Yiombi Thona

Professor Yiombi Thona Patrick is a political scientist, legal scholar, and internationally recognized voice on refugee rights, transnational politics, and African governance. He holds a PhD in Political Science, Master in NGO Studies, in Economic Sciences, human rights and is studying law in a North American country University (The location is muted for his security resean. His scholarship bridges comparative political science, international refugee law, migration, human rights, and the lived experience of forced displacement — an experience he knows not as an observer, but as a participant.

Born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Professor Thona served as an officer in the Agence Nationale de Renseignements (ANR), the national intelligence service of the DRC, and helped the South Korean national intelligence service, NIS for many years. His path took him from Kinshasa to Korea, where he arrived in 2002 and was subsequently recognized as a Convention refugee — making him one of the first Congolese nationals to receive refugee status in South Korea. He later worked in a factory, studied, taught, and ultimately earned advanced academic credentials in political science, NGO Studies, human rights.

That journey — from intelligence officer to factory worker to refugee to professor — is the intellectual and moral foundation of his work. It gives him a perspective that no amount of library research can replicate: the perspective of someone who has waited, uncertain, in corridors and offices, for a decision that will determine the direction of his life.

Professor Thona has taught political science, forced migration studies, human rights, race and gender, multiculturalism, immigration law, and risk management at Gwangju University and Chonnam National University in the Republic of Korea. He has participated in high-level international forums, including sessions of the UNHCR-NGO Consultations in Geneva (from 2010), where he worked as a UNHCR-NGO Consultant. In 2016, he was elected as a civil society delegate to meet G7 leaders in Kyoto — one of a small number of civil society representatives to participate in that forum. That same year, he was invited to address the United Nations General Assembly in New York, an invitation repeated in 2017. In 2017, he achieved a landmark: bringing the May 18th Memorial Foundation to speak at the United Nations about the Gwangju pro-democracy uprising and its lessons for human rights globally. He also led a delegation to Taiwan focused on refugee law and protection standards. The list is too long for Professor Yiombi: he was elected twice Chair of Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network, APRRN, once Deputy Chair, Once Chair of East Asia Working Group (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong). APRRN is the largest network for refugees after UNCR.

He is the founder of NZILAC (Nouvelle Zone pour la Libération Active du Congo), a Congolese political movement. He has declared his candidacy for the 2028 presidential election of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Refugee Transnationalism: Opportunity or Constraint in Korea, Japan, France, Belgium, Canada, Australia, and South Africa is one of his books. Drawing on seven years of comparative research across seven liberal democracies, it asks why refugees — people with the deepest personal stakes in political outcomes — so often appear politically silent. Its answer is structural: the legal precarity, resource poverty, and institutional constraints that shape refugee life in these countries systematically suppress political engagement, not because refugees have nothing to say, but because the cost of saying it is too high. The book is a contribution to comparative political science, international refugee law, and democratic theory — and a testimony to the voices that structural constraint has forced into silence.

Professor Thona writes and researches in English, French, and Korean and several Congolese languages.