Natalie Dietrich Jones

Natalie Dietrich Jones is Senior Research Fellow at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES) at the University of the West Indies Mona campus. Her interests include geographies of the border, governance of migration, and intra-regional migration in the Caribbean. Natalie is Chair of the Migration and Development Cluster, an interdisciplinary group of researchers exploring contemporary issues concerning migration in the Caribbean and its diaspora. Natalie holds an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in Development Policy and Management from the University of Manchester. She is currently undertaking a multi-sited project on the response to Venezuelan migration in small island developing states in the Southern Caribbean.

Research at ODID

Historically and contemporaneously, the Caribbean has been a site of crisis migration. While the most pressing crises today relate to the movement of Venezuelan and Haitian migrants throughout the region, emerging geo-political and climate-related events will likely contribute to new patterns of displaced populations over the next few decades. However, there is limited empirical research, which examines how postcolonial states in the Caribbean have responded to vulnerable migrants, in particular, persons seeking asylum. This Fellowship would therefore provide the opportunity to fill this gap in academic research by exploring decoloniality within the context of Refugee Law in the Caribbean.