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E. Tendayi Achiume
Scholar • Writer
Professor E. Tendayi Achiume is an international legal scholar whose work focuses on international human rights law, refugee law, and migration law. Her research examines the global governance of racism and xenophobia, as well as the legal and ethical implications of colonialism and empire for international migration. She also writes on migration, borders, and nation-state sovereignty. In recognition of her scholarship, she was awarded a 2023 MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as the “genius grant.”
In 2017, the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed Professor Achiume as the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, making her the first woman to hold the position since its creation in 1993. She has also served in leadership roles within the American Society of International Law and was appointed to the American Journal of International Law Board of Editors in 2021. In 2022, she was selected as a commissioner for the O’Neill-Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination and Global Health.
Before joining Stanford Law, Achiume was the inaugural Alicia Miñana Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, where she received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2020. She also served as a faculty director of the UCLA Law Promise Institute for Human Rights. Earlier in her career, she clerked for Justices Dikgang Moseneke and Yvonne Mokgoro on the Constitutional Court of South Africa and worked with Lawyers for Human Rights in Johannesburg.
Achiume has published widely in leading legal and academic journals, including the American Journal of International Law, European Journal of International Law, Lancet, Stanford Law Journal, UCLA Law Review, and Harvard Law Review. She holds a B.A. and J.D. from Yale University, as well as a Graduate Certificate in International Development Studies from Yale.
Events featuring
this guest
Friday Sept. 18 2026 • 2:00 PM | Institute of African Studies, Columbia University
The Stranger at Home: Afrophobia and the Limits of Black Solidarity
Sisonke Msimang · E. Tendayi Achiume · Sean Jacobs · Amaha Kassa · moderated by Abosede George
Across the twentieth century, Pan-Africanism imagined a commons linking Africa and its diasporas through shared histories of dispossession, resistance, and return. The present has strained that promise. With South Africa as a central point of departure, this conversation examines how African migrants are made into strangers within African and Black political life. Bringing together writers, scholars, and migrant-rights organizers, the session asks how citizenship, labor, class, borders, national injury, and state failure shape the limits of solidarity, and what solidarity requires if it must transcend slogans into law, shelter, public services, political voice, and everyday infrastructure.