It’s our great pleasure today to introduce Dr. Lucy Hovil as an IntLawGrrls contributor. Lucy is the Senior Researcher for at the International Refugee Rights Initiative where, for the past six years, she has been carrying out a research and advocacy project to generate better understandings of the lived experience of unequal access to belonging and citizenship, and its relationship to displacement in Africa’s Great Lakes region. The focus of the work, which has included nine case studies across the region, has been on those aspects of policy over which there is greatest contestation: questions of multiple citizenships, local identities, border communities, and the impact of emerging regional forms of citizenship.

Lucy is also the Managing Editor for the International Journal of Transitional Justice. She was formerly the Senior Research and Advocacy Officer at the Refugee Law Project, Faculty of Law, Makerere University, Uganda, where she founded the organisation’s research department and oversaw their working paper series. She obtained her PhD (1999) from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in which she explored the relationship between violence and identity in South Africa during the period of conflict that preceded the country’s first inclusive election in 1994.

Lucy’s first post will discuss citizenship and refugee crises in Africa’s Great Lakes region. Heartfelt welcome!