Loren Landau

Loren B Landau is Professor of Migration and Development at the University of Oxford, Research Professor at the University of the Witwatersrand’s African Centre for Migration & Society, and co-director of the Wits-Oxford Mobility Governance Lab (MGL). A political scientist by training (UC Berkeley 2002), his interdisciplinary scholarship explores mobility, multi-scale governance, and the transformation of socio-political communities across the Global South. Through the Atlas of Uncertainty and other initiatives, he his research considers questions of urbanity, xenophobia, representation, and the global political economy of knowledge. Before joining Oxford, he was a senior researcher with the African Centre for Migration & Society where he maintains an affiliation. He will be a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for the 2026-2027 academic year where he will be writing on the meaning and mechanisms through which people make spatialized claims to the future in an era of heightened mobility, political fragmentation, environmental precarity, and existential uncertainty.

A frequent media resource on regional and global migration policy debates, he has published widely in the academic and popular press including the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy. Publications include, The Humanitarian Hangover: Displacement, Aid, and Transformation in Western Tanzania (Wits Press); Forging African Communities: Mobility, Integration, and Belonging (Palgrave); I Want to Go Home Forever: Stories of Becoming and Belonging in South Africa’s Great Metropolis (Wits Press); Contemporary Migration to South Africa (World Bank); and Exorcising the Demons Within: Xenophobia, Violence and Statecraft in Contemporary South Africa (UN University Press/Wits Press). He has consulted with the European Union, the World Bank, UNDP, UNHCR, UNECA, the Cities Alliance, and others. As chair of the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa  (2004-2012) he served on the South African Immigration Advisory Board.