Fátima Fernández is a researcher and policy analyst specialising in the political economy of international relations. Her work focuses on how power relations between governments and societies draw the peripheries of the social contract and how community strategies can reverse them.

As a researcher, Fatima holds a PhD in Economic Integration and Regional Development from the University of Santiago de Compostela. Her research addresses mainly post-colonial centre-periphery relations in the Euro-Mediterranean area. As a practitioner, she has coordinated for five years the human mobility program of United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), the largest network of subnational governments in the world. In this period, she facilitated the advocacy of local governments in the implementation of the Global Compacts on Migration (GCM) and Global Compact for Refugees (GCR), as well as the elaboration of the Lampedusa Charter on Dignified Human Mobility and Territorial Solidarity, conveying the vision of more than 300 local governments and stakeholders from around the world on human mobility, human rights and the Right to the City. Prior to UCLG, Fatima worked at the European Institute of the Mediterranean and at the Institute for Economic Development of Galicia.