Public Lecture on “The Challenge of Statelessness and Migration in South Asia” by Professor Brad Blitz

Public Lecture on
“The Challenge of Statelessness and Migration in South Asia”
by Professor Brad Blitz,
Professor of International Politics and Policy, University College London Institute of Education

Monday | 14 October 2019 | 6.00 pm – 7.30 pm

Organised by Goa Institute of Management and The International Centre Goa

Entry free & open to general public

Brad K. Blitz received his Ph.D. from Stanford University and is Professor of International Politics and Policy at University College London Institute of Education and until June 2019 was Director of the British Academy/DFID Programme, Tackling Slavery, Human Trafficking and Child Labour in Modern Business. He is also Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, and Senior Fellow of the Global Migration Centre in the Graduate Institute, Geneva.

He recently acted as Principal Investigator for the ESRC-DFID funded EVI-MED project on refugee and migrant reception systems in the Mediterranean and the EU Commission project INFORM which seeks to understand how asylum seekers access legal and procedural information. In March 2019 he will begin a 5 year project as co-investigator of a £17.4 million ‘hub’ on Gender, Justice and Security, funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) with the London School of Economics.

A former Jean Monnet Chair he is widely regarded as a leading expert on refugees and stateless persons, migration, human rights and international politics. A comparative political scientist by training, he has worked extensively in the former Yugoslavia and former Soviet Union and acted as an advisor and consultant to UNDP, UNICEF, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the World Bank, OSCE, Council of Europe, DFID, and several NGOs. He has also advised national governments and has appeared as an expert witness on over 20 occasions.

In 2008 the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, and a panel of experts, selected his research as one of 12 projects which would guide and support the legacy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Publications include Statelessness in the European Union: Displaced, Undocumented and Unwanted, Cambridge University Press, 2011; and Statelessness and Citizenship: A Comparative Study on the Benefits of Nationality, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011. In 2011, he completed a US State Department funded project ‘Measuring the Costs of Statelessness’, which subsequently informed US humanitarian policy. He also contributed to UNDP’s Asia-Pacific Human Development Report. In November 2013, he completed a major cross-national study of the benefits of birth registration on development outcomes for Plan International. He is also the author of Migration and Freedom: Mobility, Citizenship, and Exclusion, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014; reissued in 2016 which was nominated for three awards.