Robin Cohen (born 1944) is a sociologist working in the fields of international development and migration. He is Professor of Development Studies and Director of the International Migration Institute, University of Oxford.
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Robin Cohen was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and was involved in student protests against the apartheid regime. He left in 1964, returning to the country for three years in the post-Mandela period, when he served as Dean of Humanities at the University of Cape Town (2001-4). He has held appointments at the universities of Ibadan, Nigeria (1967-9), Birmingham, UK (1969–77), the West Indies (Professor of Sociology, 1977-9), Warwick, UK (Professor of Sociology, 1979–2006) and Oxford (2006-). The International Migration Institute at Oxford forms part of the visionary James Martin 21st Century School. Cohen has held other major research positions - for example as the Director of the Economic & Social Research Council's nationally-designated Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations (1984-9).
Robin Cohen's doctoral work was published as Labour and politics in Nigeria (1974) - a book marked, one reviewer said, by the 'fine-focused but wide-ranging eye of a most intelligent and genuinely radical scholar'.[1] There followed collaborative work on labour movements and labour history in other parts of Africa. However, his interest and expertise in labour developed into a wider project about the continuing significance of the movement of people across national boundaries and the problems to which this has given rise in very many parts of the world. Described as 'a formidable piece of comparative sociology and history',[2] The new Helots (1987) suggested that Marx had grossly underestimated the continuing salience of migrant labour, a feature that allowed capitalism to thrive and thereby evade the fundamental confrontation between worker and employer that Marx predicted.
Cohen made a number of other contributions to the field of migration studies by giving new understandings to key contested concepts such as diaspora and borders, citizens and denizens, and collective or national identity. In his Frontiers of identity, (1994) he argued that 'fuzzy' frontiers within the UK and between Britain, the Commonwealth, and the wider world create a particular ambiguous notion of 'Britishness'. Perhaps his most influential work, Global diasporas, (1997, with many subsequent editions and translations) continued his analysis of the relationship between identity and migration. The book was thought to display 'vast erudition',[3] but his lucid writing style has made his work accessible to scholars and students internationally. Through the use of typlogies, comparisons and suggestive lists of shared characteristics, Cohen was able to employ the ancient concept of diaspora to enrich the study of present-day transnational migrant flows.[4] Along with James Clifford, William Safran, and Khachig Tölölyan, Cohen can be rightly considered one of the founding figures of contemporary diaspora studies.
Theoretically grounded in the classics of both sociology and politics, Cohen has an intellectual engagement across academic disciplines. The same is true with regard to the division between developing and industralised societies: Cohen is comfortable with debates and issues in these worlds and sensibly refuses to further harden the boundaries between them. He has collaborated with scholars on all continents, and in addition to the major works listed below Cohen has edited or co-edited 20 volumes and published extensively in a range of academic and popular journals.
2006 Migration and its enemies: global capital, migrant labour and the nation state, Aldershot: Ashgate, p. 252
2000 Global sociology (with Paul Kennedy), Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: New York University Press, p. 408. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Reprinted 2001, 2002, 2004. Japanese translations 2003. Second expanded and revised edition March 2007. NYUP, September 2007.
1997 Global diasporas: an introduction, London: UCL Press & Seattle: University of Washington Press, pp 228. Reprinted 1999, 2000. Reprinted 2001, Palgrave. Japanese translation (Tokyo: Akahi Shoton, 2001) by Komai Hiroshi. Greek translation, with new preface, Athens, 2003, p. 374. Revised second edition, London & New York: Routledge, 2008.
1994 Frontiers of identity: the British and the others, London: Longman & New York: Addison Wesley, p. 248.
1991 Contested domains: debates in international labour studies, London: Zed Press, p. 188
1987 The new Helots: migrants in the international division of labour, Aldershot: Avebury/Gower Publishing Group, pp 290; paperback edition, Gower, 1988; Japanese translation, 1989; reprinted 1993, 2003.
1986 Endgame in South Africa: the changing ideology and social structure of South Africa, Paris: UNESCO Press & London: James Curry, pp 108; German edition under the title Endspiel Sudafrika: Iien Anatomie der Apartheid , Translated by Ulf Dammann, with a Foreword by Jean Ziegler, Berlin: Rotbach Verlag, 1987, p. 142; US edition, New York: Africa World Press, 1988.
1974 Labour and politics in Nigeria: 1945-71, London: Heinemann Education Books & New York: Holmes & Meier/Africana Publishing Corporation. New Heinemann edition, updated Introduction and bibliography under the title Labour and politics in Nigeria, 1982, p. 302.