Alexander Betts (political scientist)
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Alexander Milton Stedman Betts (born 17 January 1980) is the Leopold Muller Professor of Forced Migration and International Affairs.
In 2017, he co-authored Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System with Paul Collier, which was recognised by The Economist as one of the best books of 2017, and was final shortlisted for the Estoril Global Issues Distinguished Book Prize.
His ideas have had a notable impact on refugee policy. He is perhaps best known for his research reframing refugees as economic contributors.
Together with Paul Collier, he has argued for a new approach to refugee assistance based on development rather than just humanitarianism. They developed an idea to employ Syrian refugees in already existing Special Economic Zones in Jordan, first published in a piece in Foreign Affairs. The proposal adopted as a pilot project by Jordan, the UK, the EU, and the World Bank, which became known as known as the 'Jordan Compact’. The pilot was described by News Deeply as “one of the most important economic experiments in the world today”.
Since 2017, he has led the Refugee Economies Programme at the University of Oxford, which is funded by the IKEA Foundation, which supports the socio-economic inclusion of refugees through a longitudinal study following the economic lives of 15,000 refugees and host community members in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda.
