E. Tendayi Achiume

E. Tendayi Achiume is a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law and currently holds a visiting professorship at Stanford Law School (2022–2024). She is also an Extraordinary Professor at the University of Pretoria’s Department of Jurisprudence, and a Research Associate at the African Centre for Migration and Society (Wits University) and Oxford’s Refugee Studies Center. She served as the UN Special Rapporteur on Racism (2017–2022), the first woman in the role since its establishment.

Her education includes a B.A. (2005) and J.D. (2008) from Yale University, along with a Graduate Certificate in International Development Studies. She clerked for South Africa’s Constitutional Court and worked with Lawyers for Human Rights on refugee rights. Her research focuses on decolonizing migration governance, racialized border policies, and reparations for colonial harms. She has been honored with the MacArthur Fellowship (2023) and UCLA’s top teaching awards.

Her UN reports addressed Nazism glorification, digital tech’s racial impacts, and climate migration’s racial justice dimensions. Her scholarship bridges colonial legacies with modern migration ethics, emphasizing reparative frameworks for formerly colonized populations.