Brad Blitz

Brad K. Blitz received his Ph.D. in International Development and Education from Stanford University where he received an Andrew W. Mellon award for European Studies. He is currently Professor of International Politics at Middlesex University London and Senior Fellow at the Global Migration Centre, Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies, Geneva. He was formerly Professor of Human and Political Geography and Director of Graduate Research Programmes at Kingston University London.

A former Jean Monnet Chair at Oxford Brookes University and Research Associate in the Department of International Development, University of Oxford, he is widely regarded as a leading expert on international and comparative politics, post conflict transition, statelessness, migration, development and human rights. He has acted as an advisor and consultant to UNDP, UNICEF, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the World Bank, OSCE, Council of Europe, DFID, as well as several NGOs. He has also advised national governments including and the Bosnian, Russian and Albanian governments and has appeared as an expert witness advising UK and Australian courts, on over 20 occasions.

In 2008 the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and former President of Ireland, Mary Robinson, and a panel of experts, selected his research as one of 12 projects which would guide and support the legacy of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Recent publications include Statelessness in the European Union: Displaced, Undocumented and Unwanted, Cambridge University Press, 2011; and Statelessness and Citizenship: A Comparative Study on the Benefits of Nationality, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011. In 2011, he completed a US State Department funded project 'Measuring the Costs of Statelessness', a livelihoods study of 980 stateless and formerly stateless households in Bangladesh, Kenya, Slovenia, and Sri Lanka which subsequently informed US humanitarian policy. He also contributed to UNDP's Asia-Pacific Human Development Report. On the basis of this work he was nominated for the European Latsis Prize in Demography. In November 2013, he completed a major cross-national study of the benefits of birth registration on development outcomes for Plan International. He is also the author of Migration and Freedom: Mobility, Citizenship, and Exclusion, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014.