Noora Lori
· Associate Professor of International Relations; Director of Middle East – North Africa InitiativeVerifiedBoston University · International Relations
Active 2011–2026
About
Noora Lori is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University. Her research broadly focuses on citizenship, migration, and statelessness, with particular interest in temporal strategies of migration enforcement. She has written extensively about citizenship regimes, naturalization policies, temporary migration schemes, and racial hierarchies in a comparative perspective. Regionally, her work examines the shifting population movements associated with state formation in the Persian Gulf, expanding the study of Middle East politics to include historic and new connections with East Africa and the Indian subcontinent. Lori's first book, Offshore Citizens: Permanent “Temporary” Status in the Gulf, published by Cambridge University Press in 2019, has received multiple awards including the best book prize from the Migration and Citizenship section of the American Political Science Association, the Distinguished Book Award from the Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies section of the International Studies Association, and the Best Book in MENA Politics from the APSA-MENA Politics section. Her research has been published in various academic journals and edited volumes, and has been funded by several prestigious grants and fellowships. She has received teaching awards such as the Gitner Family Prize for Faculty Excellence and the CAS Templeton Award for Excellence in Student Advising. Lori has also piloted innovative teaching methods, including a digital policy incubator that produced an aid-mapping app for refugees. Prior to her current position, Lori was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, a fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's International Security Program, and a visiting scholar at the Dubai School of Government. She earned her PhD in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University in 2013, where her dissertation received the Best Dissertation Award from the Migration and Citizenship Section of the American Political Science Association. She completed her B.A. in Political Science and International Studies at Northwestern University in 2006, graduating summa cum laude. Lori co-directs the Pardee School Initiative on Forced Migration and Human Trafficking and serves on multiple academic committees and advisory boards related to international migration and Middle East politics.
Research topics
- Sociology
- Political Science
- Law
- Political economy
- Economics
- Public administration
- Geography
- Business
- Psychology
- Law and economics
- Economic system
- Development economics
- Gender studies
- Economic geography
Selected publications
Mobile temporalities and political possibilities: Expanding the temporal turn in migration studies
Migration Studies · 2026-03-18
articleAbstract This special issue advances a research agenda on mobile temporalities—the multiple, dynamic temporal orders that intersect with human mobility to shape political life. While the “temporal turn” in Migration Studies has illuminated the governance of migrants through time (waiting, delay, acceleration), we argue that it remains constrained by a linear, incorporative orientation that centers citizenship as the teleological endpoint. We propose a shift from counting time to interrogating temporalities as socially and politically constructed phenomena that collide with movements such as migration, displacement, pilgrimage, and urban circulation. This reframing foregrounds regulatory powers beyond the state, migrants’ temporal agency, and non-linear horizons where waiting, anticipation, or rupture may generate politics irreducible to progress towards membership rights. Convening scholars from politics, sociology, geography, and anthropology, the issue stages a collaborative cross-disciplinary conversation. Little and Nakata theorize “radical incompletion,” bringing indigenous temporalities into debates on borders and sovereignty. Franck and Turner juxtapose refugees and “preppers” to show how anticipatory futures organize (im)mobility. Walker analyzes the time of pilgrimage, highlighting frictions with state time. Kim traces intersecting temporalities of asylum law, Chinese capitalism, and Korean evangelicalism to complicate assumptions about conversion, authenticity, and citizenship as endpoints. Across these studies, we show how mobile temporalities unsettle hegemonic timelines and open political possibilities—from new solidarities to forms of autonomy, refusal or resignation —often missed by linear frames. We invite scholars of migration and time to rethink how time moves through migration and how migration reshapes time, expanding the field’s empirical and normative horizons.
International Journal Middle East Studies · 2026-04-06
article1st authorCorrespondingCosmopolitanism and the Right to Travel
2025-09-23
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Cosmopolitan ideals of universal hospitality celebrate the freedom to cross international borders as a means of forging global connections and creating the conditions for cosmopolitan justice. This chapter discusses the right to travel as a central facet of cosmopolitanism, distinguishing between traveling for short-term periods or “the right to visit” and migration or “the right to reside.” Emphasizing that the right to travel is highly unevenly distributed across the globe, it explores the implications of this global hierarchy for our understanding of cosmopolitanism as a moral framework and way of being in the world. Drawing upon contemporary political thought and recent empirical research, it examines the intersection of travel and “global citizenship” from two dimensions: how cosmopolitan theorists articulate the normative commitments of globally engaged citizens, as well as how “global citizenship” as a lifestyle is marketed and monetized in citizenship markets today.
Geopolitics · 2025-08-04 · 5 citations
articleCorrespondingThis article introduces a research agenda for reimagining political possibilities by placing multiple temporalities at the centre of analyses of human mobility. While recent scholarship in migration studies has taken a ‘temporal turn’ by exploring how states use time to regulate movement – through delay, stoppage, or acceleration – we call for a broader conceptual shift: from understanding time as a tool of control to recognising temporality as a terrain of friction, fragmentation, and political imagination. In so doing, we unsettle metanarratives of justice rooted in teleological conceptions of citizenship and incorporation. We illustrate the geopolitical stakes of this move with three examples from diverse geographies, summarised with reference to three key ideas: zombie citizenship, miracles, and memory. Zombie citizenship refers to a legal status that suspends people in fragmented temporalities, effectively excluding them from any national historiography or membership rights. Miracles refer to attempts to respond to ‘stuckedness’ by abandoning linear notions of progress and embracing the miraculous claims of preachers and profits. Memory signals a terrain in which historical contestations of human mobilities open space for reimagining sovereignty. In each case, we explain how temporal infrastructures both constrain and enable forms of solidarity, division, and political claim-making. These sketches are not typologies but heuristics that provoke fresh inquiry into how time and mobility interact to shape political life. We call for a normative and analytical recalibration that centres on temporal multiplicity as a constitutive force in contemporary geopolitics and migration.
Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations
- Political Science
- Sociology
- Political Science
Abstract This chapter shows why the large-scale movement of human populations in the MENA has manifest importance to states and societies across the region. Whether driven by economic concerns, violence, or some combination of the two, the migration of peoples—which, in its most tragic form, produces refugee crises—has become an indelible part of the regional landscape. The chapter traces the history of such migration prior to the Arab uprisings and locates the applicability of outside literatures to help understand the experiences of migrants and refugees. Research on the relationship between conflict and migration, labor migration, state-level governance of migration, global governance and international institutions, and the nexus between diasporas and states all receive close attention. The ethics of studying displaced communities also invokes discussion. Key debates, notable cases, and avenues for future research are hence mapped out in systematic detail.
Citizens-in-waiting: strategic naturalization delays in the USA and UAE
2022-08-22
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThis article contributes to the study of conditional inclusion by examining the strategic postponement of naturalization cases in the UAE and USA. In both cases, the naturalization cases of specific minority immigrant groups are delayed (potentially indefinitely) by one branch of the federal government in the name of national security. Drawing upon ostensibly opposite cases, I identify delays as an important but largely overlooked strategy of boundary-policing found across regime-types. The pattern of delays reveals whose attempts to become one of “us” is met with greater obstacles. The prolonged questioning of the moral character of certain minorities makes their access to rights contingent upon their behaviour, rather than a statutorily enacted and secure right. Instead of being fully included or excluded, the targets of these deferrals are conditionally included in the host state – suspended in limbo without indication of whether they will receive citizenship or how long they must wait.
Muddying the waters: migration management in the global commons
International Relations · 2021 · 7 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Sociology
- Political Science
Advanced liberal democratic states interdict migrants on the High Seas global commons. Why have liberal states engaged in this practice over the past four decades? Deterrence and humanitarian rescue explain part of this puzzle, but they are insufficient for understanding the patterns and justifications for migrant interdiction on the High Seas. Tension between states promoting international human rights and circumventing those obligations challenges expectations of liberal state behavior. International relations scholars must incorporate the global commons when explaining state behavior; ungoverned areas create exceptional zones for states to partially suspend their standard operating procedures to execute policies furthering their interests. We argue that liberal states use the regulatory gray zones of the High Seas to ‘muddy the waters’ in order to advance their security interests. States with the highest domestic refugee protections have incentives to circumvent their own obligations, which vary over time with changes to domestic asylum laws.
Citizens-in-waiting: strategic naturalization delays in the USA and UAE
Ethnic and Racial Studies · 2021 · 8 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Sociology
- Political Science
This article contributes to the study of conditional inclusion by examining the strategic postponement of naturalization cases in the UAE and USA. In both cases, the naturalization cases of specific minority immigrant groups are delayed (potentially indefinitely) by one branch of the federal government in the name of national security. Drawing upon ostensibly opposite cases, I identify delays as an important but largely overlooked strategy of boundary-policing found across regime-types. The pattern of delays reveals whose attempts to become one of “us” is met with greater obstacles. The prolonged questioning of the moral character of certain minorities makes their access to rights contingent upon their behaviour, rather than a statutorily enacted and secure right. Instead of being fully included or excluded, the targets of these deferrals are conditionally included in the host state – suspended in limbo without indication of whether they will receive citizenship or how long they must wait.
International Migration Review · 2021-12-09 · 9 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingWhile most boundary-making studies examine native-born citizens’ opposition to immigration, this article explains why immigrants develop anti-immigrant attitudes. Under what conditions do previous generations of immigrants develop solidarity with newcomers? When might immigrants, instead, police national boundaries and oppose further immigration or naturalization? I argue that under uncertain citizenship status, long-term immigrants are unlikely to develop solidarity with newcomers, despite common experience with exclusionary citizenship policies. Drawing on interviews with naturalization applicants in the United Arab Emirates, this article analyses how policies that unevenly distribute rights and protections to non-citizens structure relationships between immigrant groups. Moving beyond citizen/non-citizen binaries, it calls attention to hierarchies among non-citizens, examining how long-term immigrants with partial and conditional rights police national boundaries to navigate exclusionary policies. When states restrict citizenship, making it a scarce good, immigrants may respond to uncertainty by competing and, thus, limiting access to that good for newcomers. When naturalization is arduous, applicants face pressures to continually perform citizenship to prove that they deserve inclusion. Naturalization applicants lacked citizenship, but they immigrated to the UAE before the establishment of its guest-worker program and claimed Emirati identity by differentiating themselves from “migrant workers.” I show how migration enforcement and boundary-policing factored into their perceptions and performances of what it meant to be a “good” Emirati citizen. Ethnic hierarchies and the timing of migration created distinctions between immigrants eligible for naturalization and those who were not. The mere possibility of inclusion in the citizenry may generate hierarchies between immigrants, precluding solidarity, and encouraging boundary-policing.
Time and its Miscounting: Methodological Challenges in the Study of Citizenship Boundaries
International Journal Middle East Studies · 2020-11-01 · 5 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingOne would think that, after years of fieldwork and writing, I would be able to answer a pretty simple and straightforward question about who exactly I interviewed for my study of citizenship boundaries in the UAE: “Do you have any notion of the proportions [of interlocuters] of the different ethnic or descent lines that you spoke to?” This essay is about why it is so difficult to answer this question and the insights into citizenship that unfolded as I searched for an empirical answer. Spoiler alert: Answers to questions about “national” or “ethnic” origin are entirely dependent upon how we count—and miscount—time.
Frequent coauthors
Education
B.A.
Northwestern University
M.A.
Johns Hopkins University
Ph.D.
Johns Hopkins University
Awards & honors
- Best Book Prize from the Migration and Citizenship section o…
- Distinguished Book Award from the Ethnicity, Nationalism, an…
- Best Book in MENA (Middle East and North Africa) Politics fr…
- Honorable mention for the Best Book Award from Association f…
- Best Dissertation Award from the Migration and Citizenship S…
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