Research Team

University of Messina Unit

Eugenio Cusumano

Eugenio Cusumano is Professor of political science at the Department of Political and Legal Studies of the University of Messina, Italy. He was previously assistant professor of international relations at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, Marie Curie Fellow at Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, and Fulbright Scholar at the Korbel School of International Studies, Denver.
His research focuses on how international norms and institutions shape state and non-state actors’ involvement in crisis management, border enforcement, and migration governance in the wider Mediterranean region and worldwide. He has examined these and other issues in over thirty scientific articles on venues including the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, the Journal of Peace Research, and Security Dialogue, as well as three monographs and several edited volumes published by Oxford and Stanford University Press, Routledge, and Palgrave.
He is profile editor at Mediterranean Politics.

Contacts:
OrcID: 0000-0002-7349-6639
Twitter: @eugeniocusumano

Diego Caballero-Vélez

Diego Caballero Vélez currently holds the position of a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Messina, working within the PRIN project SHUT-MED: “Securitizing Human Transit across the Central Mediterranean migratory corridor: shifting mobility governance discourses and practices in Italy, Malta, Libya, and Niger”. He earned his PhD at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies and has undertaken visiting periods at prestigious institutions such as the Refugee Studies Centre (University of Oxford), Migration Policy Centre (European University Institute), and the SGH Warsaw School of Economics. Previously, he served as a Blue Book Trainee at the Research Executive Agency of the European Commission and he is also an affiliated researcher at the Centre of Migration Research at the University of Warsaw. His research primarily focuses on International migration governance, political economy, and EU foreign policy. He has recently published the monograph entitled "Contesting Migration Crises in Central Eastern Europe" with Palgrave Macmillan. The book discusses states' different approaches in providing refugee protection, with a specific analysis of Poland.

Contacts:
OrcID: 0000-0003-3646-9823
dcaballerovelez[at]unime.it
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Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies unit

Luca Raineri

Luca Raineri is Assistant Professor (RTD-B) in political science at the Institute of Law, Politics and Development (DIRPOLIS), Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy. His research draws on critical security and conflict studies and investigates in particular transnational phenomena of security relevance (trafficking, crime, terrorism) with reference to Africa, European borders, and EU external action in general. Since 2010, he has been engaged in several field research missions in Mali, Niger, Tunisia and Senegal. He is the author of several scientific publications in international academic journals, contributions in books and monographs, including La Crisi Libica e l’Ordine Internazionale (ed. Carocci, 2022).
He holds a degree in political theory from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris (2008), and was a Pensionnaire Étranger at the École Normale Supérieure (2009). He also holds a Master’s degree in Human Rights and Conflict Management (2011), and a PhD in Global Politics and Human Rights from the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa (2016). He was a member of the Research School on peace and conflict in Oslo (2014-2016) and a visiting researcher at the Autonomous University of Madrid (2017). Dr Raineri has also worked as a consultant for numerous research centres and international organisations – governmental and non-governmental – dealing with peacebuilding, security and development, with a particular focus on West Africa.

Contacts:
OrcID: 0000-0001-6107-0019
luca.raineri[at]santannapisa.it
Twitter: @Raineri_Lu

Chiara Loschi

Member of SHUT-MED from Jan to Sept 2024 as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Law, Politics and Development (DIRPOLIS), Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy. Since Oct 2024, she has been a tenure-track researcher in the Sociology of Cultural and Communicative Processes at the Department of Philosophy, University of Bologna. From 2020 to 2023 she worked as a research fellow on the ERC project “Processing Citizenship. Digital registration of migrants as co-production of citizens, territory and Europe,” led by Prof. Annalisa Pelizza, at the Department of Philosophy and Communication. Prior to that, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna from 2018 to 2020 and as a postdoctoral researcher for the Tunis-based Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique CNRS from May 2017 to September 2018.

Her research interests include focusing on the role of information infrastructures, their correlation with organizational dynamics with national and transnational organizations, and European policies on supranational integration focusing on security, migration flows, digital infrastructures, and the environment and energy. She has also analyzed regime change and authoritarian upgrading and reinforcing in North Africa before and after 2011, focusing on environment and solid waste management.