Alessandro Monsutti

Alessandro Monsutti is trained as a social anthropologist. He is Professor and Chair of the Anthropology and Sociology department at the Graduate Institute of Development Studies. Alessandro has been Research Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies (1999-2000) and Yale University (2008-2010), Grantee of the MacArthur Foundation (2004-2006), and Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna (2012) and Arizona State University (2014). He is also Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre (University of Oxford). In addition, he has worked as a consultant for several international and nongovernmental organizations such as UNHCR.

Alessandro has conducted multi-sited research since the mid-1990s in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran to study the modes of solidarity and cooperation mobilized in a situation of conflict and forced migration. He has subsequently broadened the geographical scope of his research to include members of the Afghan diaspora living in Western countries. This led him to analyze war and post-conflict reconstruction in the light of the social networks and economic strategies developed by refugees and migrants, and—more generally—to address theoretical and methodological issues related to globalization. Among his current research interests are the political economy of reconstruction in Afghanistan, as an example of emerging forms of sovereignty and global governance; asylum seekers and refugees in Europe; migrants and non-migrants in urban neighborhoods; and, the changing nature of borderlands in Europe and South Asia.