Professor Ruben Andersson

Professor of Social Anthropology

Oxford Department of International Development; Wolfson College

Ruben Andersson is an anthropologist working on migration, borders and security with a focus on the West African Sahel and southern Europe. His first book Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe (University of California Press 2014), an ethnographic account of European efforts to halt irregular migration, accompanies border agencies, aid organisations and migrants along the Spanish-African borders. The book shows how the 'fight against irregular migration' has fuelled distress and drama at the borders, which in turns has led to the expansion of a self-reinforcing industry of controls.

Ruben's second book is No Go World: How fear is redrawing our maps and infecting our politics (University of California Press 2019). This book, building on multi-sited research financed by the AXA Research Fund, looks comparatively at remote-controlled interventions and the selective withdrawal of international actors from global 'crisis zones'. Taking as its starting point the conflict in Mali in the West African Sahel, it explores how the mapping of danger, the perception of risk and the politics of fear have all contributed to framing and fuelling security, aid and border interventions in the Sahel as well as in other settings such as Somalia, Libya and Afghanistan.

Ruben's recent work has been concerned with security intervention on a global scale. Some of this research has been published in Wreckonomics: Why it's time to end the war on everything (Oxford University Press, 2023). Coauthored with Professor David Keen of LSE, the book examines why various wars and security interventions have proven so profitable despite their frequently disastrous failures. (See more details at OUP and Ruben's website.)

Ruben has recently been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for a project entitled 'Apocalypse soon: Security, subversion and the struggle for a human future'. The project will run over 2023-26 and will involve multi-sited research for a book on the expansion of global security agendas.

Further information at the ODID website.