Isadora Gotts is a PhD student at King’s College London in the War Studies department. Her research interests include infrastructural politics, informality and entangled governance, reconstruction, and everyday politics in Iraq. She has lived closed to 5 years in Iraq, and before that in Lebanon. She has held grants from the Rotary Foundation (Global Grants) and the British Institute for Iraq (Research Grant). She is also one of the conference chairs for the Conflict Research Society (CRS) in the UK.

Research Project

This doctoral research seeks to understand the role of informal housing settlements in emerging forms of post-war governance in Mosul, Iraq. Through a socio-spatial analysis of “urban encroachments”, it posits informal housing as a type of reconstruction with significant socio-political ramifications. In tracing power reconfigurations as they are materialized, embedded, and produced in and through informal settlements, everyday practices and processes are shown to shape urban political economies, state authority, and civilian agency. Based on a year of fieldwork in Mosul, this project draws on urban studies, geography, and political science to elucidate the form and function a post-war city’s deeply entangled and ambiguous governance arrangements after two decades of conflict.