Book Launch and Panel Discussion on Refugee Reception in (Southern) Africa

This in-person panel discussion investigates how refugees are welcomed and hosted in neighbouring countries in Southern Africa and the wider African continent. Through an expert discussion, key themes relating to the inherently temporary nature of refugee reception today will be explored, including refugee camps and urban displacement. These ideas sit at the heart of contemporary debates about how we understand displacement, forms of protections found at different levels of analysis (including global and ground-level approaches), and formal and informal solutions to displacement for refugees will be discussed.

Dr Nicholas Maple will introduce key elements of the welcome refugees receive in Southern Africa as presented in his new book Refugee Reception in Southern Africa: National and Local Policies in Zambia and South Africa (University of London Press, 2024). Dr Georgia Cole (University of Edinburgh) will then chair a one-hour discussion on these themes with:

• Prof Loren Landau (Professor of Migration and Development, University of Oxford)
• Dr Helidah Ogude (Lecturer in Migration and Development, University of Oxford)
• Dr Lucy Hovil (Senior Research Associate at the RLI, University of London)
• Dr Nicholas Maple (Lecturer in Refugee Studies, RLI, University of London)

Questions and comments will be welcomed from the audience and a drinks reception will follow the discussion. 

Refugee Reception in Southern Africa: National and Local Policies in Zambia and South Africa is available to download for free now at University of London Press. It is also available in paperback from major booksellers or online at University of London Press. Attendees at the discussion panel will also be provided with a code that can be used to obtain a discount when purchasing the book.

Speaker Bios

• Dr Nicholas Maple is a Lecturer in Refugee Studies at the Refugee Law Initiative, School of Advanced Study, University of London. His research interests take a multidisciplinary approach to examining refugee and migrant displacement in Africa and Latin America. He is the Joint Editor-in-Chief at the Refugee Survey Quarterly Journal, published by Oxford University Press and a Research Associate at ACMS, University of the Witwatersrand.
  
  
• Prof Loren B Landau is Professor of Migration and Development at the University of Oxford, Research Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand’s African Centre for Migration & Society, and co-director of the Wits-Oxford Mobility Governance Lab (MGL). He previously held visiting and faculty positions at Princeton, Georgetown, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He holds an MSc in Development Studies (LSE) and a PhD in Political Science (Berkeley) and is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa.
  
  
• Dr Helidah Ogude-Chambert is a Departmental Lecturer in Migration and Development at the Oxford Department of International Development. She convenes courses on Migration and Development and Relational Formations of Race and Human (Im)mobilities. Her interdisciplinary scholarship is situated within migration/mobilities studies, decolonial feminist thought, discourse and affect studies, and race-critical theories. She uses critical theories, mixed methods, and historical ways of thinking to understand how political elites manipulate emotions and public discourse in ways that normalize migrant precarity and justify state practices of cruelty and racialised expulsion. 
  
  
• Dr Lucy Hovil is a social researcher and widely published global expert on issues related to displacement and forced migration. She supports a broad range of governments, non-governmental organisations and donors to understand migration and conflict contexts, their impact on local populations, and how programmatic and policy interventions can improve their effectiveness. Lucy is a Senior Research Associate of the Refugee Law Initiative (University of London). 
  
  
• Dr Georgia Cole is a Chancellor's Fellow in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the alternatives that people pursue to formal asylum pathways and on pluralising geographies of refuge to account for diverse sites of protection and respite. She works primarily with Eritrean refugees and migrants in Eritrea, East Africa and the Gulf States, where she is trying to understand the historical and contemporary role of Gulf actors in global systems of displacement and humanitarianism.