Samah Rafiq is a Lecturer in International Relations at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. She works on the international politics of bordering and migration control and is interested in studying global south perspectives in this regard. In disciplinary terms, her work is located within critical security studies, international political sociology and postcolonial scholarship in IR.

Her current project ‘State-private hybrid regimes of migration control,’ funded by the British International Studies Association (BISA), examines the phenomenon of outsourcing and privatisation in migration control with empirical focus on the UK and India.

Samah has a PhD in international politics from the Centre for International Politics, Organization and Disarmament (CIPOD), Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. In the UK, she previously taught at the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London. She has been a Fox International Fellow at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, Yale University, USA and she previously worked on migration policy as a researcher at India’s Ministry of External Affairs’ India Centre for Migration.

Samah is currently working on publishing her monograph while teaching MA and BA modules at the Department of War Studies. She is a Fellow of the Advance HE.

Research interests

• Borders and Migration/Mobility
• Non-state actors (privatisation and outsourcing) in migration control
• Critical Security Studies
• Postcolonial approaches
• Politics of risk and technology
• Borders and mobility in South Asia

Teaching

2024-25:

• 4SSW1006 International Relations Theory (BA1 core) – Module convenor
• 7SSWN079 Theories, Concepts and Methods in International Relations (MA core)

Publications

Peer-reviewed journal article:

• Rafiq, Samah. 2022. Linear borders, partition and identity in postcolonial South Asia. Geopolitics. 27 (2): 478-500. DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2020.1757652. (Journal Impact Factor, 2022: 2.9)

Blogs/Op-eds:

• Rafiq, Samah. South Asia needs a climate migration policy framework. The Wire. Published online on 10 August 2023.
• Rafiq, Samah. The colonial roots of linear borders in South Asia. Security in Context. Published online on 6 August 2023.
• Rafiq, Samah. 2020. Open borders: scapegoat in COVID-19 response. Yale Global. Published online on 9 April 2020.
• Rafiq, Samah. 2018. Crossing international borders: how mobile is the South Asian individual? NewsClick, published online on 23 March 2018.

Book reviews:

• Rafiq, Samah. 2016. Networks of rebellion: explaining insurgent cohesion and collapse. Civil Wars. 18(4):538-541. DOI: 10.1080/13698249.2017.1296807.

Funding

Her current project is funded by the British International Studies Association. Previously, she has received funding for her work from the Fox Fellowship programme at Yale University (2019-20), and the University Grants Commission (UGC) of India (2015-19).