About
Elizabeth is an IRD Fellow and a final year doctoral candidate in the Department of International Relations. Her research examines state formation under conditions of mass mobility and migration.
Drawing on Historical International Relations, state formation theory, and International Political Sociology approaches, Elizabeth’s work challenges dominant conceptualisations of the state as territorially bounded and centralised. Her doctoral research develops an alternative theory of statehood as constituted through everyday, deterritorialized practices of political authority and belonging, drawing on the case of post-Soviet Tajikistan and Tajik labour migration to Russia. Elizabeth is now extending this framework to other cases of mass mobility. She is also doing research on the implications of deterritorialized frameworks of statehood for rethinking inter-polity relations more broadly. Methodologically, Elizabeth combines ethnographic-style qualitative fieldwork approaches with archival and historical research.
Elizabeth holds an MSc in Development Studies with Distinction from LSE and a BA (Honours) in Government from Georgetown University.
Research topic
Retheorising State Formation Under Conditions of Mass Labour Mobility: The Case of Tajikistan
Academic supervisors
Mark Hoffman
Research Cluster affiliation
Theory/Area/History Research Cluster
Security and Statecraft Research Cluster
Expertise
State formation, movement and territoriality, political authority, affective politics, national identity, labour migration and remittances, service provisioning, informal economies, Central Asia, Historical IR
Not available to supervise MPhil/PhD students
Elizabeth has been funded by ESRC+3.
Teaching
Teaching experience
IR205 International Security (LSE)