 Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, colleagues, it's a great honor and a pleasure to present to you Dr. Barbara Harrell-Bond. Barbara Harrell-Bond is a legal anthropologist, author, teacher, and staunch advocate for the rights of refugees around the world. She's a seminal figure in the interdisciplinary field of refugee studies. Trained as a legal anthropologist, Barbara Harrell-Bond studied at Oxford under the supervision of anthropologists Edward Ardner and John Beatty. Her engagement with African studies and refugees came later, but her commitment to social justice was clear in her 1967 dissertation, An Ethnography of a Housing Estate in Oxford's Blackbird Lease. She went on to conduct research in Sierra Leone on family law, administrative law, and dispute treatment in customary courts while employed by the University of Edinburgh and Leiden's Africa Studi Centrum. She extended her research in West Africa at the University of Warwick's Faculty of Law. While serving as the representative of the American International Field Staff in 1981, she was introduced to the plight of Sarawi refugees in Algeria. This dominated her interest in humanitarian and refugee issues. Back at Oxford, at the encouragement of Oxford University's Queen Elizabeth House, she established the Refugee Studies Program, now the Refugee Studies Center. Run by a small, dedicated team, this institution quickly became the focal point for academics, practitioners, and refugees themselves. Her research and teaching inspired generations of scholars, including several here at SOAS, and practitioners. She helped found the Journal of Refugee Studies and the Force Migration Review, which are respectively the world's leading academic and practitioner publications on refugees and displacement, and a book series on refugees with Bergheim books. She's also a founder and honorary lifetime member of the International Association for the Study of Force Migration, the leading scholarly association on force migration. Her pioneering work helped establish the study of refugees as an interdisciplinary academic field that aims to influence policy and brings a refugee-centered focus to debates about asylum policy, social integration, and refugee legal assistance. Barbara Harrell Bond is author of the seminal book Imposing Aid, Emergency Assistance to Refugees, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. Based on her research in the 1980s in South Sudan, she makes the simple argument, which she would be the first to agree should not have to be made, that refugees are not helpless victims, but always and everywhere have agency, resilience, and dignity. Showing how badly wrong international and government actors can go when they fail to keep this basic truth in mind, her book, as with all of her work, has served as a call to account for those acting to aid and to protect refugees. Her criticisms are sharp, direct, and meticulously substantiated with evidence. Barbara Harrell Bond has never been afraid to speak truth to power, taking on donor governments, U.N. agencies, particularly the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, large non-governmental organizations, and host governments. Indeed, her bold criticisms, backed by robust evidence, have inspired generations of scholars to hold to account officials charged with assisting refugees. Upon her retirement in 1996, Barbara Harrell Bond continued research in Kenya and Uganda on the extent to which refugees enjoyed their rights. The book that she wrote based on that work, Rights in Exile, Janus-Faced Humanitarianism, co-authored with Guglielmo Verderame, it underlines the importance of legal assistance for refugees. This research led her to establish the Refugee Law Project at the University of Macquarie, as faculty of law, and the Refugee Studies Program at Moir University in Kenya. In 2000, she was invited to establish a refugee studies center offering a graduate degree at the American University in Cairo. There, she started a legal aid NGO for refugees, known as Amera Egypt, which over her eight-year tenure trained some 300 young people to continue their careers in this field. She also helped to establish the African Center for Migration and Society at the University of Vitvaterstrand in South Africa. Many of the strongest and most interesting voices at these centers are academics who are themselves refugees. In 2010, she established and she continues to coordinate the Refugee Legal Aid Information Portal, drawing together essential information needed by lawyers representing asylum seekers, including a network of country of origin experts to provide the objective evidence required to demonstrate that claims are credible. Dr. Harold Bond was awarded the Frans Boaz Prize for exemplary service to anthropology by the American Anthropological Association and the Lucy Meir Medal for Applied Anthropology. She is an honorary fellow at Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford. She was awarded an OBE in 2004 for her service to refugee studies. Barbara Harold Bond is a strong supporter of SOAS's Center of Migration and Diaspora Studies and our two migration-related master's degrees. She regularly gives seminars to our students. Several have worked as interns for the Legal Aid Information Portal and she has helped to mentor SOAS staff as we have built up this important area of research and teaching. Madam President, it is now my privilege to present Dr. Barbara Harold Bond for the award of Doctor of Laws, honoris causa, and to invite her to address this assembly.