Esteban's research was shaped by an experience during his Master's at the Florence School of Transnational Governance, where fieldwork took him to a refugee camp on the border between Tijuana and the United States. Those months, he says, gave him the inspiration for the work he does today, and led him back to the EUI as a PhD researcher.
At the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences, Esteban studies asylum in Latin America, and specifically how identity shapes the process. Where international law describes a codified, mechanistic system, he finds something closer to chance: Whether someone is believed can depend less on the facts of their case than on how well they perform a certain identity, sometimes with real consequences for whether they're granted asylum at all.
His fieldwork takes him from Europe to Latin America every summer, including to Brazil, where he learned Portuguese for his research. He describes the work as emotionally demanding as well as logistically so, hearing traumatic experiences while carrying a responsibility that goes beyond the academic, toward the safety and well-being of the people he works with.
Esteban believes research like his has a role to play in bridging the gap between academia, policy and practice, which he sees as too often disconnected.
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Esteban Octavio Scuzarello is a PhD researcher at the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences. His thesis, 'Performing asylum: a study on refugee status determination processes in Brazil and Mexico', is supervised by Prof. Jeffrey T. Checkel.