Dr. Ashiagbor, Diamond

Dr. Diamond Ashiagbor is Professor of Law at Kent Law School, University of Kent and author of several books. Ashiagbor was Professor of Labour Law in the School of Law at SOAS, University of London. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Jurisprudence (Law) from the University of Oxford, and a PhD from the European University Institute, Florence. Her PhD thesis examined the European Union employment strategy, ‘new governance’, and the economics of labour market regulation.

Her previous positions include: Reader (Associate Professor) and Lecturer in Law at University College London (2004-2010); Research Fellow in the Institute of European and Comparative Law, University of Oxford and Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford (2002-4); Lecturer in Law in the University of Hull. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at Columbia Law School, New York (2000, 2007), and the recipient of a US-EU Fulbright Research Award and a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship, Department of Law, European University Institute (2011). She is the holder of a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (2013-2014).

Diamond’s main areas of research interest are labour/employment law, in particular in the context of regional integration; labour law, trade and development; economic sociology of law; the law and economics of labour market regulation; human rights, equality and multiculturalism. Her book The European Employment Strategy: Labour Market Regulation and New Governance (OUP, 2005) was winner of the 2006 Society of Legal Scholars / Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship.

At UNU-CRIS her research project relates to her Leverhulme Research project, on ‘Social rights and the market: Embedding trade liberalisation in regional labour law’, interrogating the social dimension of regional economic integration: how markets may be embedded within, constituted by, and ameliorated through the ‘social’, in particular by labour law and social policy. With a focus on integration within sub-Saharan Africa, the central thesis of this research is that regional integration with a social dimension has the potential to engender a more equitable pattern of trade liberalisation.

Dr. Diamond Ashiagbor worked at UNU-CRIS for a period of 2 months.