Faculty Friday: Noora Lori

Professor Noora Lori is an Assistant Professor of International Relations in the Pardee School of Global Studies. She is also the Founding Director of the Pardee School Initiative on Forced Migration and Human Trafficking

Tell me a little bit about yourself.

NL: I was born and raised in Bahrain, and I did my Ph.D at Johns Hopkins University in Political Science. One of the reasons I chose that university was because I helped develop a comparative race and citizenship program that looked at racial politics in different parts of the world. For me, that was really wonderful, because I think that if you study immigration in the Middle East and all you’re thinking about is Middle East politics, it’s very easy to think [mass migration] is just particular to the Middle East. But when you’re trained in migration and you’re looking at North America, Western Europe, Korea, Japan, Brazil, Soviet Union, you’re realizing that, (a) migration is super global and old as life itself, and (b), people move all the time, so it’s so political/we only have crises when they’re man made. People think that when you get rid of barriers everyone will come – that’s not true. If there were more effective ways to process claims, then you wouldn’t necessarily see these man-made crises.

I’ve always been interested in studying migration; my dissertation was on immigrants in the United Arab Emirates, my book expands that to the Gulf, and I think that a lot of people look at citizenship boundaries from the perspective of a border of a state, whereas I’m really interested in how borders are erected domestically, and so I look at long term residents who are excluded. In the Gulf, everyone who is on a temporary worker program is excluded from permanent residency and citizenship, but that doesn’t mean that they’re actually temporary – they’re there for protracted periods and have to continually renew their visas.

Once you start broadening the frame outside the Middle East you realize this is a tactic that a lot of states use, that is, putting people on temporary visas instead of really incorporating them. For me, that’s a form of exclusion that occurs domestically and not necessarily just at the border.

What projects are you currently working on? Do you mind expanding on your most recent book?

I rewrote [my dissertation] several times, but the book is called Offshore Citizens: Permanent “Temporary” Status in the Gulf, and what I’m trying to do in that work is move us beyond the idea of citizen/non-citizen binary, which is the way our literature is structured (either citizen of alien). I want us to think that, in the same we we have territorial boundary zones, we also have demographic boundary zones. That includes a lot of people who are in limbo, who might be incorporated or might be deported, but they never really have security either way. I want to understand what is politically expedient about putting people in these limbo zones, and theoretically, that means I’m really interested in time. I’m interested in the way that migration and policing citizenship boundaries allows states to separate the unfolding of the clock, chronological time, from the way that time is counted under the mantle of the law. In the United States, we would say five years of residency before you can become a permanent resident, and then after more years you can become a citizen. But you have to be under the right visa status, so if you’re on Temporary Protected Status – which is a status that a lot of people who are fleeing a lot of humanitarian conflicts are under; we have people under TPS for 30 years – and none of that time counts. They can be deported. That’s the way exclusion works. It’s not discretionary power, it’s about suspending and delaying time. In democratic theory, time is so important to accruing membership rights because time is experienced the same way by everyone. But in the name of citizen enforcement and migrant enforcement, states miscount time. This can also work the other way – if you have a citizenship by investment scheme, those who are super rich don’t need to spend any time, they can receive citizenship immediately because they can pay for it. For me, the way we use time to police boundaries is fascinating. I think that there’s a long history of looking at citizenship as a liberal strategy of exclusion; the way colonial empires worked was to create racial and gender barriers to citizenship, and now in the 21st century we’ve replaced those cultural and gender barriers with temporal politics, because it seems so much more neutral. We count the time of legal status different.

You received a seed grant from the Initiative on Cities. What did you use the funding for, and what is the status of the project?

I used seed funding from the IOC to study refugee livelihoods, and specifically, the impact of authorizing work permits for Syrian refugees in Jordan. What we found was that, even though the government was really pushing this and allowing people to work, very few people were applying for these permits. which made me focus on what are the barriers when there are existing aid and resources, why aren’t people using it? This culminated with an experimental class I taught in spring of 2016, where I had a class of 25 women who I put in teams with Syrians and Jordanians in Jordan. Instead of a policy recommendation, I asked them what they would build to support refugees and local municipalities. The students divided into different sectors (i.e. education, legal aid, housing, healthcare, etc.), and what they found was that, across the board, you see a drop in access to aid from camp settings to urban settings. But this is puzzling because you have higher infrastructure for aid in urban settings, and it’s a huge problem because 90% of Syrian refugees are in urban settings not camps. What my students decided to design was a basic aid locator [in the form of a mobile application]. We have six sectors, and you can click on one of the sectors [within the application] and see all of the locations near you. At the end of the semester, the Initiative on Cities put us in touch with Microsoft, and Microsoft built the app for us pro-bono, and after that, I received a grant from the Harari Institute for Computing, and we created an OpenSource version of the app, and now we have a BU student that’s also working on the latest version. It’s been hard to continue the project because my full time job is as a professor, but what we would like to do, if we have enough student power behind it, is localize this app for anyone in the world. Any nonprofit that can use it for their clients can. We want to replace lists, which aren’t very intuitive. We just want to make this something that’s totally accessible to any nonprofit.

What do you think are the most common problems facing cities, or the most common issues facing resettled refugees or migrants in urban spaces?

As a political scientist, I’m trained to think on the nation-state level of analysis. But actually, there’s a huge variation at the local level. Some cities are very accepting of non-citizens, others are not. Often you see that at the national level you can have a lot more anti-immigrant rhetoric, but at the city level, the city officials are the ones on the ground and the ones who have to solve these problems. When you have large concentrations of refugees and migrants in communities, you can have tension with the host communities only if the host community perceives refugees as being more privileged than they are. In a place like Turkey or Jordan, the parts of the cities that have the most refugees are also the parts that are the most low income.

But some of the most inspiring examples have come from local municipalities that have been very smart as to how to use technology. In Istanbul, in a poor municipality with a poor Turkish community and a lot of Syrian refugees and other migrants, they realized if they created a handout of some sort, and the Turks saw Syrians lining up to get some benefit, that’s going to create a host antagonism. Instead, they interviewed every refugee, got a sense of what their work background was and what their skills were, and then they started matching people on a database of all the local jobs. There wasn’t really this public spectacle, but they were very effective at getting people jobs and off of aid. I think that was a really great example as to how you can use existing technology to address problems, and an important reminder that just because you have people of different cultures living together, doesn’t mean they’ll clash. They only clash when you have policies that antagonize them.

From a student’s perspective, what’s the best way for undergraduate students to engage with their city, or engage with issues that concern them on the international level?

They should come work with us!

What I’ve found was that if something works, it should work in multiple contexts. Yes, you need to know the local contexts, but there are ways of building modular tools that are scalable and should work in any context. I think that that’s a testament to this aid locator – it can work in Amman, it can work in Boston, we have colleagues at the [International Rescue Committee] in the Bay Area, we’ve been contacted by people in Libya – this works in any city because it’s a scalable idea. I think that students who want to get involved both locally and internationally should think about scalable, modular ideas. That the direction I think we need to take toward development – infrastructural development in cities. We can support NGO coordination. When you’re engaged here you can be engaged globally.

Boston is a global city. I think we need to harness that. If you look at the faculty in the Pardee School, we’re from all over the world and have research all over the world. This is such an exciting city for a nerd like me.

What’s your favorite thing about Boston?

If you’re any kind of scientist or scholar, Boston is this incredible brain concentration. We have one of the largest concentrations of higher education in the world. For me that’s just irreplaceable, and it would be very hard to convince me to move to a different city after I’ve been able to experience how stimulating this city is. You get excited to work.

What’s your favorite city?

I think my favorite city would be Istanbul; I think it’s a perfect mix of East and West. It has this beautiful history, and I love that it’s a Muslim city but I don’t think it imposes the religion on anyone. I love that it’s very open, so even on Ramadan, you see people sitting outside eating and drinking, it doesn’t offend anyone. It embraces everyone.