About
Dr Tesfalem studied Political Science (BA) at the University of Asmara, Eritrea and worked as a Graduate Assistant at the College of Arts and Social Sciences in Eritrea Institute of Technology (2006-2010). His role as a Graduate Assistant involved conducting tutorial classes, teaching the course 'Introduction to Political Science and International Relations' to first year students and taking part in exam coordination. After spending two years in Sudan as a refugee between 2010 to 2012, Tesfalem went to China and completed an MA in International Relations at Tsinghua University.
For his final dissertation, Tesfalem examined the evolution of the principle of non-interference (as it applies in Chinese Foreign Policy) in Sino-Sudan relations during the North-South Civil War and the Darfur Crisis. Tesfalem also holds a second MA in African Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Bradford. Taking Eritrea as an illustrative case study, his dissertation critically analysed the politics of EU's development aid to human rights violating states in the context of interlocking development aid and securitarian migration control.
After completing his studies at the University of Bradford, Tesfalem worked in the UK refugee and migrant sector, including with Refugee Education, Training and Advice Service (RETAS Leeds), The Salvation Army, Growing Points and Migration Yorkshire. In 2018, he joined the University of Leeds to pursue his doctoral studies.
For his PhD project, Tesfalem drew on decolonial and postcolonial scholarship and examined the case of Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers in the UK. Through the lens of postcolonial scholarship, he examined the technologies through which Eritrean forced migrants construct outside imaginaries of the UK, how they form their asylum destination preferences and their lived post-arrival experiences as they navigate the different immigration recognition regimes in the UK. Tesfalem argues that the factors that shape the destination preferences of asylum seekers cannot be decoupled from how Britain has deployed (and continues to do so) the same factors to expand/enroot its imperial/colonial project and how it retooled them, with the aim of sustaining British neo-imperial domination, in the supposedly postcolonial present. Building on the participants’ post-arrival experiences, he also critiques the idea that Britain represents as postcolonial space insofar as the lived experiences of racialised refugees and asylum seekers are concerned.
As a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the ESRC-funded Channel Crossings project (2023-2025), Tesfalem worked with a group of academic researchers at the Universities of Liverpool, Sheffield, Nottingham and York. The Channel Crossings project was collaborative research that examined the phenomenon of irregular crossings in the English Channel, particularly entailing four areas of work: political and policy responses relating to Channel crossings; understanding the space of contestation in the UK refugee and migrant sector; lived experience of people crossing the English Channel; and border security economy. In particular, Tesfalem led the project’s third package of work that aimed to examine and understand the lived experiences of people who have crossed into Britain through the Channel. Working with a group of refugee researchers, he led a successful fieldwork, where 39 people who crossed the Channel were interviewed.