Associate Professor
Laurea [B.Sc. and MA equiv.] (University of Sassari, Italy);
M.A. (University of Kent);
Ph.D. (University of Kent);
PGCHE (University of Nottingham)
Office Hours: Fall 2020 Semester
Monday & Wednesday: 18:15–19:15 hrs
Dr. Raffaela Puggioni joined the School of International Affairs of O.P. Jindal Global (Institution of Eminence Deemed To Be 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 fourteen-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, Third World Quarterly and Global Society, and her monograph, Rethinking International Protection, has been published with Palgrave in 2016.
She is currently a member of the Editorial Board for the International Journal of Migration and Border Studies.
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 a great part of International Relations literature does, ‘she questions whether the ‘subject of mobility’ — and specifically the border-crosser — might not be governable through current 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.
