Rate My Professor Phil Orchard

Phil Orchard is Professor of International Relations and Head of Discipline, Politics and International Studies, in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Wollongong. He earned a PhD in Political Science from the University of British Columbia. From 2009 to 2018, he was Lecturer in International Relations and Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Queensland. Orchard serves as Co-Director of the UOW Future of Rights Centre, leading the Conflict, Migration, and Human Rights cluster, and as Senior Research Fellow at the Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. His research examines international efforts to establish legal and institutional protections for refugees, internally displaced persons, and war-affected civilians, encompassing human rights, peace and conflict studies, international relations theory, human security, and global governance.

Orchard's major publications include the monograph A Right to Flee: Refugees, States, and the Construction of International Cooperation (Cambridge University Press, 2014), which won the 2016 International Studies Association Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies Section Distinguished Book Award; Protecting the Internally Displaced: Rhetoric and Reality (Routledge, 2018); and, as co-editor with Alexander Betts, Implementation and World Politics: How International Norms Change Practice (Oxford University Press, 2014). He recently co-edited Contesting the World: Norm Research in Theory and Practice with Antje Wiener (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and, with Charles Hunt, Constructing the Responsibility to Protect: Consolidation and Contestation (Routledge). Orchard has authored articles on topics including the refugee regime, forcible transfers in international criminal law, and norm contestation in forced migration. His scholarship has garnered over 1,300 citations on Google Scholar. He engages in public commentary on refugee rights, climate-induced displacement, and international accountability mechanisms, such as sanctions against state-led deportations.