Arapiles, Sara

Sara Arapiles is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Law of Lund University. She conducts her research within the interdisciplinary project ‘Refugee Finance: Histories, Frameworks and Practices (REF-FIN)’ where she studies innovative financial instruments aimed at refugees and migrants, particularly refugee impact bonds, outcome- and performance-based contracts and concessional loans, with a focus on the institutions, processes and actors involved. At Lund, Sara teaches and supervises LLM students in human rights law and refugee law and coordinates courses on research methods in law and socio-legal research on the master and PhD programmes. During her postdoctoral research, Sara held visiting research fellowships at the Refugee Studies Centre of the University of Oxford and at Los Andes University in Bogotá.

Sara is a Research Affiliate of the Refugee Law Initiative of the University of London and a member of its Working Group on Courts and Refugee Protection. She also serves on the Coordinating Committee of the Interest Group on Migration and Refugee Law of the European Society of International Law (ESIL), and on the Board of the Think Tank Europe External Programme with Africa.

Sara holds a PhD in Socio-Legal Studies from the University of Nottingham, which was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and titled ‘Slavery in Refugee Status Determination Procedures in Europe: A Comparative Socio-Legal Study of Approaches to Eritrean Protection Claims’. Her thesis won the DJ Harris Prize for the Best PhD Thesis 2023 at the School of Law. Sara also holds a MA in Socio-Legal Studies from the University of Nottingham, a LLM in International and European Law from the Institute for European Studies (IES) of the Free University of Brussels, and a Law Degree from the University of Salamanca.