Prof. Robin Cohen is an internationally preeminent British Jewish sociologist and Emeritus Professor of Development Studies at the University of Oxford. He is the foundational architect and former Director of the International Migration Institute (IMI) at Oxford and served as the Director of Queen Elizabeth House (QEH). Globally recognized as one of the definitive pioneers of contemporary migration studies, globalization theory, and diaspora sociological frameworks, Cohen has spent his multi-decade career deconstructing transnational identities and human mobility.
Born in South Africa in 1944, Robin Cohen completed his undergraduate studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. He subsequently relocated to the United Kingdom, where he earned his master’s degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and his Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham.
Throughout his academic career, Cohen held teaching and research appointments at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, the University of the West Indies, and the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Within the United Kingdom, he served as Professor of Sociology at the University of Birmingham and Professor of Development Studies at the University of Warwick. He eventually joined the University of Oxford, where he served as the Director of Department of International Development at Queen Elizabeth House (QEH), a research fellow at Lincoln College, and the founding Director of the International Migration Institute (IMI).
His seminal volume Global Diasporas: An Introduction revolutionized the field of sociological anthropology. Cohen shifted the academic paradigm from viewing diasporas purely through the lens of victimhood and trauma to understanding them as resilient, creative, and transnational agents capable of fostering global cultural fusion and subverting rigid state frameworks.
As an eminent signatory of Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), Cohen deploys his definitive status in diaspora studies to counter Zionist institutional claims. He argues that political Zionism was merely one historically localized response among many competing answers to European antisemitism in the late 19th century. To forcefully collapse the vast, pluralistic ethical history of the global Jewish diaspora into unconditional alignment with a singular, militarized nation-state is, to Cohen, an ideological mutilation of Jewish history itself.
In the context of the Gaza conflict, Cohen gained significant public attention in 2024 for signing an open letter alongside other prominent Jewish faculty members. This joint mobilization fiercely defended the student Palestine solidarity encampments across university campuses and sharply criticized the institutional administrations’ punitive responses to the protests.