Associate Professor Matthew Zagor has 20 years’ experience as a human rights and law reform advocate, practitioner and scholar. His research is characterised by its transdisciplinary approach and diversity, with recent publications covering the legal paradoxes of refugee resettlement, the comparative constitutional law and executive detention, refugee narrative identities and discourses of autonomy, the ‘humanity’ turn of international law, and perspectives of legality amongst Israeli soldiers.

Matthew’s most recent research considers how liberal notions of autonomy, authenticity and redemption inform legal and political constructions of the refugee, and the intersection between theological and legal - or anti-legal (antinomian) - thinking in the formulation of refugee resettlement policy. His current projects are more doctrinal, uncovering judicial legal theories underpinning approaches to executive detention of non-citizens, and the sui generis approach of Australian courts to the Refugee Convention.

Before joining academia, Matthew worked in community law, the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department, and the Migration / Refugee Review Tribunal, where he was a part-time Member. As the Director of Law Reform and Social Justice, he remains actively involved in law reform and public policy, making regular submissions to Parliamentary inquiries, commenting publicly on refugee policy, and sitting on the Advisory Committee of the ALRC’s Freedoms Inquiry.

Matthew is an Adjunct Fellow at the ANU Centre for European Studies, and a Senior Research Associate at the Refugee Law Initiative at the University of London's School of Advanced Legal Studies. He is a former Editor of both the Australian Yearbook of International Law and Federal Law Review, and has held Visiting Fellowships at the LSE Centre for Human Rights and Society, the University of Grenoble’s Centre for International Security and European Cooperation, Georgetown University Law School, and the University of London's School of Advanced Legal Studies.