Dr Zeynep Kilicoglu is a scholar of international migration, specialising in the racialised and gendered politics of asylum, humanitarianism and citizenship in the UK and France.

A decolonial feminist scholar, her work investigates how diverse non-state actors engage in forms of subversive humanitarianism, creating opportunities to support asylum-seeking and refugee women’s authorship, visibility and political agency.

Zeynep’s research has received prestigious and highly competitive funding from the British Academy, the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence and the London School of Economics and Political Science. Grounded in close collaboration with activist and grassroots networks, her epistemological approach draws on ethnographic methods to co-create academic knowledge in partnership with migrant communities.

Zeynep is the author of Deconstructing Refugee Women’s Empowerment: A Comparative Approach to British and French Aid Structures (Routledge, 2025). The book was shortlisted for the British International Studies Association’s L.H.M. Ling Outstanding First Book Prize in 2026.

As a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Zeynep has over ten years of teaching experience in international politics, critical security studies and human rights at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Her innovative, research-informed teaching has received multiple awards forteaching excellence, including the LSE Excellence in Education Award in 2025 and two LSE Class Teacher Awards for Inspirational Teaching.

Zeynep is also the founder of She Claims, an AI product designed to increase the legal literacy of asylum-seeking women in the UK and reduce their dependency on solicitors and humanitarians.

Before joining King’s College London, Zeynep was an LSE Fellow in Gender and International Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a Tutor in International Security Studies at Swansea University.

Research Interests

• Critical Security Studies
• Feminist IR Theory
• Migration and Forced Displacement
• Digital Border Governance and AI
• Participatory and Art-based Methodologies

Zeynep’s current British Academy-funded project explores how artistic expression can support refugee and asylum-seeking women’s activism in the UK. By positioning artworks as both expressions of political agency and legitimate forms of knowledge production, the project contributes to debates on epistemic justice and participatory methodologies in forced displacement research.

Publications

• Kilicoglu, Zeynep (2026). Coming Back to Life from 'Social Death': Creating and Regulating Space with/for Women Refugees. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 28(2), 339-361.
• Kilicoglu, Zeynep (2025). Deconstructing Refugee Women’s Empowerment: A Comparative Approach to British and French Aid Structures. New York: Routledge.
• Kilicoglu, Zeynep. (2021). Contextualising Feminist Global Justice Activism: A Case Study of the Gezi Park Protests. Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture and Politics, 5(1), 1-13.
• Kilicoglu, Zeynep. (2020). A Gendered Approach to the Syrian Refugee Crisis, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 22(3), 446-448.

Courses

• Critical Security Studies
• Global Politics
• Climate Change and International Relations