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Robin Cohen (born 1944) is a social scientist working in the fields of globalisation, migration and diaspora studies. He is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies and former Director of the International Migration Institute, University of Oxford.
Robin Cohen was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. He left in 1964, returning to the country for three years in the post-Mandela period, when he served as Dean of Humanities at the University of Cape Town (2001–04). He has held appointments at the universities of Ibadan, Nigeria (1967–69), Birmingham, UK (1969–77), the West Indies (Professor of Sociology, 1977–9), Warwick, UK (Professor of Sociology, 1979–2006) and Oxford (2006–). He is former director of the International Migration Institute which forms part of the Oxford Martin School. Cohen was principal investigator on the Oxford Diasporas Programme, [1] funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
Robin Cohen's doctoral work was published as Labour and politics in Nigeria (1974). [2] There followed collaborative work on labour movements and labour history in other parts of Africa. However, his interest and expertise in labour developed into a wider project about the continuing significance of the movement of people across national boundaries and the problems to which this has given rise in very many parts of the world. In The new Helots (1987), [3] he suggested that Marx had underestimated the continuing salience of migrant labour, a feature that allowed capitalism to thrive and thereby evade the fundamental confrontation between worker and employer that Marx predicted.
Cohen made a number of other contributions to the field of migration studies by giving new understandings to key contested concepts such as diaspora and borders, citizens and denizens, and collective or national identity. In Frontiers of identity, (1994) [4] he argued that 'fuzzy' frontiers within the UK and between Britain, the Commonwealth, and the wider world create a particular ambiguous notion of 'Britishness'. His most influential work, Global diasporas, (1997, with subsequent editions and translations) [5] continued his analysis of the relationship between identity and migration. Through the use of typologies, comparisons and suggestive lists of shared characteristics, Cohen was able to employ the ancient concept of diaspora to enrich the study of present-day transnational migrant flows. [6] Along with James Clifford, William Safran, Paul Gilroy and Khachig Tölölyan, Cohen can be considered one of the founding figures of contemporary diaspora studies.
A diaspora is a population that is scattered across regions which are separate from its geographic place of origin. The word is used in reference to people who identify with a specific geographic location, but currently reside elsewhere.
Human migration is the movement of people from one place to another, with intentions of settling, permanently or temporarily, at a new location. The movement often occurs over long distances and from one country to another, but internal migration is the dominant form of human migration globally.
Since 1945, immigration to the United Kingdom, controlled by British immigration law and to an extent by British nationality law, has been significant, in particular from the Republic of Ireland and from the former British Empire, especially India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Caribbean, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Hong Kong. Since the accession of the UK to the European Communities in the 1970s and the creation of the EU in the early 1990s, immigrants relocated from member states of the European Union, exercising one of the European Union's Four Freedoms. In 2021, since Brexit came into effect, previous EU citizenship's right to newly move to and reside in the UK on a permanent basis does not apply anymore. A smaller number have come as asylum seekers seeking protection as refugees under the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention.
Hinduism came to Mauritius when Indians were brought as indentured labour to colonial French and later in much larger numbers to British plantations in Mauritius and neighboring islands of the Indian Ocean. The migrants came primarily from what are now the Indian states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, with another influx of migrants from the Sindh region of Pakistan, following the Partition of India.
Transnationalism is a research field and social phenomenon grown out of the heightened interconnectivity between people and the receding economic and social significance of boundaries among nation states.
A remittance is a non-commercial transfer of money by a foreign worker, a member of a diaspora community, or a citizen with familial ties abroad, for household income in their home country or homeland. Money sent home by migrants competes with international aid as one of the largest financial inflows to developing countries. Workers' remittances are a significant part of international capital flows, especially with regard to labor-exporting countries.
Patrick Manning is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of World History, Emeritus, at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also president of the World History Network, Inc., a nonprofit corporation fostering research in world history. A specialist in world history and African history, his current research addresses global historiography, early human history, migration in world history, the African diaspora, and the demography of African slavery.
Sir Paul Collier, is a British development economist who serves as the Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and the director of the International Growth Centre.
Indians in Kenya, often known as Kenyan Asians, are citizens and residents of Kenya with ancestral roots in the Indian subcontinent. Significant Indian migration to modern-day Kenya began following the creation of the British East Africa Protectorate in 1895, which had strong infrastructure links with Bombay in British India. Indians in Kenya predominantly live in the major urban areas of Nairobi and Mombasa, with a minority living in rural areas.
Immigration to Ghana is managed by the Ghana Immigration Service (GIS). Ghana a country located at the western part of the African continent with a population of 28.83 million and gained independence on 6 March 1957.
Migration studies is the academic study of human migration. Migration studies is an interdisciplinary field which draws on anthropology, prehistory, history, economics, law, sociology and postcolonial studies.
The International Migration Institute (IMI) is an international network that promotes research on international migration. It is based at the University of Amsterdam and is part of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR). It was established as a research institute at Oxford University in the United Kingdom where it was affiliated with the Oxford Department of International Development.
British Punjabis are citizens or residents of the United Kingdom whose heritage originates wholly or partly in the Punjab, a region in the Indian subcontinent, which is divided between India and Pakistan. Numbering 700,000 in 2006, Punjabis represent the largest ethnicity among British Asians. They are a major sub-group of the British-Indian and British Pakistani communities.
Chief Olufemi O. Vaughan is a Nigerian academic whose research and teaching focuses on African Political and Social History, African Politics, Diaspora Studies, African Migrations and Globalization, Religion and African States. He is currently the Alfred Sargent Lee '41 and Mary Ames Lee Professor of African Studies at Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts.
Steven Vertovec is an anthropologist and Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, based in Göttingen, Germany. He is also currently Honorary Joint Professor of Sociology and Ethnology at the Georg August University of Göttingen and Supernumerary Fellow at Linacre College, Oxford.
Migration from India into Africa pre-dates European colonization. The number of Indians in Africa increased greatly with the settlement of Indians in Africa as indentured servants during colonization, and has continued to increase into the 21st century.
Step migration is a migration pattern conceptualized in 1885 by Ernst Georg Ravenstein, who observed migration as occurring stage by stage as rural inhabitants move closer to urban areas of growth. It is a migration pattern regarded by some scholars to be a widely popular form of international migration in the twenty-first century globalized world. There is a large breadth of study proving the existence of step migration in many international migration patterns, although there is lack of consensus over its exact specification and measurement. Step migration scholars deem it to be an important international trend that has the power to aid in the design of policy development efforts in both rural and urban areas worldwide. According to Abrahm Lustgarten, Senior Environmental Reporter for ProPublica, in his May 2021 report, Step migration – or "stepwise migration" – is a characteristic pattern of migration driven by climate change.
Hein de Haas is a Dutch sociologist and geographer who has lived and worked in the Netherlands, Morocco and the United Kingdom. He is currently Professor of Sociology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA). His research is focusing on the relationship between migration and social transformation and development in origin and destination countries. He is a founding member and co-director of the International Migration Institute (IMI) at Oxford University, and directs IMI nowadays from its current base at UvA. He is also Professor of Migration and Development at the University of Maastricht.
Ibrahim Ibrahim Abubakar is a British-Nigerian epidemiologist who is Professor in Infectious Disease Epidemiology at University College London and Dean of the UCL Faculty of Population Health Sciences.
Oxford Monitor of Forced Migration (OxMo) is a biannual publication engaging in a global intellectual dialogue about forced migration, supported by the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford.
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