Clara Peter

Clara is a humanitarian researcher specialising in urban displacement, housing, and protection, with a strong interdisciplinary background bridging humanitarian practice, migration research, and urban studies. 

She is currently a doctoral researcher and applied policy specialist whose work examines how protection for forced migrants is shaped, negotiated, and operationalised in urban contexts. Her research focuses on urban protection, migration governance, multi-level governance, combining qualitative and quantitative approaches with spatial analysis to understand how legal norms, policies, and everyday practices intersect in displacement-affected cities.

Her doctoral research advances emerging debates in legal geography, political geography, and socio-legal studies by examining the localisation of international human rights law and the spatial dimensions of protection beyond the state. Challenging state-centric approaches to migration governance, her work explores how sub-national actors - particularly cities - contribute to shaping protection outcomes through policy innovation, participatory governance, and bottom-up lawmaking. Methodologically, she employs mixed methods that integrate qualitative fieldwork, policy analysis, and interviews with geospatial tools such as GIS, satellite imagery, and participatory mapping, enabling a multi-scalar analysis of protection that captures both institutional frameworks and lived experiences.

She brings several years of humanitarian field and technical experience to her academic research, having worked across urban displacement, shelter and settlements, housing policy, and migration governance. Her professional background includes roles with international organisations such as UN-Habitat, the German Red Cross, and the Palestine Red Crescent Society, where she supported the design, implementation, and evaluation of urban humanitarian and migration programmes. Across these roles, she has extensive experience translating operational evidence into policy-relevant research and guidance for UN agencies, the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, and government partners.

She is trained as an architect with a specialisation in urban development, studying degrees at TU Berlin and ETH Zürich, and she also holds an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from the University of Oxford. This combined training in architecture, urbanism, and forced migration informs her research approach, allowing her to critically engage with questions of space, governance, and justice in contexts of displacement. Her work is motivated by a commitment to producing research that is both theoretically rigorous and directly relevant to policy and practice.

• Local-global dynamics
• Policy competency beyond the nation-state
• Legal Pluralism
• Migration Policy
• Spatial justice
• Forced migration
• IDPs and Urban Refugees
• Alternatives to Refugee Camps