Research team
Principal Investigator
Dr Vicki Squire (Warwick) is Reader in International Security at the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick. She is author of The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum (2009), The Contested Politics of Mobility (2011), and Post/Humanitarian Border Politics Between Mexico and the US: People, Places, Things (2015). Dr Squire is currently Leverhulme Research Fellow on the project Human Dignity and Biophysical Violence: Migrant Deaths across the Mediterranean Sea, as well as PI on Crossing the Mediterranean Sea by Boat.
Co-Investigators
Dr Dallal Stevens (Warwick) is Associate Professor of Law (Reader) at the University of Warwick. Her expertise is in the fields of refugee and asylum law, on which she has researched and taught for many years. Dallal has written widely on asylum law and policy in the UK, EU and Middle East. Much of her work has revolved around the construction of the asylum seeker within a contemporary perspective, although she has also examined the plight of the refugee in a historical context. Dallal is regularly asked to undertake media and other public engagements on refugee and asylum issues.
Professor Nick Vaughan-Williams (Warwick) is Professor of International Security and Head of the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. In 2015 he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize for outstanding research in Politics and International Relations. His research, supported with grants from the British Academy, ESRC, and Leverhulme Trust, focuses on the relationship between sovereignty, subjectivity, and the spatial dimensions of security. He has published nine books as either author, co-author, or co-editor in the field of International Security and Border Studies. His latest single-authored monograph is Europe's Border Crisis: Biopolitical Security and Beyond (2015). His earlier book, Border Politics: The Limits of Sovereign Power (2009, 2012) was Gold Winner of the Association for Borderlands Studies Book Award.
Dr Angeliki Dimitriadi (Athens) is Research Fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European & Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) and currently a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. Her research focuses on irregular and transit migration, securitisation of migration and EU policies on migration and asylum. She was awarded with distinction her Ph.D. in Social Administration from Democritus University of Thrace (2009-2012), focusing on irregular transit migration to Greece. She has published in academic journals, participated in numerous research projects on migration and asylum and authored a monograph titled "Transit migration to Greece: the case of Afghans, Bangladeshi and Pakistan migrants". She is currently working on a book examining the governance of irregular migration at the external borders of the Union.
Dr Maria Pisani (Malta) is a Maltese academic, practitioner and activist. She is the co-founder and director of Integra Foundation, Malta. Maria is a lecturer with the Department of Youth and Community Studies, University of Malta. She also coordinates the Centre for Critical Migration Studies with The Critical Institute. Maria has published extensively in international journals and contributed to edited texts. She is an Editorial Board Member on the International Journal Disability and the Global South and the Journal of International Humanitarian Action. Maria combines this work with her interest in critical pedagogy and engaging praxis as a project of social transformation towards social justice.
Researcher
Dr Nina Perkowski (Warwick) is a Research Fellow at the Department of Politics and International Studies, working on the Crossing the Mediterranean by Boat project. She is also the Research Coordinator of the ESRC's Mediterranean Migration Research Programme. Nina's research interests revolve around analyses of and reflections on migration governance and the effects of border policies and practices. She obtained her PhD in Politics at the University of Edinburgh in 2016. Within her doctoral work, she explored the relationships between humanitarianism, human rights, and security in contemporary European border governance, with a focus on Frontex. She tweets @ninaperkowski.
Advisory Board
Anne Bathily is senior policy officer at The European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE). She leads and develops ECRE’s work and policy on integration, with aspects such as family reunification, access to the labour market, education, and social inclusion. She developed a pan-European informal network of refugee communities in order to actively involve them in ECRE and in EU political debates. She co-produced the first ECRE documentary How Much Further, and co-founded a Belgian national platform of migrant-led organisations (Share). Aside from her ECRE work, she studied the long-term impact of immigration detention, and together with Dawit Friew (Ethiopian refugee) she is a guest lecturer at Kent University on international protection.
Veronika Bilger is a senior research and Programme Manager of ICMPD’s Research Unit. She has coordinated and worked in numerous comparative projects in the area of migration and migration policy. She has authored/co-authored various publications among others on irregular migration, migrant smuggling, human trafficking, and methodological and ethical aspects of research involving vulnerable migrants. She has lectured at the University of Vienna for many years and has also provided trainings to civil servants, law enforcement and other professional groups. She is a Member of the European IMISCOE Network and Editorial Board Member of the Vienna Journal of African Studies.
Dr Paolo Cuttitta is a post-doc researcher at VU University Amsterdam, Faculty of Law. He has published extensively on migration management and borders (with a particular focus on the Italian-North African border), and, more specifically, on the following issues: transformations of territorial and non-territorial borders, Euro-African relations, humanitarianism, integration, racism. His book publications include Segnali di confine. Il controllo dell’immigrazione nel mondo-frontiera (2007) and Lo spettacolo del confine. Lampedusa tra produzione e messa in scena della frontiera (2012). He is a member of Escapes. Laboratorio di studi critici sulle migrazioni forzate and of Kritnet. Netzwerk für kritische Migrations- und Grenzregimeforschung.
Dr Edward Albert Hall has worked for the Greek Asylum Service since October 2012. He heads the Department of Training, Quality Assurance and Documentation. Previously, he was for three years (2006-9) a Seconded National Expert with the Fundamental Rights Agency of the European Union (FRA). He is an historian by academic training.
Dr Suzan Ilcan is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Legal Studies at the University of Waterloo and the Balsillie School of International Affairs. Her research focuses on refugee management, humanitarian aid, citizenship rights and social justice, and the politics of poverty and development. She is the author of Longing in Belonging: The Cultural Politics of Settlement, and co-author of Governing the Poor: Exercises of Poverty Reduction, Practices of Global Aid, and Issues in Social Justice: Citizenship and Transnational Struggles. She is editor of Mobilities, Knowledge, and Social Justice. Professor Ilcan's most recent SSHRC-funded project (2015-2019) (with Feyzi Baban and Kim Rygiel) examines humanitarian aid responses to emergencies, and citizenship policies and practices, involving Syrian refugees in Turkey.
Dr Pia Oberoi is the Advisor on Migration and Human Rights at the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. Prior to this, she led the work of Amnesty International's International Secretariat on the human rights of migrants, and has advised NGOs and policy institutes on migrant and refugee rights. She has published widely on these issues, and holds a DPhil in International Relations from St Antony's College, Oxford.
Federico Soda is the Director of the IOM Coordination Office for the Mediterranean in Rome, where he is responsible for IOM activities in Italy, Malta and the Representative to the Holy Sea. Before assuming this position in October 2014, he was the Head of the Labour Migration and Human Development Division at IOM headquarters from June 2010 to September 2014. In that capacity he oversaw IOM’s activities in the areas of labour migration, integration and migration and development. From 2005 to June 2010, Federico worked on labour migration, migration and development, and policy at IOM’s Regional Office for Southeast Asia in Bangkok, Thailand. Federico worked with IOM in Bosnia and Herzegovina (2001-2005) and Myanmar (2008). Before joining IOM, he practiced labour and employment law with McCarthy Tétrault in Toronto, Canada.
