Matthew Longo

Matthew Longo is an American political scientist and author. He is an associate professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where he researches border politics, security, and democratic theory. He received his PhD from Yale University and has written widely on sovereignty, borders, and the politics of freedom of movement. His book The Picnic: A Journey Through Europe's Forgotten Borderlands (2023) follows the route of the 1989 Pan-European Picnic—a symbolic border opening between Austria and Hungary that became one of the catalytic events of the fall of the Iron Curtain—and uses it as a vehicle for a broader meditation on European borders, migration, and the meaning of open borders in the twenty-first century. The book won the Orwell Prize for Political Writing in 2024 and was praised for its blend of history, travel writing, and political analysis. Longo is also the author of The Politics of Borders: Sovereignty, Security, and the Citizen after 9/11 (2018). He divides his time between Leiden and New York.