Research
My work explores the containment of people deemed “dangerous” to the security of late liberal societies. I mainly focus on the Spanish-Moroccan border as a space of inquiry and on border control as an analytical frame to investigate the emergence of new tools to contain marginalised and racialised populations at the frontiers of inequality.
My first book, Immigration Nation. Aid, control and border politics in Morocco, will be published by Cambridge University Press in September 2021. Based on almost a year of fieldwork, the project explores the rise of ‘Sub-Saharan migrants’ as beneficiaries of the aid industry in Morocco. I analyse how aid-funded non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and International Organisations (IOs) have emerged and encroached into the Moroccan migration governance landscape since the mid-2000s, and how the ‘aid-ification’ of migration governance merges with situated dynamics of neoliberal and authoritarian reordering.
During my fellowship at Lucy Cavendish College and CRASSH, I’ll also start a new project on the control of child mobility in the Canary Islands and in Melilla. I’ll explore how the tension between geographies of remoteness, infrastructures of neglect and international human right duties transform these remote border sites in a charged political space. This project is funded by the British Academy, the Society for Libyan Studies, the Royal Geographical Society and the Cambridge Humanities Research Fund.
About
I obtained my PhD in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2019. Before Cambridge, I completed a BA and MA in Foreign Languages at the University of Bologna, where I benefitted from the financial and pastoral support of the Collegio Superiore. I held visiting positions at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and at the Centre Jacques Berque pour les Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Morocco. During my studies, I have also worked as a seasonal agricultural worker, as an ice-cream vendor, as an administrative assistant, and as a research consultant at the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Monographs:
- Gazzotti, L. (2021). ‘Immigration Nation: Aid, Control, and Border Politics in Morocco’. Cambridge University Press.
Special issue editorship:
- Gross Wyrtzen, L., and Gazzotti, L., 2020 (online first),’ Telling Histories of the Present: Postcolonial Perspectives on Morocco’s ‘Radically New’ Migration Policy‘, Special issue of the Journal of North African Studies.
- Peer-reviewed articles:
Bastani, N., & Gazzotti, L. (2021). ‘“Still a bit uncomfortable, to be an arm of the state”: Making sense and subjects of counter-extremism in the UK and Morocco‘, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space. - Gazzotti, L. (2021). ‘(Un) making illegality: Border control, racialized bodies and differential regimes of illegality in Morocco’, The Sociological Review, 69(2), 277-295.
- Gazzotti., L, and Hagan, M., 2020 (online first), ‘Dispersal and dispossession as bordering: Exploring migration governance through mobility in post-2013 Morocco‘, Journal of North African Studies.
- Jiménez-Alvarez, M., Espiñeira, K., and Gazzotti, L., 2020 (online first), ‘Migration Policy and International human rights frameworks in Morocco: Tensions and Contradictions‘, Journal of North African Studies.
- Gazzotti, L., 2019, ‘Deaths, Borders, and the Exception: Humanitarianism at the Spanish– Moroccan Border‘, American Behavioral Scientist, Special issue on Deaths at the borders: Revisiting the debate in the light of the Euro-Mediterranean crisis.
- Gazzotti, Lorena, 2018, ‘From irregular emigration to radicalisation? Fragile borders, securitised development and the governance of Moroccan youth’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.
Chapters in edited books:
- Gazzotti, Lorena, 2017,’ Local governance, civil society and migrants’ support to local development: perspectives from Morocco’, in Lacroix, Thomas and Desille, Amandine (eds.), International Migrations and Local Governance: A Global Perspective, Palgrave MacMillan
