Gerasimos Tsourapas
Gerasimos Tsourapas FAcSS is 125th Anniversary Chair and Professor of International Relations at the University of Birmingham. He is Editor-in-chief of Migration Studies. His research examines the international relations of the Middle East and broader Global South, focusing on the politics of migrants, refugees, and diasporas. He has advanced the concepts of migration diplomacy, migration interdependence, and refugee rentierism to analyse the political economy and foreign policy dimensions of cross-border mobility.
Tsourapas is the author of The Politics of Migration in Modern Egypt: Strategies for Regime Survival in Autocracies, which was awarded the 2020 ENMISA Distinguished Book Award by the International Studies Association. His second book was entitled Migration Diplomacy in the Middle East and North Africa: Power, Mobility, and the State. He has received major research funding, including a European Research Council Starting Grant, a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award, and a Carnegie Corporation of New York grant.
His research has informed policy debates and been cited in reports by the European Commission, the United States Congress, and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, among others, and has been featured in international media such as The New York Times, The Economist, the BBC, and TAZ .
Education
Tsourapas received an undergraduate degree in Economics and Political Science from Yale University, where he compiled the history of the Yale Dramatic Association, as the organisation's archivist, in 2004. He went on to earn an MSc in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He completed his PhD in Politics at SOAS, University of London. His thesis received the American Political Science Association's 2016 Best Dissertation Prize on Migration & Citizenship.Career
Tsourapas became 125th Anniversary Chair and Professor of International Relations at the University of Birmingham in 2025 and is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow, where he held academic posts from 2021 to 2025, most recently as Professor of International Relations.He was a Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, in 2019–20. He served as a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2024, and was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo in 2024–25. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Leir Institute for Migration and Human Security at Tufts University.
Tsourapas has held a number of elected positions in professional associations, including Chair of the Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies Section of the International Studies Association, and Treasurer of the Migration and Citizenship Section of the American Political Science Association. He was also an elected Trustee of the Council for British Research in the Levant, a British Academy research institute, where he served as Acting Honorary Treasurer and a member of the Research Sub-Committee.