Dr Diego Garcia Rodriguez

Diego is a Future Leaders Research Fellow. He holds a PhD in Gender and Sexuality Studies (University College London), an MSc in Asian Studies (Lund University/National University of Singapore), and a BA in Journalism (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, University of Tampere and Korea University). Diego's Fellowship aims to transform how we understand and respond to LGBTIQ+ asylum globally through a decolonial, participatory research approach. Despite the rising number of displaced people (30.5 million by mid-2023), there remains little data or policy attention focused on the specific challenges faced by LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers. These include exposure to homophobia and transphobia, barriers to legal and social support, economic precarity and heightened vulnerability to violence. In the UK, for instance, government data collection captures only sexual orientation, excluding gender identity altogether. Globally, asylum research continues to neglect South-to-South movements and often lacks meaningful collaboration between activists and scholars in the Global North and South. Working with regional steering committees and an Alternative Ethics Board composed of LGBTIQ+ people seeking asylum and refugees, this cross-sectoral project will begin in the UK, using it as a core case study to identify systemic gaps in asylum policy and practice. It will then expand to a comparative analysis across the European Union, with a particular focus on Spain and France as two strategically important sites: both sit at the centre of contemporary migration routes and policy debates, and both offer distinct legal, institutional, and political contexts through which to examine protection, credibility and reception. This EU strand will be strengthened through a placement at the European Parliament, enabling the fellowship to translate findings into real-time policy conversations and to support practical knowledge exchange across member states and UK–EU partners in the post-Brexit landscape. The project’s comparative design is a deliberate methodology grounded in colonial and postcolonial entanglements that continue to shape asylum governance, legal infrastructures and migration routes. The fellowship therefore works through three “colonial pairings” to surface how historical power relations and contemporary policy regimes interact across regions: Mexico–Spain, UK–Kenya, and France–Lebanon. Mexico–Spain will enable an analysis of how Iberian colonial legacies, language and transnational ties shape migration governance across Latin America and its connections to Europe. UK–Kenya will be useful to explore how British colonial and Commonwealth-linked legal and administrative architectures echo into present-day asylum and refugee systems, while also centring Kenya’s position as a major refugee-hosting state and regional hub for mobility and protection. France–Lebanon will examine how Francophone institutional networks and the afterlives of the French Mandate intersect with displacement dynamics in the SWANA region, including the political economy of humanitarianism and the uneven distribution of responsibility for protection. The study will then extend to Mexico, Lebanon, and Kenya, which are three key sites in global asylum routes. Mexico will provide critical insights into LGBTIQ+ migration across Latin America, where asylum routes span both South-to-North and South-to-South directions. Lebanon will offer a lens into asylum dynamics within resource-constrained and politically complex settings in the SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) region. Kenya, as a major refugee-hosting nation in Africa, will shed light on South-to-South asylum experiences within the African continent. Across all sites, the fellowship will use participatory, art-based methods to generate rich, policy-relevant evidence grounded in lived experience.