Oreva Olakpe researches 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. Oreva 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.
Recent Publications
(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.
With Anna Triandafyllidou. (2023). Special Issue on De-Centering the Study of Sino-African Migrations (external link) , African Mobility Review, 9(2), 1-11.
(2023). South-South Migrations and the Law from Below (external link) . Hart Publishing; Bloomsbury Publishing, London, United Kingdom.
With Anna Triandafyllidou. (2021). Reimagining the Norms of the International Migration System: 'Green' passports for medium-skilled Youth (external link) , The EUI Global Citizenship Observatory.
(2021). Lessons in Mutualism: 50 Years of Sino-Nigerian Relations (external link, opens in new window) , The Republic Journal.
With Kula, L. (2020). Displacement. Commodification and Profit-making in Nigeria. In A. Pine & S. Mcguirk (Eds.), In Profit, Protest and the Asylum Industry. PM Press, United Kingdom.
(2018). Encountering Nigerian Migrants in China: Changing the Migration Narrative (external link, opens in new window) in Perspectives Magazine "Not on the Board to Europe: Movements of Africans within and beyond the continent', Heinrich Böll Stiftung.
(2018). Xi-led Growth? Nigeria at FOCAC 2018 (external link) . The Republic Journal.
(2017). Global Trends in Migration: Centering on Nigerian Migrations to China (external link, opens in new window) . The Republic Journal.
Policy Brief
With Sambe, M. (2023) (PDF file) Rethinking EU-Africa Migration Cooperation. CERC Migration Policy Brief 17, Jan. 2024.