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Kirsten McConnachie is Professor of Socio-Legal Studies at the University of East Anglia where she is also Associate Dean for Postgraduate Research in the Faculty of Social Science. She is a Research Associate at the University of Oxford's Refugee Studies Centre. 

Her research approach is socio-legal and interdisciplinary. Her research interests include international and UK refugee law; the governance and management of refugee camps; anthropology and ethnography of forced migration; transitional justice and post-conflict accountability. She has a particular interest in displacement in and from southeast Asia and has carried out extensive fieldwork with refugees from Myanmar (including with Karen refugees living in camps in Thailand and with ethnic Chin refugees in Malaysia and India). Her research has been funded by major funders including the Leverhulme Trust, AHRC, John Fell Fund, Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Emslie Horniman Trust. 

She is a series editor for Berghahn's series in Forced Migration, an editorial board member of the Journal of Human Rights Practice, International Journal of Refugee Law and Social and Legal Studies and a member of the UKRI Talent Panel College. She regularly presents at invited seminars in the UK and internationally, and in 2022 delivered the annual Elizabeth Colson lecture at the University of Oxford. She has been interviewed by media as an expert on refugee issues and on Burma/Myanmar (including BBC World Service, BBC Asian News Service, Channel News Asia, France News 24 and Al-Jazeera) and has written for online media including The Conversation, openDemocracy, The Diplomat, Lacuna, and The Muslim Debate.

Selected recent publications

  • (2022).  Border Governance: Reframing Political Transition in Myanmar. Modern Asian Studies 56: 471-503.
  • (2022). ‘Refugee Policy as Border Governance: Repatriation, Peacebuilding and Statebuilding in Myanmar’, Modern Asian Studies 56: 661-690.
  • (2020). ‘Everyday Justice in Karen Refugee Camps’, H. Kyed, ed. Everyday Justice in Myanmar NIAS.
  • (2019). Routledge Handbook of Socio-Legal Theory and Method, N. Creutzfeldt, M. Mason and K. McConnachie (eds).
  • (2019). ‘Law and Anthropology’, Routledge Handbook of Socio-Legal Theory and Method.
  • (2019). ‘Securitisation and Community-Based Protection Among Chin Refugees in Kuala Lumpur’, Social and Legal Studies, 28(2): 158-178.
  • (2018). ‘Boundaries and Belonging in the Indo-Myanmar Borderlands: Chin Refugees in Mizoram’, Journal of Refugee Studies, 31(3): 331-343. 
  • (2018). ‘Protracted Encampment and its Consequences: Gender Identities and Historical Memory’ in I. Katz, D. Martin, C. Minca, eds. Camps Revisited: Multifaceted Spatialities of a Modern Political Technology, Rowman & Littlefield International. 
  • (2017). ‘Refugee Protection and the Art of the Deal’, Journal of Human Rights Practice. 9(2): 190-196 
  • (2016). ‘Camps of Containment: A genealogy of the refugee camp’. Humanity: An international journal of human rights, humanitarianism and development 7(3): 397-412. 
  • (2016). Kieran McEvoy and Kirsten McConnachie, ‘Victimhood and Transitional Justice’, Spencer and S. Walklate, eds., Critical Victimology. Lexington, pp111-132. 
  • (2014).  Governing Refugees: Justice, Order and Legal Pluralism. Abingdon: Routledge 
  • (2014). ‘Forced Migration in Southeast and East Asia’. In E. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, G. Loescher, K. Long, N. Sigona eds. Handbook of Forced Migration Studies. OUP 626-637.