Alexander Betts (political scientist)

Betts completed his undergraduate degree at Durham University.[4] He then completed a MSc at Bristol University, followed by an MPhil and DPhil from the University of Oxford.[4]

He is a British academic, whose research focuses mainly on the politics and economics of refugee assistance.[5] He has also written on migration and humanitarianism.

His books include Protection by Persuasion: International Cooperation in the Refugee Regime (Cornell University Press, 2009),[6] Refugees in International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2010),[7] Global Migration Governance (Oxford University Press, 2011),[8] Survival Migration: Failed Governance and the Crisis of Displacement (Cornell University Press, 2013),[9] Mobilising the Diaspora: How Refugees Challenge Authoritarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2016),[10] Refugee Economies: Forced Displacement and Development (Oxford University Press, 2016),[11] and The Global Governed? Refugees as Providers of Protection and Assistance (Cambridge University Press, 2020).[12]

In 2017, he co-authored Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System[13] with Paul Collier, which was recognised by The Economist as one of the best books of 2017,[14] and was final shortlisted for the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize.[15]

His ideas have had a notable impact on refugee policy. He is perhaps best known for his research reframing refugees as economic contributors.[16][17] Together with Paul Collier, he has argued for a new approach to refugee assistance based on development rather than just humanitarianism. They developed an idea to employ Syrian refugees in already existing Special Economic Zones in Jordan, first published in a piece in Foreign Affairs.[18][19] The proposal adopted as a pilot project by Jordan, the UK, the EU, and the World Bank, which became known as the 'Jordan Compact’.[20] The pilot was described by News Deeply as “one of the most important economic experiments in the world today”.[18]

Since 2017, he has led the Refugee Economies Programme at the University of Oxford, which is funded by the IKEA Foundation, which supports the socio-economic inclusion of refugees through a longitudinal study following the economic lives of 15,000 refugees and host community members in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda.[21]

He was named in Foreign Policy magazine's top 100 global thinkers in 2016,[22] as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2016,[23] in Thinkers 50's radar list of emerging business influencers in 2017,[24] as a Bloomberg Businessweek 'gamechanger' in 2017,[25] and as a European Young Leader by Friends of Europe in 2020.[26]

He has received fellowships and grants from the British Academy, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), among others. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA) and of the Academy of Social Sciences (FAcSS).

• Protection by Persuasion: International Cooperation in the Refugee Regime, Cornell University Press, 2009
• Forced Migration and Global Politics, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009
• Refugees in International Relations, co-edited with Gil Loescher, Oxford University Press 2010,
• Global Migration Governance, Oxford University Press, 2011
• UNHCR: The Politics and Practice of Refugee Protection, with Gil Loescher and James Milner Routledge, 2012
• Survival Migration: Failed Governance and the Crisis of Displacement Cornell University Press, 2013
• Implementation in World Politics: How Norms Change Practice, co-edited with Phil Orchard Oxford University Press, 2014
• Mobilising the Diaspora: How Refugees Challenge Authoritarianism, with Will Jones, Cambridge University Press, 2016
• Refugee Economies: Forced Displacement and Development, with Louise Bloom, Josiah Kaplan, Naohiko Omata, Oxford University Press 2016
• Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System with Paul Collier, Penguin Allen Lane, 2017
• The Global Governed? Refugees as Providers of Protection and Assistance, with Kate Pincock and Evan Easton-Calabria Cambridge University Press, 2020

• 'Refugees as a Resource' at Skoll World Forum, October 2016
• 'Our Refugee System is Failing. Here's How We Can Fix It.' at TED Conference, March 2016
• 'It's Not About Migration, It's About Economic Transformation', TEDx Oxford, April 2019
• 'Why Brexit Happened and What to Do Next?' at TED Conference, July 2016
• 'What If We Helped Refugees to Help Themselves', TEDx Vienna, November 2015
• 'Making Sense of Brexit' at Business of Fashion, December 2016

He is former European debating champion.[27] He has run the London Marathon in 2:38.24 and has a personal best half marathon time of 1:11.51[28]