Dr. Sigrid Lupieri
Politics, Crisis, and the Human Cost of Aid
I am a political scientist whose work sits at the intersection of humanitarianism, foreign policy, and the politics of health. Most of my research asks a version of the same question: what happens to ordinary people when states decide that their suffering is useful? My forthcoming book, Disease and Diplomacy: Weaponizing Medical Aid to Syrian Refugees in Jordan (University of Michigan Press, 2026), examines exactly that — how refugee health becomes a tool of diplomacy, and what that means for the people caught inside these systems.
My work has taken me across a range of fields and places. I hold a Ph.D. in Politics and International Studies and an MPhil in Modern European History from the University of Cambridge, and an M.S. in Journalism from Northwestern University. Before I was an academic, I worked as a journalist in Armenia, Georgia, and Germany, and as a UN officer in New York and New Delhi. I think that background still shapes how I write — I care about finding the human scale inside large structural arguments.
My research has appeared in Third World Quarterly, Social Science & Medicine, Forced Migration Review, and elsewhere. I was most recently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University, where I also taught seminars on war, humanitarianism, and global politics.
Disease and Diplomacy: Weaponizing Medical Aid to Syrian Refugees in Jordan
When millions of Syrians fled civil war after 2011, international donors and humanitarian organizations mobilized to provide assistance to neighboring countries. Focusing on Jordan—one of the world's largest refugee hosting states—Disease and Diplomacy investigates how medical aid to refugees operates as an instrument of diplomacy and control within the global refugee system. It argues that health, far from being an apolitical humanitarian good, is a bargaining tool that states commodify to extract resources and concessions.
Drawing on years of field research, interviews, and policy analysis, the book shows how the Jordanian government, international donors, and humanitarian agencies turned healthcare for refugees into a tool for negotiating power, resources, and responsibility. In these cases, refugees, caught within these negotiations, often found their access to care determined not by medical need, but by political calculation. Developing the concept of the weaponization of medical aid, the book extends theories of migration diplomacy and refugee rentierism to show how global power dynamics shape who receives healthcare. The analysis identifies a self-reinforcing “crisis loop” that privileges short-term, highly visible responses while neglecting chronic and long-term needs. Disease and Diplomacy advances an interdisciplinary framework for understanding how humanitarian practices reinforce global inequalities and argues for more equitable approaches to refugee health and responsibility-sharing in the international system.
Research & Publications
Journal Articles
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2024
'Health Rentierism and Displacement: The Case of Syrian Refugees in Jordan'
POMEPS Studies, 50
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2022
Social Science & Medicine, 301(114903)
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2021
Refugee Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Review of Global Policy Responses
Risk Management and Healthcare Policy, 14 (1373–1378)
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2020
Third World Quarterly, 41(6), 958–975
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2020
Sigrid Lupieri & Lorraine Frisina Doetter — Global Social Policy, 20(2), 192–214
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2018
The Neglected Health Needs of Older Syrian Refugees in Jordan
Forced Migration Review, 57, 25–27
Policy & Commentary
Policy Reports & Analysis
New Directions in Social Policy
Crisis, Family, and the State: Italy 1900–1950
A social and political history of how ordinary lives are remade by extraordinary forces
How do ordinary people navigate the crises made by states? That question has long sat at the center of my scholarly work on refugee health policy in the Middle East, but it now animates a new project that moves across geography and genre to examine a different kind of crisis response: that of an Italian family between 1900 and 1950.
This project is a social history of Italy during one of the most convulsive half-centuries in modern European history. It traces the Lupieri family across the upheavals of the First World War, the rise of fascism and the Mussolini regime, mass emigration and the fragmentation of community, imperial ambition, and the catastrophe of the Second World War. Rather than beginning from the vantage point of leaders or institutions, the project recovers what the political looks like from below — how families made decisions about loyalty, movement, survival, and belonging when the state was simultaneously the source of violence and the only guarantor of protection. In this sense, it extends my research on the relationship between crisis and agency, between geopolitical structure and individual life.
Thematically, the project connects to a broader framework I have been developing: the idea that crises — whether humanitarian, medical, or geopolitical — are not interruptions to normal political life, but the condition under which political life most clearly reveals itself. Crisis, in this account, is not an exception. It is the testing ground in which power shows its hand. This new project brings that lens to bear on Italian history, and on the intimate scale of family life as a site where history's abstractions become concrete.