Olga Demetriou

Olga Demetriou is Professor in Political Anthropology at Durham University’s School of Government and International Affairs, and Director of the Durham Global Security Institute. Before joining the School and DGSi in 2018, she was affiliated with PRIO, the University of Cyprus, and Amnesty International, where she was the organisation's researcher on Greece and Cyprus. 

Her interests straddle anthropology and politics/IR. Previous work on citizenship, minorities, gender, and displacement in border locations in Greece and Cyprus has been published in two monographs, Capricious Borders (Berghahn, 2013) and Refugeehood and the Postconflict Subject (SUNY, 2018) as well as various journals across the two disciplines. She supervises doctoral projects across these domains with cross-disciplinary foci. 

Her current work focuses on activism in refugee reception sites in Spain, Italy, Greece, and Cyprus. The project "Contesting Migration", which she leads, explores the point of view of activists at key reception sites in these countries, employing political ethnography to study comparatively pro- and anti-migrant contestations over migration and refugee reception.