Marie Courtoy

Marie Courtoy holds a double Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Anthropology and in Law (Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles, Belgium) as well as a Master’s degree in Law (UCLouvain, Belgium). During her Master’s years, she carried out an exchange in Geneva and received two awards for her thesis titled ‘Climate migrants: symptoms of a failing global governance of migration’ (2017). Following her studies, she interned at the European Court of Human Rights and at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (Belgium and Luxembourg Office).

She is currently completing a doctorate at UCLouvain (EDEM-CeDIE) and KU Leuven with a grant from the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS), under the supervision of Sylvie Sarolea and Marie-Claire Foblets. Her thesis, at the crossroads of law and anthropology, is also part of the “Environmental Rights in Cultural Context” project led by Dirk Hanschel at the Law & Anthropology Department of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, where she is a research associate.

Her research focuses on the role of human mobility in the face of climate change and how the law approaches it (2023), with an emphasis on its anticipatory potential. Instead of examining the protection of individuals already displaced by environmental degradation (2020), she investigates in what contexts human mobility can represent a positive means of adaptation in the face of a degrading territory (2022).

She conducts fieldwork in three coastal cities where relocations are being considered or implemented, in France, Guadeloupe and Senegal. She looks at how States choose which measures to put in place to protect their citizens from coastal risks exacerbated by climate change, and how the law allows or prevents certain types of solution.