Robin Cohen was born in South Africa in 1944, where he studied politics and history until the apartheid movement started gaining ground. He moved to Nigeria, where he completed his doctoral thesis on labor movements. He and his wife, Selina Molteno, who had studied the anti-apartheid movement, returned to a post-apartheid South Africa after 36 years in exile. Cohen served as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cape Town (2001–2003) and later worked as a professor at universities like Birmingham, Stanford, Berkeley, and many more. He also served as the director of the International Migration Institute at the University of Oxford, and directed the nationally designated UK Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations at Warwick (1985–1999).