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Dr Seila Panizzolo

Visiting Fellow
Department of International Relations

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About

About

Seila is a Departmental Lecturer in International Politics in the Department of International Development at the University of Oxford, and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Department of International Relations at LSE. Her research engages with International Institutions in times of crisis, the symbolic and material structures of Global Governance and Qualitative Methods.

She earned a PhD in International Politics from City St George’s, where her research examined the humanitarian response of international organisations based in the United Arab Emirates to conflicts in the Middle East between 2016 and 2018. For her doctoral fieldwork, she was based at the United Nations Development Programme in Abu Dhabi and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Doha.

She has over ten years of teaching experience and her research has been published in International Studies Quarterly and the Journal of International Relations and Development. Before her current roles, she was a Fellow in Methodology at LSE, a Lecturer in Global Governance at the University of Oxford, and held fellowships in International Studies and Diplomacy at SOAS and City St George’s, University of London.

Research Cluster affiliation

International Institutions, Law and Ethics research cluster

Not available to supervise PhD students

Expertise

Seila is interested in how international organisations and institutions in humanitarianism and development operate across different geographical scales simultaneously and are therefore exposed to distinct power dynamics, particularly in times of crisis. She is also interested in developing new methodologies that capture international institutions' changes in localised spaces, both in their symbolism and materiality. Drawing on qualitative methods and extensive fieldwork, her research is informed by case studies in the Middle East (United Arab Emirates), Central America (Panama) and Southeast Asia (Thailand).

Her current projects include analyses of how the urban spaces of Panama City and Bangkok have been transformed by regional diplomacy and the presence of international organisations. Her book project is a comparative analysis of the regional policies of humanitarian organisations during migration crises in the Darién in Central America and the Andaman Sea in Southeast Asia.