What role for law in refugee studies? Towards a transdisciplinary agenda

Abstract Refugee law has historically formed an important part of refugee studies. Yet, in the past decades, the legal study of refugees has increasingly developed out of sync with refugee studies more generally. The purpose of this special issue is to help bridge the gap between refugee law and refugee studies and foster a broader transdisciplinary research agenda on law within refugee studies scholarship. The special issue serves two overarching purposes. The first is to exemplify and celebrate methodological heterodoxy in refugee law scholarship—deliberately foregrounding perspectives often marginalized within more mainstream legal scholarship. To this end, this issue presents a range of contributions that draw on methods and theories from different disciplines in the study of refugee law, including anthropology, history, psychology, political science, organization studies, and data science. Second, by anchoring this special issue in the Journal of Refugee Studies, we hope to convince the wider refugee studies community that empirical and interdisciplinary legal methods may provide new and important insights into some of the core debates on and long-standing challenges to refugee law.