Jessi A. J. Gilchrist is Associate Fellow at SAIS Europe


Jessi Gilchrist is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of War Studies and a doctoral fellow at the Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy and the Society for Intelligence History where her research explores imperial borders and their legacies in our contemporary international laws. Jessi also holds a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Her current PhD project, “Fractious Frontiers: British Egypt, Italian Libya, and the Making of an International Legal Order, 1907-1952,” focuses on the Libyan-Egyptian colonial frontier as a point of departure to explore how the British and Italian empires attempted to govern this inter-imperial border; how ideology shaped imperial policy and practice towards colonial border security; and what the experience of this colonial border tell us about the role of international law in mediating, formalizing, and entrenching the imperial system within the twentieth-century global order. This project seeks to demonstrate that an international legal order developed in tandem with empire as the British and Italians collaborated and competed with one another in an effort to determine solutions to the colonial problems that they faced at this inter-imperial border from the initial conquest of each territory in the 1910s to formal decolonisation in the 1950s. In doing so, her PhD project aims to offer a new interpretation of how empire really worked and why it remained so durable over the course of the twentieth century.

Since beginning her PhD, Jessi founded the King's Trauma-Centred Study Group and continues to coordinate monthly sessions, workshops, and public events that engage with the theme of trauma as both a research focus and a lived-experience of researchers.

Jessi previously worked as an analyst in the Geopolitics and National Security Learning Program at the Canada School of Public Service where she specialised on files relating to extremism within the Canadian national security environment.