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Our People

Professor Robin Cohen

Fellow, Senior Research Fellow

Emeritus Professor of Development Studies

Oxford Department of International Development

BA (Witwatersrand), MSc (London), PhD (Birmingham), DLitt (Warwick)

Robin Cohen is Professor Emeritus of Development Studies, University of Oxford. He has held full-time teaching appointments at the Universities of Ibadan, Birmingham, Warwick and the West Indies and short-term appointments at Stanford, Toronto and Berkeley. He is Honorary Professor at the University of Warwick and Senior Research Partner at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity, Göttingen.

Robin Cohen’s 12 authored books include:

The new helots: migrants in the international division of labour (1987, 1993, 2003), Frontiers of identity: the British and the others (1994), Global diasporas: an introduction (1997, rev. 2008), Global sociology (co-author, 2000, rev. 2007, rev. 2013), Migration and its enemies (2006), Encountering difference (co-author, 2016), Island societies (2017), Migration: the movement of humankind from prehistory to the present (2019) and Refugia: radical solutions to mass displacement (co-author, 2020).

He has edited or co-edited 22 further volumes, particularly on the sociology and politics of developing areas, ethnicity, diasporas, international migration, transnationalism and globalisation. His major works have been translated into Danish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Portuguese, Spanish ad Turkish.

Selected Articles

‘Strangers and migrants in the making of African societies: a conceptual and historical review’ Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2017. DOI 10.1007/s40647-017-0203-x
(with Nicholas Van Hear) ‘Visions of Refugia: territorialized and transnational solutions to mass displacement’, Planning Theory and Practice, 18 (3), 2017, 494–504. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14649357.2017.1330233
(with Nicholas Van Hear) ‘Diasporas and conflict: distance, contiguity and spheres of engagement’, Oxford Development Studies, 45 (2), 2017, 171–84, DOI: 10.1080/13600818.2016.1160043, 1–14
‘Reconsidering social inclusion/exclusion in social theory: nine perspectives, three levels’ Mondi Migranti: Rivista di studi e ricerche sulle migrazioni internazionali (Franco Angelli), Issue 1, 2015, 7–29.

A full list of publications (some downloadable) is available here: https://oxford.academia.edu/RobinCohen