Assistant Professor of Migration Studies and Institute for Migration Studies (IMS) Director Jasmin Lilian Diab has been awarded a Global Visiting Fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights.

Dr. Diab is one of only six researchers worldwide to receive the fellowship, which brings together researchers, practitioners, advocates, and human rights defenders with a sustained commitment to advancing LGBTQI+ rights globally.

The fellowship recognizes Dr. Diab’s extensive scholarship on migration, forced displacement, human rights, gender, and sexuality, while also opening the door to broader collaboration between the Carr-Ryan Center and the IMS.

“One of my priorities is to create opportunities for the fellowship to extend beyond my individual research,” said Dr. Diab, who hopes to develop joint activities between the two institutions: Online conversations, research exchanges, and public-facing discussions addressing issues central to the IMS’s work.

These could include LGBTQI+ displacement and refugee protection; how asylum and humanitarian institutions assess credibility and vulnerability; the intersection of gender, sexuality, and migration governance; and how knowledge produced in the Global South can contribute more directly to international human rights debates.

“Lebanon is not simply a location in which displacement happens,” said Dr. Diab. “It is an important site from which displacement and protection can be theorized. “Its extensive humanitarian infrastructure and its role in Syrian refugee mobility makes visible how much protection depends on informal practices, negotiation, and institutional discretion.”

Her proposal therefore treats Lebanon as a site of knowledge production rather than merely as a case study to which theories developed elsewhere are applied. “I hope the fellowship can ensure that knowledge emerging from Lebanon and the wider region travels more meaningfully into global conversations.”

Dr. Diab’s fellowship project, titled “Producing Protection: Queer Syrian Refugees, Human Rights Knowledge, and the Political Economy of Legibility in Lebanon,” builds on more than five years of research on migration, forced displacement, refugee protection, gender, and sexuality in Lebanon.

At the heart of the project is an examination of queer Syrian refugees not simply as recipients of humanitarian assistance and protection, but as participants in human rights discourse.

“The project is ultimately asking us to rethink who we consider an expert on human rights,” Dr. Diab explained. “Refugees are very often interviewed, documented, assessed, and spoken about. But they are also constantly interpreting law, translating institutional expectations, advising one another and producing knowledge about systems that they often understand with extraordinary sophistication because their lives depend upon navigating them.”

Building on this approach, Dr. Diab is developing a theoretical framework she calls a “Queer Refugee Epistemic Political Economy.” The framework examines how refugee knowledge becomes necessary to protection systems while simultaneously being filtered, extracted, rewarded, or marginalized by those same systems.

Through the fellowship, Dr. Diab aims to create lasting connections between scholarship emerging from Lebanon and international conversations on human rights, migration, and protection.