Photo of Philip Orchard

Philip Orchard

Associate Professor, University of Wollongong

Degrees:Ph.D. (UBC)

Dr. Philip C. Orchard is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. Formerly an Associate Professor of International Relations and Peace Conflict Studies at the University of Queensland and the Assistant to the Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Internally Displaced Persons, Dr. Orchard also served as the Research Director of the Asia Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, where he remains a Senior Research Fellow. Dr. Orchard holds a PhD from the University of British Columbia and won a 2016 Australian Awards for University Teaching Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning as well as other teaching awards at the University and Faculty levels.

Dr. Orchard’s research interests focus primarily on international efforts to provide institutional and legal forms of protection to internally displaced persons, refugees, and war-affected civilians. His current research projects include:

  • An ARC Discovery funded project (2016-2020) titled “Improving the International Response to Regime-Induced Displacement,” which examines why governments increasingly use force to deliberately displace their own populations on a massive scale, which is termed regime-induced displacement.
  • An ARC Discovery funded project (2020-2024) titled “Creating Accountability: Improving Responses to Forced Displacement Crimes,” which will investigate how the United Nations and individual states can respond to forced displacement crimes at the individual and state levels through seven existing accountability mechanisms at the domestic, regional, and international levels.
  • Protecting the Internally Displaced: Rhetoric and Reality (Routledge, 2018) The book examines these issues as separate regimes, and uses theories of regime complexity to explore how the emergence of the internally displaced persons protection regime over the past twenty years has interacted, transformed, and undermined other existing regimes.

He is the author of Protecting the Internally Displaced: Rhetoric and Reality (Routledge, 2018) which examines how the emergence of IDP protection as an international issue in the past twenty years has challenged basic understandings around similar issues, including refugee protection, migration, humanitarianism, and international humanitarian and human rights law. and of A Right to Flee: Refugees, States, and the Construction of International Cooperation (Cambridge University Press, 2014) which examines the emergence and evolution of norms around refugee protection and which won the 2016 International Studies Association Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies Section Distinguished Book Award. He is also the co-editor, with Alexander Betts, of Implementation in World Politics: How Norms Change Practice (Oxford University Press, 2014), and the co-editor, with Charles Hunt, of the forthcoming book Constructing the Responsibility to Protect: Contestation and Consolidation (Routledge, 2020).