Federico Alagna is an Assistant Professor of Political Sociology in the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, Italy. He earned his PhD in 2020 from the University of Bologna and Radboud University.

His research lies at the intersection of political sociology, socio-legal studies and critical border studies. Federico’s work has primarily focused on migration, and more recently, on social movements and collective action. Specifically, he has extensively examined the contentious politics of migration in the EU and Italy, with particular attention to the migrant smuggling policy regime, the role of civil society actors in shaping and contesting migration policies from below and the criminalisation of people on the move and solidarity initiatives. More recently, his research has expanded into the interdisciplinary study of social movements and law, with a focus on legal mobilisation, including areas beyond migration.

He has contributed to a number of edited books and has published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals such as the European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, Geopolitics, Journal of European Integration, International Migration, International Migration Review, Mediterranean Politics and The Annals of the American Academy of Political Science. He is the author of the monograph Migrant Smuggling and the Criminalisation of Migration in the EU (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). In 2026 he has been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Postdoctoral Fellowship for the project Law and Border: Legal Mobilisation around Migration in the Borderlands.

Federico has delivered lectures and seminars in several universities and research institutions, including the European University Institute, FLACSO Ecuador, Humboldt University, Lisbon University Institute, New York University, Radboud University, Scuola Normale Superiore, Stanford University, University of Bologna. He has published several non-academic contributions on migration and municipalism in Italian and European news outlets, as well as being invited to numerous international meetings and conferences on these topics. Federico has also previously served as Deputy-Mayor for Culture and Public Education of the City of Messina, Sicily.