MACIMIDE welcomes new junior visiting research fellow Lillian Frost

Lillian Frost started as a Junior Visiting Fellow at MACIMIDE on February 19. She is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at George Washington University (GWU), with primary research interests in forced migration, citizenship, and Middle East politics. Her dissertation project aims to explain variations in the sets of rights and forms of citizenship statuses host states offer to different protracted refugee groups over time, including shifts in formal laws as well as their informal enforcement. Protracted refugees are designated by the United Nations as groups of 25,000 or more refugees with the same nationality living in the same host country for at least five years.

She analyzes this topic using process tracing from 1946–2017 to compare Jordan’s policies toward different groups of Palestinian refugees—the oldest and largest group of protracted refugees in the world. She also examines Jordan’s policies toward Syrian and Iraqi protracted refugees as well as the intersection of these policies and gender discrimination in Jordan’s nationality law. This research engages data from over 800 files collected in the U.S. and British National Archives as well as about 170 semi-structured interviews conducted in English and Arabic over 12 months of fieldwork in Jordan. Her research has received support from the Fulbright U.S. Student Program, Council of American Overseas Research Centers, and GWU Institute for Middle East Studies.

During her three months at MACIMIDE, she will focus on writing and presenting dissertation chapters under the supervision of Prof. Maarten Vink. In doing so, she will assess the similarities and differences in the logic and consequences of citizenship policies in Europe compared to those in less democratic contexts, pulling from and building on the MiLifeStatus project’s research.