Political Science Faculty and Staff
Laura Zanotti
Associate Professor
Ph.D., Florida International University, 2004
Ph.D., Florida International University, 2004
LAURA ZANOTTI, Associate Professor (Ph.D., Florida International University 2004).
Her research and teaching include critical political and international relations theory, as well as international organization, security, peacekeeping and democratization. She is currently finalizing a book that explores, through a Foucaultian framework, United Nations peacekeeping in the context of the post-Cold War international security regime. The main argument of that work is that pro-democracy peacekeeping is an instance of an international regime that aims at taming chaos through disciplinary and regulatory mechanisms directed at reforming the institutions of potentially disorderly states and at steering their behaviour through multiple mechanisms of surveillance and reward/punishment. In this regime, democratization becomes the means for reducing the risk posed by "disorderly "states and the "rogue" actors they are believed to harbor by making their processes of government more readable and codified and making obscure borderlands visible and predictable. Other aspects of Dr. Zanotti' s research regard the reform of the United Nations, the changing understandings of the role of the UN as a collective security organization and their implication for state sovereignty, as well as the UN's new "human security" based approaches to crisis management and prevention. Zanotti has published articles in Alternatives, International Peacekeeping, Security Dialogue, the Journal of International Relations and Development as well as in the European University Working Papers Series. She has also contributed a chapter on risk management and natural disaster prevention to the Annuario IAI/ISPI, 2006 Edition (in Italian, with Raffaele Marchetti) and to United Nations, Past Present and Future, edited by Alissa Wartrers and Scott Kaufman (Nova History, 2008) . Professor Zanotti is currently working at a new book project that explores the role of community based foundations in international governance and peace building.
In 2005-2006 Laura has spent an academic year as a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute in San Domenico di Fiesole, Italy. She also serves as a Visiting Professor at the Ph.D. and Master programs at the School of International Relations, Trento University, Italy. Previously she received funding from the Latin America and Caribbean Institute at Florida International University, and the Mellons' Foundation. She has presented numerous papers on the subject of her research at international meetings, and has been frequently invited to lecture in Italy and abroad on peacekeeping, democratization and the United Nations reform. Prior to joining VT, Laura has worked for about ten years at the United Nations, where she has served both in administration and as a political advisor for Peacekeeping Operations. She has spent several years in the field. She was twice in Haiti, in 1995 and 1999. In 1999 she represented the Department of Peacekeeping Operations in a "Needs Assessment Mission" deployed in Haiti by the United Nations Secretary General to devise the shift of the UN mandate from peacekeeping to peace building. In 2001-2003 she was in Croatia where she performed the function of Deputy to the Head of the United Nations Liaison Office in Zagreb.
Email: Laura Zanotti