Hello! I am a Professor in International Migration Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo (UiO). You can find my UiO staff page here. I am also an Associate Fellow at the Issam Fares Institute, American University of Beirut.

I hold a PhD (2012) in international refugee law from the University of Bergen, Norway. Focusing predominantly on the Middle East, I study international law from below. I am interested in how refugees and other migrants understand and engage with legal norms and institutions, and in how international refugee law in particular is interpreted and implemented in local contexts. I draw heavily on work within other disciplines, including sociology and anthropology.

My book came out with Brill in 2014, and my articles have appeared in Journal of Refugee Studies, International Journal of Refugee Law, Middle East Critique and other journals. I have also written for general readers in The Washington Post’s Monkey Cage and The New Humanitarian, and have been quoted by media outlets including The Economist and BBC. I regularly disseminate my research findings to a broad range of policy-makers in Europe and in the Middle East.

I am increasingly interested in disseminating my research findings through visual storytelling methods. Based on my research, we published the graphic novel Cardboard Camp: Stories of Sudanese Refugees in Lebanon in 2023.

My work has received several awards and recognitions, including the Fridtjof Nansen medal of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in 2022, the University of Oslo's Award for young researchers in 2021, the Chr. Michelsen Prize for outstanding development research in 2018, and the Meltzer Prize for young researchers in 2014.

My current research agenda is to construct a more global perspective on the nature of international refugee law by focusing on the role and practice of states that haven’t ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention. These non-signatory states are predominantly found in the Middle East and South Asia, and have traditionally been seen as exceptions to international refugee law. In my current research I am hoping to bring these states from the margins to the fore.

My research has been supported by the European Research Council and the Research Council of Norway. Currently, I am the Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant (2021-2026) project Protection without Ratification? International Refugee Law beyond States Parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention (BEYOND). I recently also the project Refugees and the Arab Middle East: Protection in States Not Party to the Refugee Convention (REF-ARAB, 2019-2023).  You will find resources and information about both of these projects on this website.

I am also a member of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Refugee Law, and a member of the advisory board for the Gerda Henkel Foundation’s Funding Program Forced Migration. In 2023, I was appointed to the OSCE List of Experts for the Human Dimension Mechanism. Between 2020 and 2023 I held an appointment as a Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford.

You can most easily reach me by email: maja.janmyr@jus.uio.no