Lori Presents at Jordan Conference

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Noora Lori, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, presented a paper at a major academic conference in Jordan.

Lori attended the Middle East Legal Series Seminar, an annual seminar organized by the Yale Law School that brings together academics, lawyers, judges, and officials from the U. S. and the Middle East. This year’s meeting was held in Amman, Jordan Jan. 7-10, 2016.

This year’s conference theme was “The New Cartography: One Hundred Years After the Sykes-Picot Agreement.” Lori presented a paper entitled “Precarious Membership and the Proliferation of ‘In-Between’ Statuses.”

“In this paper I reflect on Sykes-Picot and state formation in the early twentieth century as a prism for understanding how the meaning of national citizenship has changed with the advent of new technologies for identity management,” Lori said. “The work related less to the geographic area of the Sykes-Picot agreement as much as it addressed the implications of the system that Sykes-Picot and other national formation projects ushered in.

“I argue that there is a time lag between the design of the nation-state system and the application of national citizenship; as the structure of citizenship is actually implemented over time, the margin of the system is growing. This margin refers to people whose citizenship status is precarious; they are caught “in-between” the official (juridical) population categories of the states in which they reside.”

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. She is the Director of the Pardee School Initiative on Forced Migration and Human Trafficking. Learn more about her here.