Since 2014, Dr. Rajai Ray Jureidini has been a professor of migration ethics and human rights since for the MA in Applied Islamic Ethics (AIE) program at the College of Islamic Studies in Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Doha, Qatar. His human and labor rights-based research and activism centers on migrant labor exploitation, human trafficking, racism, debt bondage, corruption and slavery-like practices in the Middle East. Jureidini obtained his PhD from the Flinders University of South Australia in economic and industrial sociology, and taught Sociology in several universities in Australia. He then went on to spend 6 years at the American University of Beirut beginning in 1999 where he began researching and publishing on abuses of the human rights of migrant domestic workers in Lebanon. This was followed by 6 years at the American University in Cairo from 2005 where he became the director of the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies and conducted a number of research projects on migrant and refugee issues.
Between 2011 and 2014, he returned to Lebanon and worked at the Institute for Migration Studies at the Lebanese American University. In 2012, he served for one year as a consultant to the Migrant Worker Welfare Initiative at Qatar Foundation (QF), contributing to the QF Standards for Migrant Worker Welfare for contractors and sub-contractors and completing a report on labor recruitment into Qatar. He was one of the authors of the Qatar Foundation’s 2013 Mandatory Standards for Migrant Worker Welfare and the author of a 2014 report, Migrant Labour Recruitment to Qatar for the Qatar Foundation. In 2016, he authored the ILO White Paper, Ways Forward in Fair Recruitment of Low-skilled Migrant Workers in the Asia-Arab States Corridor.
Among many other publications such as on Wage Protection Systems in the GCC and the Transnational Culture of Corruption in Migrant Labour Recruitment, Dr. Jureidini edited a special issue of Sociology of Islam on “Immigration, Political Economy and Islam”. He recently published (with Said Hassan) an edited book entitled Migration and Islamic Ethics: Issues of Residence, Naturalization and Citizenship published by Brill. Jureidini is a consultant and advisor on refugee issues, labour recruitment, labour supply chain evaluations and migrant labour reform advocacy.
