KM Rakibul Islam is a highly accomplished interdisciplinary researcher, legal practitioner, and academic currently enrolled as a PhD candidate in the Sociology of State, Law, and Justice programme at the University of Coimbra, Portugal. His doctoral research investigates how legal frameworks, populist discourse, and governance practices intersect to shape the lived experiences of South Asian agricultural migrant workers in Portugal. With a unique combination of scholarly insight and practical legal advocacy, his work interrogates issues of legal exclusion, informal labor, and the dehumanization of vulnerable migrants. Islam’s academic training spans prestigious institutions across Europe and South Asia. He holds an M.A. in Sociology of Law from Lund University and an LL.M. in Constitutional Law and Human Rights from Umeå University, both in Sweden. He also earned dual law degrees (LL.B. and LL.M.) from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, where he received the Dean’s Award for his research monograph. His academic exposure also includes further legal studies at the University of London and training in International Environmental Law at Stockholm University. These global academic experiences provide him with a rich, decolonial, and comparative framework through which to study migration and justice. Professionally, he brings over a decade of experience as both an educator and a practicing lawyer. He has served as a Senior Lecturer of Law at Green University of Bangladesh and taught as a visiting faculty member at Manarat International University and the International Islamic University of Chittagong. His teaching focused on Public International Law, Human Rights, and Refugee and Migration Law. Concurrently, he has worked as an Advocate of the Supreme Court of Bangladesh since 2014, where he has represented marginalized clients in cases involving labor exploitation, constitutional rights, and trafficking. His parallel roles in legal practice and academia position him as a rare scholar-practitioner deeply embedded in both theory and practice. He has played lead and supporting roles in several funded research projects. As Principal Investigator for the 2025 BFSAI-funded initiative “Reintegrating Dignity,” he led qualitative research on the reintegration of Bangladeshi women returnee migrants from the UAE. He also contributed to “Beyond Borders Beneath Roofs,” a project supported by the South Asian Communities Forum in Portugal that explored racialized housing discrimination against South Asian migrants. His current doctoral research expands upon these themes, using ethnographic fieldwork, discourse analysis, and comparative legal inquiry to investigate systemic exclusion in the Portuguese migration regime. A seasoned academic communicator, Islam has delivered over a dozen presentations at conferences, universities, and legal forums in Bangladesh, Sweden, Portugal, and the UK. His talks have covered a wide range of topics, from gender-based legal discrimination and refugee policy to digital transformation in legal education. His editorial contributions include serving as Assistant Editor for the Green University Review of Social Sciences, and he currently peer reviews for international journals such as the Journal of International Migration and Integration. Fluent in seven languages—Bangla, English, Swedish, Hindi, Urdu, Nepali, and Assamese—he is adept at conducting multilingual, culturally sensitive fieldwork. His language skills, combined with his cross-cultural insight, make him uniquely equipped to access and engage with underrepresented migrant communities, particularly in rural Portugal. Overall, KM Rakibul Islam’s academic and professional trajectory exemplifies a rare synthesis of legal expertise, social theory, and field-based research. His work seeks not only to contribute to scholarly debates on migration and human rights but also to influence real-world policy aimed at protecting migrant communities.