The department is a lively community that is recognised internationally as one of the top centres for research and teaching in development studies.

Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our courses offer excellent training for a career in international development or for advanced study, and attract students of the highest calibre from across the world.
“I had waited for 10 years before my dream to study in Oxford became a reality and the experience was truly beyond expectation”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
Our students are taught to develop as critical and independent thinkers and when they leave us they are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to bring about real change.
“My time at Oxford strengthened my critical analysis and provided me with a unique interdisciplinary grounding in history, politics and economics that has equipped me well in dealing with public policy issues and program development strategy.”
Matthew J Gibney is Professor of Politics and Forced Migration and Fellow of Linacre College, Oxford. He is a political scientist who has written widely on issues relating to refugees, migration control and citizenship from the perspectives of normative political theory and comparative politics. He is a graduate of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and completed an MPhil and a PhD. at Cambridge University, where he was a Commonwealth Scholar.
He has taught politics at Monash, Cambridge, and Harvard universities and the University of Toronto. He has held Visiting Academic positions at Northwestern University in Illinois, Monash University in Melbourne, Australia and, most recently at the University of Toronto and the University of New South Wales in Sydney.
He has written many articles and chapters on asylum and immigration and their relationship to issues of ethics, security and the liberal democratic state. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, the Georgetown Immigration Law Journal, Forced Migration Review, Government and Opposition, and a range of other journals. His books include Globalizing Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures (Oxford University Press 2003), which has been translated into Spanish and Italian; The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to Refugees (Cambridge University Press 2004); and (with Randall Hansen) a three-volume encyclopedia entitled Immigration and Asylum From 1900 to the Present (ABC-Clio 2005).
Matthew Gibney teaches two courses for the MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies: Asylum and the Modern State and Morality and Movement: Ethical Issues in Border Control. He also lectures on the core course in Development Studies for the MPhil in Development Studies.
The evolution and future of asylum in liberal democracies; the ethical and political issues raised by deportation and expulsion; the role of forced migration in reshaping the modern state.