Dr Nicholas Maple is a Post Doc Research Fellow at the African Centre for Migration & Society (ACMS), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He is currently working on a number of different continental and international projects, which include (i) the ‘Protect: The Right to International Protection’ project, which is an EU funded research project which studies the impact of the UN’s Global Compacts on Refugees and Migration on refugees’ right to international protection; (ii) a project with the Institute for Human Rights and Development in Africa (IHRDA) in the Gambia, which is looking at the effect of the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic on refugees, migrants, asylum seekers and internally displaced persons in Africa; and (iii) a migration governance project funded by the Open Society Foundations, investigating national, regional and continental migration frameworks with a focus on southern Africa.

Nicholas completed his Ph.D. in 2021, under the supervision of Prof Cantor at the Refugee Law Initiative (RLI), University of London, UK. The thesis focused on how states manage the reception of refugees in southern Africa. It involved two country case studies, Zambia and South Africa, with a geographical focus on the refugee camp and the urban space. He is currently turning the thesis into a book manuscript.

Nicholas is also an academic support officer for the MA in Refugee Protection and Forced Migration Studies at the RLI, University of London. In addition, he is the module convenor and tutor for the core module on the MA,  ‘An Introduction to Refugee and Forced Migration Studies’.  Finally, he is an assistant editor at the Refugee Survey Quarterly Journal, published by Oxford University Press.