Professor Dawn Chatty
Emeritus Professor of Anthropology and Forced Migration, Oxford Department of International Development; Emeritus Fellow, St Cross College
About
Dawn Chatty is Emeritus Professor in Anthropology and Forced Migration and former Director of the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. She is also a Fellow of the British Academy. Her research interests include coping strategies and resilience of refugee youth; tribes and tribalism; nomadic pastoralism and conservation; gender and development; health, illness and culture. She has worked with nomadic pastoral groups in Lebanon and Syria since the mid-1970s and extended her research to Oman in 1979. She has continued to be engaged with these communities and advocate for their rights to resist forced settlement.
She has edited numerous books including: Deterritorialized Youth: Sahrawi and Afghan Refugees at the Margins of the Middle East (Berghahn Books, 2010); Nomadic Societies in the Middle East and North Africa: Facing the 21st Century (Leiden, Brill, 2006); Children of Palestine: Experiencing Forced Migration in the Middle East (Berghahn Books, 2005); and Conservation and Mobile Peoples: Displacement, Forced Settlement and Sustainable Development (Berghahn Press, 2002). She is the author of Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2010); From Camel to Truck (White Horse Press, 2013); and Syria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refuge State (Hurst Publishers, 2018).
Expertise
- Middle East ethnography (culture and society)
- Nomadic peoples and conservation
- Dispossession and migration in the Middle East
- Gender and development
- Children and armed conflict
- Palestinian, Sahrawi and Afghan refugee youth
- Syria
- Oman
Selected publications
- Mobile indigenous peoples and the quest for human rights (2025)
- Refuge in the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean: Spaces of containment or places of choice? (2024)
- Forward to the Special Issue Fragile Selves, Annali di Ca’Foscari (2023)
- Displaced Syrians and the global compact on refugees, Workshop statement (2022)
- Dana Declaration+20 Manifesto on mobile peoples and conservation (2022)
- Introduction to Special Issue: Displaced Syrians, Journal of Refugee Studies (2021)
- Has the tide turned? Refuge and sanctuary in the Euro-Mediterranean space (2020)
- Commentary: When hospitality turns into hostility in prolonged forced migration (2020)
- Syria: The making and unmaking of a refuge state (2018)
- A post-imperial lens on displacement and refuge in the Middle East (2018)
- Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Media experience
Professor Chatty has wide experience of both broadcast and print media.
Languages
English, Arabic