Valeria Bello is Full Professor (Profesora Titular) in Migration and Security and Director of the Official Master in Advanced Studies in International Affairs at the Blanquerna Faculty of Communications and International Relations, Universitat Ramón Llull, Barcelona, Spain.

Previously she has been Senior Research Fellow at the United Nations University Institute on Globalization, Culture and Mobility (UNU-GCM) and is the founding scientific coordinator of the UNU Migration Network, which she has coordinated from February 2014 until January 2016. She is a Political Sociologist who has taught and published in the fields of Sociology, International Relations and Political Science.

She is interested in the impact of cognitions and the intersection of cultural and socio-political elements on the development of social life. She mainly works at themes such as prejudice, racism, extremism and the securitization of migration. Her research interests concern the role of non-state actors in the area of migration and interethnic relations and in the fields of international relations and international and human security. She is also an expert of migration and climate change and its impact on socio-political and cultural conflicts.

Before joining UNU-GCM in December 2012, she was “Marie Curie-Sklovdowska” Intra-European Research Fellow at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (Spain). She has also worked as assistant coordinator of the Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence of the University of Trento (2003-2009) and assistant professor at the University of Trento (Italy) from 2005 to 2009.

She is author of the book "International Migration and International Security. Why Prejudice is a Global Security Threat" (Routledge, 2017).

From September 2017 to September 2021, Valeria Bello has served as Member of the Governing Council of the European International Studies Association, the second biggest international studies association of the world. Since January 2018, Valeria Bello also seats as a member of the Joint Management Committee of the European Journal of International Relations.