Lori Interviewed on Migration Crisis Facing Arab World
Noora Lori, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was recently interviewed on the migration crisis facing the Arab world as well as the surge in the research and public interest in forced migration.
Lori was interviewed for a July 15, 2016 article in the Journal of Middle Eastern Politics and Policy, a Harvard Kennedy School of Government publication.
From the text of the interview:
JMEPP: Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?
Lori: Recently there has been a huge surge in the research and public interest in forced migration. What I notice—in paper after paper, lecture after lecture, workshop after workshop—is that many of us have developed a consensus about theproblems associated with forced migration and displacement. We know, for example, that states and international organizations officially treat refugee flows as ‘temporary’ crises but human displacement is not only spreading (60 million as of last year), it is also becoming more permanent and protracted. In my opinion, the more interesting debates—from both a research and advocacy standpoint—are about how new technologies can be harnessed by civil society actors, the private sector, and even our own students to help develop and test new solutions or (at least concrete management strategies) to address the ever-growing challenges of human displacement.
JMEPP: What makes this a crisis? Some claim that, historically, migration is as old as humanity itself.
Lori: Exactly! There is nothing new about migration. While the speed and reach of human mobility have certainly increased over the past two centuries, it would be inaccurate to characterize this mobility as ‘new’; what is relatively new is the criminalization of movement. Scholars like James Scott, Charles Tilly, and John Torpey have shown that by the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, modern states monopolized the authority over legitimate movement into and out of their territories, aiming to (among other goals) settle mobile populations.The current unprecedented level of human displacement can only be understood as an outcome of the coordinated international response to systematically criminalize ‘unauthorized’ movement. National governments are hardening borders just as the larger structural forces of migration (like urbanization and climate change) are becoming more and more acute.
You can read the entire interview here.
Noora Lori’s research broadly focuses on the political economy of migration, the development of security institutions and international migration control, and the establishment and growth of national identity systems. She is particularly interested in the study of temporary worker programs and racial hierarchies in comparative perspective. Regionally, her work examines the shifting population movements accompanying state formation in the Persian Gulf, expanding the study of Middle East politics to include historic and new connections with East Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Lori is the Founding Director of the Pardee School Initiative on Forced Migration and Human Trafficking. You can read more about her here.