Valentina's research mainly addresses the foreign and security policies of the U.S., as well as European and Middle Eastern States, terrorism and counter-terrorism, political Islam, jihadism, the politics of fear, discourses on threat and emergency, soft power, as well as strategic communication as anti-terrorism.
Valentina's various research interests are bound together by an overall interest in the nature, causes, structure, and resolution of contemporary political violence. In particular, her research focuses on the social construction of threat and fear, questions of international conflict resolution, non kinetic and critical approaches to terrorism, anti-terrorism and soft power. The interdisciplinary character of her research clearly emerges in her writings in which Valentina touches across multiple subject areas and orientations at the same time, benefiting from theoretical, conceptual and methodological links to several disciplines, including Peace Studies, Terrorism Studies, Political Science, Sociology, Geography, Communication Studies, Applied Linguistics, and Computer Science.