Tesfalem Habte Yemane is part of Asylos’ Board of Trustees and works as a Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool. He earned his BA in Political Science from the University of Asmara, Eritrea, where he later worked as a Graduate Assistant (2006-2010) teaching Introduction to Political Science and International Relations. After spending two years as a refugee in Sudan (2010-2012), he completed an MA in International Relations at Tsinghua University in China, examining non-interference in Sino-Sudan relations, followed by a second MA in African Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Bradford, where he critically analysed EU development aid to human rights violating states through the case of Eritrea. He subsequently worked in the UK refugee and migrant sector with organisations including RETAS Leeds, The Salvation Army, and Migration Yorkshire before beginning his doctoral studies at the University of Leeds in 2018.
Tesfalem’s PhD research employed decolonial and postcolonial scholarship to examine Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers in the UK, arguing that destination preferences cannot be separated from colonial histories and ongoing neocolonial entanglements, while questioning whether Britain represents a postcolonial space for racialised refugees. As a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the ESRC-funded Channel Crossings project (2023-2025), he collaborated with researchers from the Universities of Liverpool, Sheffield, Nottingham, and York to study irregular crossings in the English Channel across four work areas: political and policy responses, contestation in the UK refugee sector, lived experiences of Channel crossers, and border security economy. Tesfalem led the project’s third work package, successfully conducting fieldwork with a team of refugee researchers to interview 39 people who crossed the Channel, examining their lived experiences.