Dr Ainoa Cabada is a Galician-born Australian researcher who has a particular interest in the role that sovereignty plays in human rights as a result of state dominance. Her academic background is in philosophy and international law and has undertaken her PhD from the areas of politics and international relations.
 
Her book entitled "The UN Charter, the Refugee Convention and the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine: Towards a Preventative Protection Regime" provides an argument for the establishment of a preventative protection regime grounded in the normative principles of these three frameworks. Dr Cabada argues that the current international refugee protection regime articulates a narrow and reactive approach to protection and suggests that protection ought to be also preventative.
 
Additionally, Ainoa undertakes research on the blacklisting of political dissidents and explores how the international community can address the exploitation of such practices by authoritarian states. Dr Cabada assesses how blacklisting practices undermine human rights, threaten democratic progress and contribute to increasing refugee outflows. This research seeks to propose strategies for the international community to counteract the misuse of blacklisting by authoritarian regimes.
 
Alongside her own research, Ainoa has contributed to research related to: refugee narratives, academic advocacy, security, externalisation and EU policy, the impacts of COVID-19 to the refugee protection regime, the use of medical knowledge to inform refugee migration policy outcomes, and youth justice and justice reinvestment.
 
Ainoa has taught several university courses including International Security, Terrorism and Global Politics, Introduction to Global Politics, Fundamentals of Public Policy and Security, Justice and Rights. Alongside her teaching roles, Dr Cabada worked with the Comparative Network on Refugee Externalisation Policies (CONREP) at The University of Melbourne and other universities and research centres across Australia including the University of New South Wales - Canberra and RMIT University.
 
Throughout her career, Ainoa has demonstrated effective leadership in the management of projects but also in their design. Ainoa coordinated several projects in a wide range of topics including anti-racism, human rights, Indigenous rights, criminal justice and justice reinvestment, democracy and education. While working at Reconciliation South Australia, the Generation of Change program that she coordinated was nominated as a finalist for the 'Racism. It Stops With Me' Award by the Australian Human Rights Commission in 2017 and 2018.
 
Dr Cabada is a member of the Editorial Team of Border Criminologies and has been a peer reviewer for leading and prestigious publishers including Oxford University Press, Bristol University Press, and Taylor and Francis.
 
Ainoa has presented her research at national and international conferences and published in world-leading journals including Policy Studies and Global Responsibility to Protect.