professor Sonja Ayeb-Karlsson investigates the intersections of climate change, migration, structural violence, mental wellbeing and justice. Her work has shaped national and international policy discussions on climate-induced immobility, legal entrapment, human trafficking and the protection of women and children. She is Professor of Intersectional Justice at UCL Risk and Disaster Reduction, leads the UCL Everyday Disasters and Violences Research Group and has published more than 100 academic works.