All Outputs (31)

Buildings of Refuge and the Postcoloniality of Asylum Infrastructure (2025)
Book
Novak, P. (2025). Buildings of Refuge and the Postcoloniality of Asylum Infrastructure. Bristol University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.18323803

This book offers a fresh perspective on the European migration crisis, chronicling its everyday realities in a central Italian province. Through vivid ethnographic accounts, it reveals how the forces and relations animating this crisis are reproduced... Read More about Buildings of Refuge and the Postcoloniality of Asylum Infrastructure.

Fronteras (2025)
Book Chapter
Novak, P. (2025). Fronteras. In Á. Iranzo, I. Ruiz-Giménez Arrieta, & M. Íñiguez de Heredia (Eds.), Manual de estudios críticos: cartografías disidentes para comprender las relaciones internacionales (615-642). Editorial Tirant Lo Blanch

Embedding Externalization (2025)
Other
(2025). Embedding Externalization. London

Embedding Externalisation: How Bordering Practices Transform Places (2024)
Journal Article
Cobarrubias, S., & Novak, P. (2025). Embedding Externalisation: How Bordering Practices Transform Places. Geopolitics, 30(1), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2024.2409857

Over the past twenty years, research into border externalisation has developed a rich spatial vocabulary to understand these bordering practices as well as critical analyses that challenge the often North-centric views towards externalisation. In thi... Read More about Embedding Externalisation: How Bordering Practices Transform Places.

Shades of carcerality? Reflections on asylum accommodation in Italy, France and the UK (2023)
Digital Artefact
Doná, G., Lindley, A., Novak, P., & Sanders, C. (2023). Shades of carcerality? Reflections on asylum accommodation in Italy, France and the UK

Riots in Knowsley: How the state perpetuates violence in asylum accommodation (2023)
Digital Artefact
Novak, P. (2023). Riots in Knowsley: How the state perpetuates violence in asylum accommodation

The Humanitarian Border, in Place (2022)
Digital Artefact
Novak, P. (2022). The Humanitarian Border, in Place

Re-producing the Humanitarian Border (2022)
Journal Article
Novak, P. (2025). Re-producing the Humanitarian Border. Geopolitics, 30(1), 46-67. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2022.2105699

Scholarship dissecting the EU humanitarian border has consistently emphasised its productive nature. The enmeshment of securitarian and humanitarian logics produces new forms of control that transform pre-existing techniques and practices; new geogra... Read More about Re-producing the Humanitarian Border.

The Camp, Housing, and the City: On Migrant Camp Accommodation in Berlin (2022)
Thesis
Sowa, C. The Camp, Housing, and the City: On Migrant Camp Accommodation in Berlin. (Thesis). SOAS University of London

This PhD thesis investigates migrant camp accommodation in Berlin after the “long summer of migration” of 2015 (Hess et al. 2016). During this time, many camp sites were opened to accommodate newly arriving migrants in the city. The PhD thesis aims t... Read More about The Camp, Housing, and the City: On Migrant Camp Accommodation in Berlin.

The postcoloniality of asylum infrastructure (2021)
Digital Artefact
Novak, P. The postcoloniality of asylum infrastructure. [YouTube]

This presentation takes as its object of analysis and investigation asylum seekers’ reception centres in a central Italian province. It builds upon literature concerned with the logistification of asylum to conceive these centres as nodes of the EU h... Read More about The postcoloniality of asylum infrastructure.

Marx, the Chief, the Prisoner and the Refugee (2021)
Book Chapter
Capps, G., LeBaron, G., Novak, P., & [in conversation with] Mezzadri, A. (2021). Marx, the Chief, the Prisoner and the Refugee. In A. Mezzadri (Ed.), Marx in the Field (203-218). Anthem Press

Deservingness and uneven geographies of asylum accommodation (2021)
Journal Article
Novak, P. (2021). Deservingness and uneven geographies of asylum accommodation. Social Policy and Society, 20(3), 452-463. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474746420000779

The arrival of over six million asylum seekers in Europe since 2011 has engendered profound and ongoing governance transformations, which this article examines through the understudied perspective of asylum seekers’ accommodation. The article uncover... Read More about Deservingness and uneven geographies of asylum accommodation.

The neoliberal location of asylum (2019)
Journal Article
Novak, P. (2019). The neoliberal location of asylum. Political Geography, 70, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.01.007

What can be learned about the European migration crisis by studying it at its margins? Framed by this question and premised on evidence collected during four months of field research in a central Italian province, the paper investigates the governanc... Read More about The neoliberal location of asylum.

Borders, distance, politics (2018)
Book Chapter
Novak, P. (2018). Borders, distance, politics. In A. Paasi, E.-K. Prokkola, J. Saarinen, & K. Zimmerbauer (Eds.), Borderless Worlds for Whom?: Ethics, Moralities and Mobilities (49-62). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429427817-4

The ‘borderless world’ narrative was, perhaps, nothing more than that: a narrative associated with a specific, and specifically neoliberal, project – that of globalization in the 1990s. Yet, at the turn of the millennium, the idea that state borders... Read More about Borders, distance, politics.

Borders as Meeting Points : Neoliberalism, Securitisation and Migrants' Autonomy in the Port/Border area of Patras (2018)
Thesis
Mogiani, M. Borders as Meeting Points : Neoliberalism, Securitisation and Migrants' Autonomy in the Port/Border area of Patras. (Thesis). SOAS, University of London

The resurgence in border studies over the last 20 years has generated a passionate and animated debate among scholars attempting to conceptualise how borders originate, where they are located, and what their implications are for the mobilities crossi... Read More about Borders as Meeting Points : Neoliberalism, Securitisation and Migrants' Autonomy in the Port/Border area of Patras.

Border rhythms (2017)
Book Chapter
Novak, P. (2017). Border rhythms. In E. Mavroudi, B. Page, & A. Christou (Eds.), Timespace and International Migration (61-76). Edward Elgar

Back to Borders (2016)
Journal Article
Novak, P. (2017). Back to Borders. Critical Sociology, 43(6), 847-864. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920516644034

What is a border? Who is a migrant? The paper uses these questions to distinguish between constructivist, Marxist and postcolonial answers provided by critical border scholarship, with three aims. First, identifying common concerns and interrogating... Read More about Back to Borders.

Placing Borders in Development (2016)
Journal Article
Novak, P. (2016). Placing Borders in Development. Geopolitics, 21(3), 483-512. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2015.1118378

Development is inextricably related to the state-centred cartography of world spaces defined by borders, both in its historical trajectory and contemporary entanglements. Yet the multiplicity of channels and directions characterising their articulati... Read More about Placing Borders in Development.

Refugee status as a productive tension (2015)
Journal Article
Novak, P. (2015). Refugee status as a productive tension. Transnational Legal Theory, 6(2), 287-311. https://doi.org/10.1080/20414005.2015.1086198

Who is an Afghan refugee in Pakistan? The paper delves into this question through a detailed discussion of the concrete mechanisms that contextually define who an Afghan refugee in Pakistan is. Drawing on an understanding of law as generatively irres... Read More about Refugee status as a productive tension.

Refugees and Empire (2015)
Book Chapter
Novak, P. (2015). Refugees and Empire. In I. Ness, & Z. Cope (Eds.), The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91206-6_265-1