Renata SUMMA

This project aims to understand the relationship between displacement and belonging among (ex) citizens from the former Yugoslavia. More specifically, it will investigate how traditional notions of nationalism and statehood are challenged by alternative forms of belonging produced through the displacement of an impressive amount of the population during the 1990s wars, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and the successive waves of migration that followed this period. This research, thus, seeks to understand how displaced peoples – which encompasses categories such as diaspora, refugees, internal displaced people and migrants – produce meanings and connections between their original social space and the new space in which s/he is inserted (Shapiro, 2013). In a context where displacement was produced by the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia and the emergence of new states (Summa, 2021, Toal and Dahlman, 2011), a crucial question this project raises regards the role war and its outcomes play in reconfiguring new forms of belonging.

Renata Summa is a post-doctoral researcher at the International Relations Institute from Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, where she teaches modules on Mobilities at the pos-graduate program in International Relations . She has received her PhD in International Relations from PUC-Rio de Janeiro, and her Master in International Relations from Sciences-Po Paris (Master Recherche/Mention très bien). She did her B.A in Journalism at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. She was a visiting researcher at Open University (UK) and at the Centre for Southeast European Studies at University of Graz (Austria). From 2014 to 2015, she lived in Sarajevo, where she conducted fieldwork for her thesis, that was published as a book by Palgrave in 2021, under the title «Everyday Boundaries, Borders and Post- Conflict Societies». Her PhD thesis received the 2017 Best Thesis Award from the Brazilian International Relations Association. She is co-founder of the research group LEEM (Eastern Europe in movement) and the Brazilian International Political Sociology Network (https://www.ipsbrasil.com/). She has taught several modules for undergraduate students at PUC-Rio and Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV), on themes that range from «Borders in International Politics» to «International Politics in the Western Balkans». She frequently contributes to newspapers, blogs, TV shows and podcasts regarding issues related to the Balkans and she gives lectures and short courses about the region to broader audiences (outside of academia). She speaks Portuguese, English, French and Italian fluently and has working knowledge of Spanish and Bosnia/Serbian/Croatian/Montenegrin.

Books

• Summa, R. (2021) Everyday Boundaries, Borders and Post-Conflict Societies. Palgrave McMillan (Critical Security Studies in the Global South). ISBN 978-3-030-55816-1
• Carabelli, G.; Djurasovic, A; Summa, R. (Eds.) (2021). Challenging the Representation of Ethnically Divided Cities: Perspectives from Mostar. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-367-70724-8

Peer-reviewed articles

• Iamamoto, S; Kubik, M and Summa, R. (2021) Brazilian Far-Right Neoliberal Nationalism: Family, Anti-Communism and the Myth of Racial Democracy.
  Globalizations, DOI 10.1080/14747731.2021.1991745
• Carabelli, G.; Djurasovic, A and Summa, R. (2019) Challenging the representation of ethnically divided cities: perspectives from Mostar, Space and Polity, 23:2, 116-124, DOI: 10.1080/13562576.2019.1634467  
• Summa, R. (2019) Inventing places: disrupting the ‘divided city’, Space and Polity, 23:2, 140-153, DOI: 10.1080/13562576.2019.1640114 

Book chapters

• Summa, R and Puh, M (2022). “Silence as practices of (in)security in post-Yugoslav region”, in McClauskey, E.  and Charalambous, C. (eds.) “Security, Ethnography, Discourse: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Everyday Unease’, Routledge Studies in Liberty and Security.
• Summa, R. (2021). “UN Missions in the ex-Yugoslavia”, in Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies. Richmond, O. and Visoka, G. (eds). Palgrave McMillan.
• Summa, R. (2021). “Prefácio/ Predgovor” [Preface], in Causos, Contos e Pesquisas sobre a Croácia: 1o concurso acadêmico e literário da SADA. Kratke priče i istražvianja o Hrvatskoj: 1. Natječaj za znanost I književnost SADA-e. [Short stories and research on Croatia: 1o Academic and Literary competition from Society Friends of Dalmacia].
• Summa, R. (2020). “What might have been lost: fieldwork and the challenges of translation”, in Kusic, K. and Zahora, J. (eds.) Fieldwork as Failure: Living and Knowing in the Field (of IR), E-IR.
• Summa. R and Herz, M. (2017). “Regional Organizations, Human Rights and Conflict Resolution”, in Fuentes, C and Drumond, P. (eds.) Human Rights and Conflict Resolution: Bridging the Theoretical and Practice Divide”. Routledge.