Yelyzaveta Monastyrova

Research Student

Yelyzaveta Monastyrova is affiliated with the Open University Law School.

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Biography

Yelyzaveta has a background in international relations and political science. After graduating with a BA degree in International Relations from the Oles Honchar Dnipro National University, she was awarded a European Commission scholarship to pursue an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master programme in South European Studies at the University of Glasgow, Autonomous University of Madrid and LUISS Guido Carli (Rome), which she completed with distinction. Her academic interests include socio-economic inequality, migration, state fragility and international development.

Current Research

Exploring the Limits of Belonging: Domestic Human Trafficking in Spain, Ukraine and the UK

The thesis is based on a hypothesis that the international antitrafficking regime (the dynamic system of legal frameworks, policies and discourses) is increasingly inclusive of exploitative situations occurring in victims’ country of citizenship, referred to as domestic trafficking. This development is not explicable from the standpoint of critical antitrafficking scholarship, according to which immigration control, governance of exploitable foreign populations and legitimisation of their exploitation are the main functions of the international antitrafficking regime. This research interrogates this contradiction, aiming to identify the dynamics behind this regime expansion and its possible implications for the ways the antitrafficking regime functions at the international level and in the national contexts in the European societies. These are explored through the analysis of national antitrafficking regimes in Spain, Ukraine and the UK. The proposed conceptual framework combining legal and political science perspectives – the offence of human trafficking seen through the lens of socio-political belonging – should facilitate a comprehensive analysis of the antitrafficking regime as a phenomenon resulting from and indicative of global socio-political and economic transformations, as well as of its potential and limitations as a platform for advancing determined social causes.