Ethan Chandler is an ESRC-funded PhD researcher in Human Geography at Newcastle University. As a political geographer, his work sits at the intersection of Geographies of Peace, Critical Geopolitics, and Border Studies – with a focus on how geopolitical structures are negotiated, subverted, and lived in everyday contexts across Southeast Europe.
His doctoral project, Everyday Encounters in Europe’s Borderlands, examines the socio-spatial manifestations of peace-making in post-conflict and contested urban spaces. By bringing the divided checkpoint city of Nicosia (Cyprus) into comparative dialogue with the unpartitioned, ethnically mixed borderland city of Xanthi (Western Thrace), his research explores how ordinary socio-spatial practices shape broader geopolitical narratives. To place the ‘macro’ of geopolitics into dialogue with the ‘micro’ of everyday life, his multi-sited methodology combines multilingual ethnography, participatory mapping, and qualitative interviews.
Ethan holds a BA (Hons) in Geography from the University of Oxford – where he graduated with First-Class honours, received multiple academic prizes, and was highly commended by the RGS-IBG Political Geography Research Group for his research on youth peace-making. He also holds an MSc with Distinction in Southeast European Studies from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
Alongside his PhD, he serves as postgraduate co-convener of the British International Studies Association (BISA) Southeast Europe Working Group and regularly contributes to regional media outlets, including Policypress and The Lausanne Project. Ethan is a native English speaker who is proficient in Modern Greek, German, and Spanish. He is currently undertaking intensive language training in Turkish.
