Introduction
I'm a professor in the Political Science Department at Northwestern University and have worked for over 20 years as a lawyer (J.D. 1989) and researcher (Ph.D. 2003) in refugee and forced migration studies. As an action researcher, I work relationally with communities both in the United States and internationally to design solutions and broaden our understandings of the rights and processes of refugee protection and the role of law and policy in settlement and inclusion in host societies.
Expert
Galya Ben-Arieh, J.D., Ph.D., a professor in the Political Science Department at Northwestern University, brings over 20 years of expertise as an academic and lawyer to her research and publications that seek to broaden our understandings of the rights and processes of refugee protection and the role of law and policy in settlement and inclusion in host societies. She is the founding director of the Northwestern Center for Forced Migration Studies (2011-2018) and currently directs the Colloquium on Refugees, Migrants and Statelessness in the WCAS Center for International and Area Studies. In 2015 she launched a refugee resettlement research program bringing together policy makers, thought leaders and researchers in a series of forums and expert workshops to consider how to strengthen the US Refugee Resettlement Program as a Global Model for Successful Humanitarian Response. She is now conducting a narrative policy analysis of the U.S. Refugee Policy in localities. In 2018 she founded COMPASS – Community Partnerships for Settlement Strategies, a public charity registered in Illinois that works to design effective approaches in support of the long-term wellbeing of refugees and asylees in our communities. She has been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and the Kellogg Center for Dispute Resolution and is a former Senior Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research (University of Duisburg-Essen) and is a consortium partner in the project, Norms and Values in the European Migration and Refugee Crisis (NoVaMigra) http://novamigra.eu, a European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 770330. She has conducted field research in the Great Lakes region of Eastern Africa, Germany and the U.S. and has published on testimony and justice, asylum law and policy, refugee protection in a digital age, human rights litigation in transnational courts and citizenship and immigrant incorporation in the US and Germany and is the co-editor of Adjudicating Refugee and Asylum Status: The Role of Witness, Expertise, and Testimony (co-edited with Benjamin Lawrance), Cambridge University Press (2015). From 2013-2018 she served on the executive committee of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration and has worked as an immigration attorney representing political asylum claimants both as a solo-practitioner and as a pro-bono attorney.
Fields of expertise: Inclusive social development / inclusive societies / social inclusion, Migration