Prof. (Dr.) Raffaela Puggioni has joined the School of International Affairs of O.P. Jindal Global University in January 2020 as Associate Professor. She is currently Associate Member at The Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement (University of Cambridge, UK), Global Studies Research Associate at the University of Sussex (UK), and Associate Fellow at the Higher Education Academy (UK).

Dr Puggioni has some thirteen-year teaching experience in International Studies/Political Science in both British and American systems of higher education, in countries as diverse as Italy, China, Azerbaijan and India. Her research expertise cuts across the field of International Relations Theory, Migration Studies, Citizenship Studies, Resistance and Border Studies. Although her research is globally-oriented, most of her research has focussed on the Italian/European migration framework, with special attention to everyday practices of resistance.

Her work has appeared in leading international journals such as the Journal of Refugee Studies, Political Studies, Citizenship Studies, and Third World Quarterly, and her monograph, Rethinking International Protection, has been published with Palgrave in 2016.

She is currently the Book Review Editor as well as a member of the Editorial Board for the International Journal of Migration and Border Studies.

Undocumented activism and political change. Speaking politics beyond equality and identity politics, submitted to Theory and Society.   

• Choosing to Be Political: Some Reflections on Youth Activism in the US, Citizenship Studies 22: 3 (2018), pp. 243-258.
• Border Politics, Right to Life and Acts of Dissensus: Voices from Lampedusa-Borderland, Third World Quarterly 36: 6 (2015), pp. 1145-1159. Special Issue, Louiza Odysseos and Anna Selmeczi (eds.) The Power of Human Rights/The Human Rights of Power.
• Speaking Through the Body: Detention and Bodily Resistance in Italy, Citizenship Studies 18: 5 (2014), pp. 562-577. Special Issue, Raia Prokhovnik (ed.), The Body as a Site for Politics: Citizenship and Practices of Contemporary Slavery.
• Against Camps’ Violence: Some Voices on Italian Holding Centres, Political Studies 62: 4 (2014), pp. 945-960.
• Refugees, Institutional Invisibility and Self-Help Strategies: Evaluating Kurdish Experience in Rome, Journal of Refugee Studies 18: 3 (2005), pp. 319-339.

Rethinking International Protection: The Sovereign, the State, the Refugee, in Migration, Minorities and Citizenship Series, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016.

• Border Politics, Right to Life and Acts of Dissensus: Voices from Lampedusa-Borderland, in Louiza Odysseos and Anna Selmeczi (eds.) The Power of Human Rights/The Human Rights of Power, Routledge, 2017.
• Italian Politics of Asylum: No Settlement, Reception Only, in Monica K. Zimmermann (ed.), Political Refugees: Social Conditions, Health and Psychological Characteristics, Nova Science Publishers, 2008, pp. 63-84
• Resisting Sovereign Power: Camps in-between Exception and Dissent, in Jef Huysmans, Andrew Dobson, and Raia Prokhovnik (eds.) The Politics of Protection. Sites of Insecurity and Political Agency, Routledge, 2006, pp. 68-83.
• Looking for Some Coherence: Migrants in-between Criminalisation and Protection, in Elspeth Guild and Paul Minderhoud (eds.), Immigration and Criminal Law in the European Union, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2006, pp. 169-200.

• Research grant, ADA University [2016].
• Research grant, University of Nottingham Ningbo, China [2015].
• Research grant, University of Nottingham Ningbo, China [2012].
• Small Seed Grant, University of Nottingham, for attending the workshop on ‘Complexities of Governance/Resistance’, University of Nottingham Malaysia [2012].
• Travel award, St. John’s University for attending the epsNet Annual Conference, University of Ljubljana [2007]
• Travel award, the European Community Studies Association, for attending the conference at the University of Madison, Wisconsin [2001].
• Full scholarship, Region of Sardinia, for the PhD programme at the University of Kent [1998-2002].
• Full scholarship, Region of Sardinia, for the MA programme at the University of Kent [1996-1997].

Prof. (Dr) Puggioni’s research has developed along the following three lines of enquiry: 1) in the area of international migration and refugee protection beyond traditional state-centric analysis, 2) in the area of everyday practices, by focussing on acts of resistance inside holding centres, camps and border-zones; and 3) in the area of political subjectivity, exploring in particular the ways by which ‘undocumented’ migrants resist dominant politics of (im)mobility.

In her book, Rethinking International Protection: The Sovereign, the State, the Refugee (2016), Dr Puggioni has highlighted the distinction between protection and assistance, and particularly, the difference between a politics of protection in which states are the sole guarantor for allocating and respecting rights and a politics of assistance in which charities and international agencies are tasked with the delivery of goods and the satisfaction of basic needs. She argued that there is a need to rethink the very concept of protection, and particularly to move away from the (dominant) concept of negative protection, which entails a protection from — persecution, violence and life-threatening events — and to embrace the concept of positive protection — a protection towards emancipation, safety and human rights — which requires the direct involvement of the liberal/constitutional state. Thus, if we were to rethink protection, more attention should be devoted to (the attribute of) the state: not the sovereign state but the constitutional state.

She is currently working on a new project that critically engages with current debate on ‘governing migration’. However, rather than investigating how mobility is controlled, disciplined and governed as great part of International Relations literature does, ‘she questions whether the ‘subject of mobility’ — and specifically the border-crosser — might be governed through dominant security dispositifs. Her reading of governmentality-cum-mobility suggests that there is a need to integrate ‘how questions’ with ‘who questions’. Not simply how to control, govern and manage border (people), but also who is the subject to be controlled, governed, and managed. Border-crossers, and their becoming mobile, do challenge the very concept of governmentality.