Dr Paolo Novak

Paolo is a Senior Lecturer in Development Studies who writes on the conceptual and contextual relationship between borders and migration, and how this relationship articulates with the development process.

After completing a degree in Business and International Banking, Paolo became an agent of the 1990s version of the “globalisation project”, working for brokerage firms and investment banks in the City of London. The turn of the millennium shifted his gaze away from global finance towards a strictly connected set of global processes -namely, those pertaining to migration and development. The study of borders is his central research concern since then, perhaps unsurprisingly considering their significance in and across these worldly processes and relationships. 

At its broadest, Paolo’s research seeks to understand how the global structures and intimate forces conjured up by borders, migration and development are fluidly and contingently reproduced and unsettled in place-specific settings, and the political implications of these ambiguous dynamics. He develops this research agenda along three axes. First, he draws from feminist and postcolonial understandings of place, space, territory, and scale to unveil the contested geographies engendered by the border/migration/development nexus. Second, he investigates the emergence and transformation of borders- and migration-related policies and practices, the forces that drive them, and the contestations, deflections, and refusals that they engender. Third, he strives to establish a conversation between what are often pitched as contrasting epistemological approaches to the study of borders and migration. His current research on humanitarian borders and asylum infrastructure seeks to directly articulate these different axes. Titled Buildings of Refuge, this research project aims at developing the concept of postcoloniality of asylum infrastructure to intervene in a series of debates associated with EU borders and the so-called European migration crisis.              

Paolo welcomes PhD application on any of these themes, particularly those that have a strong field research component, and/or that are informed by debates within and across the disciplines of geography, sociology, anthropology.

Over the years, Paolo has conducted field research in Peshawar (Pakistan), Macerata (Italy), Meghalaya (India), Cairo (Egypt), and has worked for various NGOs and the UNHCR. At SOAS, he convenes PG programmes and modules on migration, borders, and the refugee regime. He is currently the Co-Director of the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies.

• Border studies & border thinking
• Migration governance and migration “crisis”
• Refugee regime 
• Infrastructure
• Postcolonial and feminist geographies
• Time and temporalities