Dr Sophie Nakueira of the Max Planck Institute visits the GRG

Dr Sophie Nakueira is visiting the Global Risk Governance programme until the end of April 2022. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute and leads the African component of the EU funded Horizon 2020 project, 'VULNER'. This project investigates how the law assesses and addresses the vulnerability of asylum seekers and refugees in practice. 

Sophie Nakueira holds an LLM and a PhD in Public Law from the University of Cape Town.  Nakueira’s work cuts across the fields of law, criminology, and anthropology as she attempts to understand the disjuncture between law and practice and associated effects of interactions between diverse actors and contestations between different normative orders. She has explored topics on transnational private governance, the governance of mega-events, and governance in humanitarian spaces. These topics are part of her broader research interest in understanding how contemporary governance takes shape and the resulting effects in global contexts. 

Nakueira is a research associate at the Global Risk Governance programme at the University of Cape Town and a member of the Evolving Securities Initiative (ESI), a  cross­-disciplinary group of scholars that undertakes research on current and emerging security challenges. Prior to joining VULNER, she taught at the University of Zurich, where she is currently a research associate. She has worked in various capacities as a researcher, visiting scholar, guest lecturer, and consultant in Uganda, South Africa, Australia, Belgium, and Germany.