Tauhid Bin Kashem, ’24 UC Irvine political science Ph.D., has received the Best Dissertation Award from the American Political Science Association Migration and Citizenship Section. The honor recognizes research completed for his graduate dissertation, “Protection and Violence at the Borders of the Refugee Regime: International Regime Complexity and Refugee Protection in South and Southeast Asia,” which sheds light on how countries like Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand—despite not signing the Refugee Convention—have come to host over a million Rohingya refugees fleeing ethnic cleansing in Myanmar. He finds that far from being disengaged, these states strategically work with a mix of international regimes—from labor migration to disaster relief—to shape how refugees are treated.

“This layered engagement helps explain why some countries offer protection while others pursue deterrence,” he says. “The research sheds light on puzzling phenomenon-- why states without a formal commitment to international refugee laws have sheltered the majority of the world's refugees over the last decade.”

Bin Kashem earned his at undergraduate degree at Amherst College and master’s at Johns Hopkins. As a doctoral student at UC Irvine, he pursued research supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholar Award, University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), UCI Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies (CGPACS) Fellowship, UCI Kugelman Citizen Peacebuilding Research Fellowship, UCI Assistant Dean's Fellowship, and UCI Center for Asian Studies Fellowship. His advisors included associate professors Kamal Sadiq and Samantha Vortherms, and (now) emeritus professor Cecelia Lynch.

Bin Kashem is currently a research scholar with the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative at the University of California, Berkeley. Read more about his work and time as an Anteater here.