Oreva Olakpe

Oreva Olakpe is a Senior Research Associate at Bridging Divides at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), where her expertise aligns with the Citizenship and Participation research theme. As a Research Fellow at the Canada Excellence Research Chain in Migration and Integration (CERC Migration) at TMU, Oreva's research focuses on how communities without status (e.g. irregular migrants and cross-border minorities) in the Global South form institutional structures and make space for themselves in their society of settlement. She has studied sub-Saharan African migrant businessmen with mostly expired status and African asylum seekers in China, and a cross-border minority at the Cameroon-Nigeria border. She received a PhD in Law from the School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of London.

Oreva has also recently worked on EU-funded projects on migrant integration, migration partnerships, and approaches to forced displacement in West Africa. She has carried out research on African migrations and informal communal structures, funded by the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa.

Selected publications

Olakpe, O. (2024). "Forced displacement and borderlands in international law: Perspectives from below" in The Wretched of the Global South. Part of book series: International law and the global south. (external link)  (Venthan Ananthavinayagan, T., Viswanath Shenoy, A. Eds.). Springer, Singapore.

Olakpe, O., and Triandafyllidou, A. (2023). Special Issue on De-Centering the Study of Sino-African Migrations (external link) , African Mobility Review, 9(2), 1-11.

Olakpe, O. (2023). South-South Migrations and the Law from Below (external link) . Hart Publishing; Bloomsbury Publishing, London, United Kingdom.