SECUREU Visiting Fellowships

Meet the SECUREU fellows who will be undertaking the research visits to one of the consortium member institutions between September and December 2023. 

Adrià Rivera Escartin (IBEI)

Host Institution: Koç University

Research project: The Impact of Migration Management Externalization on Political Debates in Transit Countries: Between Illiberal Normative Diffusion and Domestic Politicization

Adrià Rivera Escartin is a postdoctoral researcher at IBEI in the framework of project OILDOWN. He has a PhD in Political Science, Public Policy and International Relations by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His fields of interest are European external action, human rights and (de-)democratisation. He holds a Bachelor in Political Science from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and a MA in Human Rights and Humanitarian Action from Sciences Po Paris. He was as a predoctoral fellow at IBEI under a contract from the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (FPU). He has published on topics ranging from the EU’s Neighbourhood Policy, the political transition in Tunisia and Tunisian cinema in the journals Political Geography, Third World Quarterly, the Journal of European Public Policy and Democratization.

The proposal for the SECUREU fellowship revolves around migration management externalisation and its impact on political debates in Southern Mediterranean transit countries. The policy paper will look at this important question through the lenses of EU’s illiberal normative diffusion and of domestic politicisation. The analysis will focus on two case studies: Tunisia and Turkey.

Aurora Ganz (IBEI)

Host Institution: Eurac Research

Research project: Subaltern Workers’ Protests and Forms of Resistance in Italy since 2018

Aurora Ganz is a Maria Zambrano postdoctoral research fellow at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and an affiliated researcher at IBEI. Previously, she lectured in critical security studies at the University of St Andrews and Sciences Po Paris. She holds a PhD from King’s College London Department of War Studies. Her research is situated in critical social and political theory, and pays special attention to the politics of security practices. Her proposed topic explores subaltern workers’ protests and forms of resistance that have emerged and developed in Italy since 2018. This is part of a volume on Migrants’ Resistance (Migrant Resistances Beyond Citizenship & Mobility Claiming Power/Reshaping Politics), that she is co-authoring and will be published next year by Bristol University Press.

Marzia Bona (Eurac Research)

Host institution: University of Amsterdam

Research project: The Impact of Securitization on Migrants’ Housing Pathways

Marzia Bona is a researcher in the ‘Space and Society’ group at the Institute for Regional Development of Eurac Research (IT). Her background is in political sciences, international relations, and human rights. Marzia is a member of the interdisciplinary group Migration & Diversities. Through applied research projects, she examines the inclusion processes of migrants with a focus on the territorial characteristics of the arrival contexts. Her research currently focuses on the right to housing as a key resource for the inclusion of migrants in local communities, as well as on the impact of reception systems on the housing paths of asylum seekers and refugees.

As a SECUREU fellow, she will develop a policy paper on the impact of discourses and policies on migrants’ housing pathways. Her contribution aims to explore the interconnections between reception systems and housing regimes, to highlight their impact in terms of exposure to the risk of poverty and social exclusion and to identify policies and services that can overcome these forms of exclusion.

Mattia Zeba (Eurac Research)

Host institution: Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI)

Research project: Language Requirements for Immigrants: The Securitization of Language Proficiency

Mattia Zeba is a Researcher at the Institute for Minority Rights of Eurac Research in Bolzano/Bozen, Italy. He focuses on language rights, multilingualism, linguistic diversity, and civic education. Holding Master’s degrees in Modern Languages (University of Padua) and International Relations (University of Trento), along with a Graduate Diploma in Transnational Governance (Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa), Mattia’s diverse academic background equips him to explore the intricate intersections of language, society, and governance.

During his research visit, he will focus on potential processes of securitization in regard to language proficiency in official language(s). In the context of international migration, language issues are becoming increasingly prominent as new communities are forming mainly (but not only) in urban settings. Such communities, which often concentrate in specific neighborhoods, may become ‘exclusive’ in linguistic terms, while the lack of contact with speakers of the local autochthonous languages(s) results in a low level of proficiency in the official languages. Such lack of proficiency has been framed often as a security threat and therefore language tests have been introduced as a prerequisite for the accession to basic services, as well as for the obtainment of legal documents (ID cards, residency permits, etc.). The research will focus on the ways in which such requirement of language proficiency in the standard official language(s) has been framed in securitized terms, as well as the impact (positive or negative) of these requirements on integration paths.

Yury Katliarou (Koç University)

Host institution: University of Glasgow

Research project: Role of Language in Nation Building: Contrasting Cases of the Celtic Nations of the British Isles

Yury Katliarou, Ph.D., is a lecturer at the College of Administrative Sciences and Economics at Koç University (Istanbul). He obtained his doctoral degree in Political Science and International Relations from Koç University in 2023. He completed his undergraduate degree in Political Science at the European Humanities University (Vilnius) in 2011 and his master’s degree in Eurasian Studies at the Middle East Technical University (Ankara) in 2015. He contributed to the multi-authored volume Georgia’s Muslim Communities: Minority Rights, Identity, Politics,published in 2016. He also co-authored a multimethod research article “Institutionalization of Ethnocultural Diversity and the Representation of European Muslims”, published in Perspectives on Politics in 2020 (printed version in 2021). His research interests include various aspects of nationalism and nation-building, ethnicity, language policy, minority rights, as well as the Eurasian region’s politics, economy, and society.

Within the SECUREU fellowship framework, he is working on perceptions of language-related threats and the securitization of various aspects of language policies by nation states in response to (anticipated) changes in sociolinguistic makeup due to migration.

Zeyno Kececioglu (Koç University)

Host institution: Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI)

Research project: Intersection between Nationalism, Ontological Security, and Abortion Policies

Zeyno Kececioglu is a Ph.D. student in the International Relations Department at Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey. She has actively engaged in academic pursuits since September 2018 as a research and teaching assistant at both Sabancı and Koç Universities. Her MA thesis examines the effect of ethnic and religious ties on the emergence and persistence of solidarity between Arab-Turkish citizens and Syrians in Turkey and the areas of contestation and conflict between the two communities. Within the scope of her doctoral dissertation, she aims to illuminate the diverse patterns exhibited in abortion legislation on a global scale. Employing a multifaceted approach, her research will involve in-depth case studies and comprehensive comparative quantitative analysis to unveil the fundamental causal mechanisms that inform the development of abortion laws. Notably, she has had the opportunity to present her research findings at prestigious international conferences, including those organized by the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN), The Center for Comparative Research on Democracy (CCRD) Humboldt University in Berlin, the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies International Winter School, Qatar and the ECPR General Conference 2023. Her research interests encompass the fields of nationalism and religion, state-making, migration studies, and identity politics.